The Watch That Does Me No Good ...
That's what Kevin called the monitor that was on his wrist. The monitor had the physical shape of a watch, but there was no face, no handle, no numbers or marks. It was white, square-shaped, and thick - just like a watch. I arrived at the hospital one morning and my son pointed to it and told me, "they gave me this watch that does me no good." He had no idea it was a monitor that would trigger building-wide alarms if he went past any of the exit doors from the brain injury wa
The silence had to be bearable ...
because there was no choice. As I sat by my son's bedside, holding his hand, I spoke to him knowing he could not respond. He was in a coma and the doctors had no idea when, or if, he would awaken. After the tortuous journey to New Zealand, I arrived at the Dunedin airport, South Island, New Zealand. Dunedin is the most southern town in the country - close to Antarctica; bitterly cold when the wind blows in from the south. The day I arrived, the wind was calm and the sun was s
The Telephone Rang and My Life Changed Forever
At 4:00 PM on July 28, 2002, the sun was still high, the air warm and the smell of summer was strong. I was sitting on my porch putting on my mountain biking shoes, preparing for a gentle single-track ride that began close to our house. I had one shoe on when the phone rang. Normally, we would have ignored the phone and just gone on the ride. But that day was different. I paused and asked my husband to answer the phone. As he answered the phone, I sat there, doing nothing and
