the PDF of her book - National Aphasia Association

14 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance:
It is the death card. Clear. On the table. It permeates
everything. I’m discharged for the afternoon from one hospital
to another for a neurosurgical consult. I am eager to be out in the
world, being caged for two months now—with only the scant two
weeks home. I want to taste life out there, behind these walls.
I imagine the sweetness of sitting with my daughter and Jake in a cozy
little French restaurant somewhere on the Upper West Side, looking at supper
menus, after the consultation. The discharge nurse seems to listen in on my
thoughts of escape and tells me severely, “You can’t go anywhere else, only
come back here!” For that moment, elegant dining together, I wanted the
pretense of being normal, in the world.
When I do step into the street for a taxi, I am assailed by the clamor, the
sounds, the commotion of people. I’m giddy, feel faint … unshielded.
Carefully planning, we are on time, but the doctor is not. We wait on
big brown leather couches in the reception room of Neurological Institute,
part of Presbyterian Hospital. I am wearing real clothes and wait like an
ordinary person. The illusion is thin, and I begin to suffer. I wonder: Don’t
they realize I’m a hospital patient? No one is watching over me here. I wish I
were in hospital clothes and had come in an ambulance. The energy I had is
seeping away—crowds in the street, the rushing taxi, the excitement of being
outside, the anticipation of the consultation. My body feels frail and frantic
… this waiting. An hour has gone by. Fear is clothed in flagging energy. I
am unsafe.
I think of asking Jake to complain for me, but I can’t summon the words
for the deeper sense of catastrophe in my body. I wait. Nothing shows on
the outside.
At last Dr. James Correll, the neurosurgeon, brings us into his examining
room. He had been studying my angiogram x-rays before we came in and
now puts them up on his light box for us to see.
My daughter and Jake, a veteran of many surgeries, are my Board of