A Life That Matters Read Free Page B

all we could do was wait. Dr. Shah told us that Terri had been taken from the ER to the intensive-care unit and that until they knew more about her condition, we wouldn’t be allowed to see her. Imagine! Not allowed to see our daughter.
    Dr. Shah left; we were alone in the waiting room; we had no information. In the years to come, we would have many frustrations with hospitals and their staffs, but this was the worst—and it was nobody’s fault. Nobody had any information. Nobody knew what was going to happen to Terri.
    Around eight in the morning, I called Suzanne, who was at the University of Central Florida, and told her to come to Humana Northside. I didn’t want to go into details for fear Suzanne would drive like a maniac to get there, and UCF was about two hours away. “Please just take your time,” I pleaded. “Terri’s alive. She’s okay.” (Of course, as I suspected she would, Suzanne sped to the hospital, making the drive in an hour and a half.) Both Bob and I felt the same way: we were anxious for her to get there, but we dreaded telling her about her sister’s condition.
    Many hours later, we were allowed to see Terri in the ICU. The sight was wrenching, almost unbearable. She was on a respirator. She had an IV in her arm. She had a tube coming out of her shoulder—it was for her heart. She had something going in her nose. She had tubes in her mouth. Her skin was ashen, her eyes were closed. To Bob, it was almost inconceivable that his daughter would live. But I had faith.
She’ll be all right. She’ll get through this
.
My daughter will not be taken away.
    Bobby didn’t want to go in at all. “I didn’t want to see her until I knew for sure she was going to live,” he told us. “And we didn’t know. That’s why I was scared to see her.”
    Suzanne, whose arrival provided a bit of solace, was in shock. “I couldn’t imagine what had happened to Terri,” she says. “She was fine last I’d heard. But when I got to the hospital, I was in a panic, scared to death. Especially seeing my family’s faces and the fear in their eyes.”
    Then came the frustrating wait for a doctor to bring us news. Every time we’d hear “Code Blue, Code Blue” over the loudspeaker, we’d all jump out of our seats and rush to the ICU, jamming together in the doorway like the Four Stooges, to be told that Terri was all right, that it was a different patient in trouble. But the shock of those announcements was nightmarish; I still cringe when there’s an announcement of any kind over a public address system.
    Throughout the morning and the next few days, people came to keep us company and to lend support. Michael’s parents lived in Pennsylvania and came down as soon as they could, along with one of his brothers. Otherwise, the visitors were all friends of ours or members of our extended family. I called Muriel Wextrom, Terri’s friend at Prudential, and all Terri’s friends from work came in a steady stream: Jackie Rhodes, who was Terri’s best friend, and Leuretha Gibbons, her supervisor, and Fran and Sherry and Judy and Roger. Chris Adams, Bob’s second cousin, came every day, even though he and Bob had met only once or twice previously. Chris’s mother had died suddenly, and Terri’s misfortune hit him in the heart. He was a driver for Roadway who’d go home, get up, go to work, and come back to the hospital. All of a sudden, he was family, and true to the unspoken code of the family: every time there was a crisis, every relative would offer support.
    Bob’s niece, Kathy Brown, came down from Pennsylvania. Her father and Bob’s brother, Fred Schindler, had been in a coma after a car accident several years earlier and, contrary to his doctor’s negative prognosis, had progressed remarkably after undergoing months of rehabilitation, to the point where he was able to live on his own. Kathy was a nurse and had a lot of knowledge from working with patients in Terri’s condition. “Don’t listen to