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Brain Go BOOM!
Author/Survivor: John Cooper
Chapter 5: Big, Beautiful, Blue Eyes
A
s my eyes slowly cracked open from my Rumpelstiltskin-like sleep of my ten-day
medically-induced coma, masses of people convened at my bedside. It was a madhouse.
Doctors, nurses, students, lab techs, phlebotomists, x-ray techs, neurologists—you name it, they
came to see me. The first question I remember being asked was “Do you know where you are?”
I answered, “I’m in a Disney hospital.”
I knew who I was. I knew I was married and that I had two daughters, but I didn’t know
where I was or what the hell was going on. Place? Date? President of the United States? No
clue! The days prior to all of this when I first saw my primary doctor had never happened to me,
yet why did I think I was in a Walt Disney World hospital? Like a complex and confusing
puzzle, I am still trying to put those missing pieces together. Some events are vividly clear and
other events are totally erased. It’s as if those days leading up to the aneurysm bursting never
happened. I remember dribs and drabs, but most memories of that family trip to Walt Disney
World are nonexistent.
I looked around and didn’t see any familiar faces. I had the wherewithal to do a quick
nursing assessment of my situation. I could not move my left leg, my left arm nor my left hand.
With my right hand I identified a nasogastric (NG) tube placed in my nose for feeding, a
ventilator tube in my mouth and down my throat to force oxygen to my lungs for breathing, a
Foley catheter in my penis to drain my kidneys, a central IV line for fluid intake, and wires that
coming out of my skull. The pain was nothing like a vice grip or railroad spike. Instead, it was
more like somebody had dropped a bucket of golf balls on my head.
Through the tightly wrapped gauze dressing circling my head, I felt a large depression in
my skull. Slowly sneaking my pointer and middle finger under the dressing, I could only feel a
thin layer of skin, then my brain. It felt like ground meat through cellophane at a grocery store.
I was dumfounded. It felt unnatural. (Why do people depress packaged, ground meat with their
fingers before buying it? Is there a grocery store secret to that?)
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