Read Online Crash by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein - Free Book Online Page B

away from the constant lights, the relentless noise of beeping monitors and alarms, and the ever-present eyes of the ICU nurses.
    But although Neil’s mind was clearing, the horrific reality he faced through that lifting haze haunted and depressed him. He seemed to give up. He spent his time in bed with a blanket pulled up over his head. I never heard a sob or saw a tear, but he always emerged from those covers looking weak and spent. He refused to eat. He declined physical therapy.
    “You’ll never walk right if you don’t exercise your leg, Neil,” the orthopedic surgeon told him.
    “I don’t care if I ever walk again,” he spat back.
    I asked for a psych consult—someone to evaluate his emotional stability, help him deal with his terrible loss. I told Neil someone would be stopping by to talk to him.
    “Fine,” he snarled. He aimed his one-word answers at us, hurling them like missiles in response to anything we said to him. Then, the blanket over the head.
    We continued our “never leave him alone” policy. At first it was to protect him from the news of Trista’s death. Now it was to protect him from himself.
    “Think of it as a suicide watch, Dan,” I told my oldest son, the words catching in my mouth. I didn’t really think Neil would do that. Then again he’d never lost a girlfriend before.
    We waited all day for the psychiatrist’s visit, or at least a resident. It was getting late. I finally went out to the nurses’ station to ask when the psych team was coming.
    “Oh, they’re not,” the nurse informed me, a little too cheerily.
    “Why not?” I asked, horrified that, number one, they weren’t coming, and that, number two, I wasn’t told.
    “The team won’t come unless a patient is actively suicidal,” the nurse said, her voice now devoid of cheeriness.
    “And how exactly are they supposed to make that determination without actually seeing THE PATIENT?” I asked. When the nurse took a step back, I realized just how loudly I’d raised my voice, but I was furious. I knew I’d better get a grip or someone would be calling Security on me.
    I walked back to Neil’s room and leaned against the wall outside the door, my heart pounding, my eyes stinging with pent-up tears. I tried to gather my thoughts and rein in my emotions. I felt that the hospital, my medical community, was failing us. First there was the social worker who was “here and not here,” unwilling to stay a few minutes beyond her scheduled shift to see one of her families through. And now no one was coming to evaluate my child’s mental health even though to me he was clearly at least passively suicidal. How could a world-class trauma center not recognize the emotional trauma that goes along with the broken bones and bleeding brains?
    I walked back to the nurses’ station and said in my calmest, quietest voice, “I want my son transferred back to Anna Jaques Hospital.”
    “I’ll call the residents,” she responded, her hand already on the phone before I’d even turned away from the desk to return to Neil. Here at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Neil’s care had been excellent, the staff attentive and diligent. But we knew that there were so many sicker, more critical patients here. We could see it in the halls where staff raced to silence alarms and check beeping monitors. We knew it from our time in the waiting room, listening to other families rally then grieve. We heard it in the staff’s upbeat assessment of our child. “He’s gonna be just fine.” Here a traumatic brain injury in which the patient speaks and stands was no big deal. Back home at Anna Jaques, Neil would be a very big deal. There he would be known. The son of a businessman in the community. A member of the synagogue. A classmate of the sons and daughters of the doctors and nurses caring for him. If the acute phase of Neil’s injuries was behind him—he wasn’t getting surgery on his brain; he’d had the first operation on his leg; if all