“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Thursday, May 26, 9:45 pm.

We were watching “The Rachel Maddow Show” and She, who was getting sleepy, said, “I’m a bit dizzy.”

“Room spinning kind of dizzy, or just slight?'”

“No … it’s like …”

Then the rest of the sentence spilled out in a puddle of blurred phrases, and she couldn’t get her eyes open.

“What’s your name? Tell me your name.” Her reply was blurred. She was having a stroke. I knew it.

I told her to lift her left arm. She couldn’t. The right one, yes. The left, no.

I lifted it.

“Hold that up for me.” It dropped. I was on the phone at once, dialing 911.

The first answer was, “The number you’ve dialed is no longer in order.” A touch of panic. I dialed again and someone answered. I told her the signs.

“We are on the way now,” she said.

Within minutes, literally minutes, the house, the trees and streets were bathed in red lights. Then they were through the door: a huge man and stern blond woman.

“What’s her name?”

The woman shouted into Kay’s face: “Ma’am, can you tell me your name?” She repeated it in a frightening, loud voice. “Can you tell me your name, Ma’am?”

Two more men pushed through with a gurney, and strapped her in, as I stood there with those red, flashing lights washing over me like it was a hundred years ago.

The crew shouted instructions. The words floated out. “Follow us up. Do you know Thayer?”

I stood behind them, as they slid her into the ambulance; the red lights were deeper now, redder, blood red, long-ago red. Scary red.

How many times have I seen these rescuers go by with those flashing red lights, wondering who was in there, how bad it was? Were they injured or dead? I always made the sign of the cross, a never-ending Catholic boy habit. I would watch through the window as they passed, the siren screaming.

“I’m glad it’s not us.”

“So am I,” she’d whisper.

Fifteen minutes later I was at the desk at MaineGeneral’s Thayer unit in Waterville. I had to wait to be taken up. “There are four other ambulances coming in,” the attendant said.

I stood against the wall, watching a woman on the phone sobbing her heart out. I didn’t want to think about doing that, not now.

A few minutes later, another attendant came and got me, and then I was standing in Kay’s room, doctors and nurses around her bed. She was wired to those machines we never want to think about. I had been here before.

Forty-some years ago. She had suffered a middle-of-the night miscarriage. The sheets had been covered with blood. We lost the baby.

In the next half hour of this night, a flurry of questions, numbers, details. I had to make a choice. There was a clot-busting drug, TPN. Some chance that use of it could cause serious brain bleeding.

“Your wife has had a serious stroke. She’s paralyzed on the entire left side. If she survives without the drug, she may spend the rest of her life in a nursing home, but there’ a good chance of recovery with this.”

In other words, my call. Take it or leave it. Hobson’s choice.

Done.

The TPN worked medical magic. On that long night, after she was transferred to Maine Medical Center, the paralysis disappeared. The next day she was sitting up in the hospital eating a turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy.

Epilogue: Thursday, June 2, 3:30 p.m.

She’s upstairs napping now after an hour at her desk correcting papers “that have to be in because grades close on Tuesday.” The woman is a teacher; that’s what teachers do.

She’s almost her old self, but for a small headache and the use of a walker and my firm hand on her arm. It will take some time.

The summer is coming; there will be birds, fireworks, full moons and watermelon. There will be dappled sunlight on the lawn and moonlight on her face as she sleeps.

Late on some hot summer night an ambulance will scream by. I will sit up and make the sign of the cross; it’s what little Catholic boys do. I will say, “I’m glad we’re not in it.”

She will mutter, “Me too,” and go back to sleep.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. He gives eternal thanks to the rescue team from MaineGeneral Medical Center’s Thayer Center for Health.

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