Jericho Brisance

A Different Cadence

You start already tired, as my wife puts it. You have already lost sleep and struggled with anxiety before ever arriving at the hospital. Exhaustion compounds downward from this depleted outset. Crisis-born adrenaline wires you briefly, while borrowing heavily on energy reserves, for which you must soon pay. The shear pressure of decisions, grappling with consequences, and the demands to stay somehow calm – these accruals run all accounts into the red. Long hours of silence chew down fingernails, but they are ever punctuated by medical interruptions, cheering visits from friends, phone calls from concerned family, and sobering consultations from the doctors. The brain must learn a new language: that of meningitis, of bacterial strains, of antibiotic treatments, of dosing intervals, and of prognoses. Night brings the red eyes of unsleep, equipment alarms, and nursing break-ins. By 36 hours into the ordeal, reserves are fully spent. You realize that you haven’t changed clothes or showered.

But people adapt. As those who have known life at the ICU will attest, we find a way. We find a new cadence when the world changes. We normalize to the absurd. [Read more…]

Yesterday’s Life

Night had fallen while we had been in the windowless ER, somewhere in the belly of the medical behemoth. From there, they transferred us to the intensive care unit.

Centered in the vacant sterility, Paisley lay under a dim overhead lamp, stabbed and wired in places too numerous to count. As we stared down from behind our masks, my wife tried to hold Paisley’s hands and feet still, to keep her struggles from pulling out these lifelines. Digital equipment throbbed and chimed continually. They would have snatched away the hope of sleep, had we wanted it.

I do not know a word for the futility of that place. The soul is tied by the limbs, rent and quartered. Shock and numbness mingle with the welling pressure to scream and to see everything broken. One wishes only for the quiet of home. To go back to yesterday’s life. I wanted to hold Paisley, to stand between her and the demons, and to make them take me first. Instead, you are made to stand there. You are made to feel the emptiness of your hands: a useless guardian keeping futile watch. [Read more…]

Drops of White

Paisley was only twelve days old, and no bigger than two upturned palms. She had that scent that belongs only to infants. Pink skin, with tiny newborn speckles on the bridge of her nose.

And she was writhing. Her eyes were rolled up, and she was clutching against a pain strong enough to quench her cries.

The air became leaden as the doctor and nurse, obscured behind their masks, took up positions across the table from each other. Paisley lay between them, and she was rolled to face the nurse and me. The doctor cleaned the insertion point between two vertebral knobs on her lower back. The nurse cupped her body in his two large hands, with one behind her neck and the other grasping her buttocks. As the needle was bared, my wife could watch no more, and she took her trembling and prayerful tears to the hallway. But I stayed. [Read more…]

Pink Bundle

Paisley arrived in late January, during that time of year when the Texas air feels most out of character. She completed our quartet of children, a collated symmetry of boy, girl, boy, and girl. Being indifferent to sports but fond of cultural idiom, I dubbed her, “the final four.” She did seem to complete us as a family. But owing to events that transpired not long after her birth, she came to occupy a special place in our hearts and memories.

I find it becoming difficult to write already. Eyes moisten; breath comes up short; fingers quaver over the keys. Still yesterday.

Life has a way of trespassing its own character. Just as with the dissonance that Texas winter embodies, there was something about Paisley’s hale and golden dawning that makes befuddlement of that which followed shortly after. Just before her gentle rise pulled free of the rim. [Read more…]