As many of you know, Athena fractured her femur in late March 2024 and was admitted to hospital where she has been ever since. Athena has done a great job documenting the many highs and lows of spending 75+ days in a shared hospital room with a revolving string of roommates. Between the loud hallway voices, TVs blaring from the bed next to her, machines beeping in the early morning hours, and nurses waking her up in the dead of night to feed her pain medications, Athena has approached each day with remarkable mental strength.
What I haven’t shared with you all is what my experience has been journeying alongside her.
On this Saturday, I am reminded of that Saturday back in March, when I first realized that I couldn’t help Athena on my own. On the morning, I had a video call scheduled. She was lying in our bed in the room next door. I could hear her moaning.
The urgent care people had sent us home the Thursday before, saying that there was nothing to do but rest and wait for the bone to heal. But the pain seemed to be getting worse. And my attempts at helping Athena to the bathroom were becoming unmanageable. We tried using a bed pan but even that failed as her entire body contorted in pain when I tried to slide the bedpan underneath her.
We had been at a similar crossroads once before. A few years back she woke me up in the dead of night, her eyes wide open but her words slurred and incoherent. She was unresponsive to my questioning. When I asked her if I should call 911, she said no in a floaty, disconnected sort of way that did little to reassure me. I called 911 and we ended up at Foothills Hospital. Luckily, she recovered in the weeks following. We never did find out what went wrong. A seizure or a stroke, they said. The tests were inconclusive.
This time, I didn’t ask her permission to call for help. I told her we needed to — that we couldn’t do this on our own. She nodded agreement. We called the nurse’s line first, and then the ambulance. The paramedics arrived on one of the snowiest nights in Calgary. When I went down with the paramedic to get the stretcher, a car was stuck in the snow behind the ambulance. Calmly, the paramedic explained to the driver, and the passerby who was desperately pushing the vehicle to no avail, that they needed to rock the car back and forth. The driver reversed a little, then drove forward, and again, and again, until finally the car came free and slowly drove away.
We got back up to our apartment. The paramedics readied to load Athena onto the stretcher. She pleaded with them not to move her, but what else could they do. She couldn’t stay where she was. Somehow they rolled her onto a blanket so they could lift her onto the stretcher. Her screams reverberated through the apartment. I stood in the kitchen biting back my terror, feeling utterly powerless. My entire body shook as I held the dogs back from the room.
The paramedics kindly agreed for me to ride in the ambulance with her. As they lifted the stretcher into the back of the vehicle, snow fell onto her face, ‘like Narnia,’ I whispered. She smiled. We were entering an unknown world alright.
The next moments are a blur: a bumpy ride to Rockyview Hospital, the paramedics unloading her and pushing her into a hallway, the stretcher making its way to Emergency and Athena asking if she can just remain in it. No, we were told. And so the screaming began again as they moved her broken body off the stretcher and onto a hospital bed, the knot in my stomach growing tighter. The ER staff injected her with painkillers soon after. Her eyelids drooped as she went in and out of consciousness.
Even as I write this I feel a part of me pulling away, not wanting to remember the details — the who, what, where and why. As if by not naming them I am preventing them from happening. If only I had that power.
Somewhere in there I went home, to walk the dogs, to feed myself, to notify my employer, to do what I could to regain some sense of normalcy amidst the chaos.
Since then, close to 80 days have gone by with Athena in the hospital, and me visiting almost every night. Time has slowed to moments of boredom and routine, and of just wanting this chapter to be over with. The gruelling repetition — wake up, walk dogs, make and eat breakfast, go to work, walk dogs, make dinner, go to the hospital, help stabilize her leg while the nurse’s aids change Athena’s pad and slider, spend a few minutes talking about the art exhibit or other pressing matters like unfinished taxes, drive home from the hospital, walk dogs, zone out in front of the television with something mindless like RuPaul’s Drag Race, or Baby Reindeer, go to bed, try to sleep, then start all over again the next morning, feeling unrested, trying to numb out the uncertainty of it all.
When I arrive for my nightly visits, we joke with each other that she is the unit’s longest staying resident. While others come and go, she has become a fixture. The nurse’s aids chat with her like old friends as they feed her meals and wipe her down. Her neighbours are a motley crew of men and women in different stages of physical and mental decline. Some are more miserable than others — the woman who won’t shut up about losing her pair of compression socks; the man who sings in German at night while his elderly wife sits by his side from morning to night; the woman with dementia who won’t stay in bed, and makes Athena fear for her safety; the restless man who is hard of hearing, and loudly calls his friends, desperate for them to pick him up, and failing to secure a ride, focuses instead on the tiny hospital TV next to his bed where the Edmonton Oilers are playing the Dallas Stars; the man whose wheelchair was left behind when he came in, who is ready for discharge but has no way to get home.
‘You could write a TV script of your time here,’ I suggest. Athena is more serious and tells me how this experience has changed her. We talk about how, when our time comes, we don’t want to die in a hospital bed. I don’t want to think too hard about that, though. Not right now. ‘One day at a time,’ I say. And we refocus our attention on Athena’s upcoming art exhibit, the one we don’t know whether she will be able to attend in person. It’s looking more and more unlikely, so we discuss how I might load her up on Facetime on my phone so she can attend virtually. When I leave, she asks for ear plugs from the hospital staff and turns off her hearing aids. I feel guilty leaving her behind in this place, but I’m glad to escape the noise.
As I exit the hospital I walk by men in hospital gowns congregating by the parking lot entrance, some standing and some in wheelchairs, some puffing on cigarettes while they have oxygen tanks attached to the back of their chairs. It’s all so depressing. In my lower moments I wonder if Athena will ever come home. I remind myself, calmly, that it’s just a broken bone and it’s not life threatening. But I know that when you have brittle bone disease (Osteogenesis Imperfecta) like Athena does a broken bone is never just a broken bone. Her body isn’t healing fast. And hospitals are germ factories. She got an E. coli infection likely from the catheter. Her skin has broken out in a rash, partly from stress I think. Every day is a new adventure.
‘We are in uncharted territory,’ says the orthopedic surgeon with the close cropped ginger beard. We know he has little experience working with adults with Osteogenesis Imperfecta. In the next moment, he says the bone is healing as expected. How can that be? The x-ray shows the bone misalignment increasing. He comes across arrogant and dismissive. We both bite our tongues. Later we plot ways of getting a second opinion.
When I arrive home, the dogs seem to look for something — or someone — behind me. Maybe I'm imagining it. The apartment feels uncomfortably empty. The silence is almost worse than the noise. I turn on the kettle to make some tea and relax before bed. But I’m keyed up and restless. I play chess on my phone to distract myself. I’m doing that a lot lately. I try to disconnect from the chronic low-grade anxiety in the back of my mind.
Athena likes to tell me that one of the reasons she fell in love with me was my honesty. I don’t know if it’s a strength or a vulnerability. If I’m honest now, I am scared of what lies ahead. Despite the awfulness, though, I am also hopeful. I know if anyone can get through this, Athena can. She is the toughest person I know. That faith helps get me up in the morning. And because Athena hasn’t stopped fighting, I know I will keep fighting too. I cannot cure her broken bone or make the hospital less hectic. But I can bear witness to her experience, and mine.
In our next post, Athena and I will share the ways we have harnessed all our inner resources to help us through this challenging time. We are, in Athena’s words, ‘Team Unstoppable’.
This is so beautifully written. You are an amazing couple and I wish you both all the support, energy and healing to get through this. It is such an honor to read writing from both of you. You both have a way of elevating something right under our noses, so important, so that we can stop and take notice of another's experience. Thank you for sharing.
I was JUST wondering how you were holding up during Athen's marathon hospital admission. You capture the exhausting mix of pressure and boredom, chaos and routine of an acute care admission well. It must be disorienting to switch from home mode to work mode to hospital mode and home over and over again.
Sending you both lots of love, strength and patience. (And for Pete's sake, lay off the Baby Reindeer! That show is soooo painful to watch! It does not count as mind cleansing, end-of-stresful-day-amid-80-others day entertainment my friend!)