Nine Minutes

Nine Minutes

by Christina Dappollone McGovern

I saw my husband for the first time after emergency surgery, in the Cardiac ICU, hooked up to a machine that dropped his body temperature to 32 degrees Celsius. When the heart stops beating and you die, your brain, in its final message before shutting down, tells your body to self-destruct. It sends little electromagnetic pulses out to every organ, every cell, indicating that it’s over and time has run out; erase the files and begin the journey to dust. If someone happens to snatch you from the clutches of death, say, nine minutes after that message is sent, well, the body, in all its efficiency, has already started to molecularly break down.

“Therapeutic hypothermia” buys some time to slow that process, depleting the brain of oxygen, until the organs catch up with the new message: cease and desist all decomposition. It also makes a person appear stiff. He doesn’t remember me touching his cold body and asking him to stay with me, because he was in a coma. He doesn’t remember them telling me that he might never wake up, and that even if he did, it could take months, and he still might be permanently brain-damaged from the lack of oxygen and swelling. 

He doesn’t remember defying those odds, jolting back into consciousness and crying my name as he struggled to reconcile the feeling of the intubation tube and his confusion. Those memories are all mine to reflect on. 

When my husband first woke up, he had no short-term memory at all. Every minute was a repeat of the last; speaking with him became an exercise in patience with the patient. As time went on, he was able to retain more for longer, but then the details were often blurred by perception, or emotion, or drugs, and in sleep, his brain would reboot and erase whatever had just happened. He knew me, his children, his family, because we were cemented into his long-term memory, categorized and easily retrievable, but he forgot who came to visit, who called, information the doctors told him, what he was and wasn’t supposed to do, how this happened. 

Our days were scripted: 

“Chris, what happened? Why am I in the hospital?”

 “You had a heart attack, Kev.” It wasn’t really. It was really a sudden cardiac arrest due to an unknown genetic defect that caused tachycardia, but it got too hard to say that over and over.

“I did?”

“Yes. At work. You collapsed after a meeting, and you were revived on site before they brought you here.”

“I fainted at work?” You could hear the fear and tension in his voice. He was embarrassed and afraid that they had seen him that way. 

“No honey. You died at work. You had a heart attack and you died for nine minutes. You are at Cooper hospital now being treated.”

“I died?”

“Yes, love. But you were revived, and now you are here, and it's time to get better.”

“Does Steve know?” 

Steve was Kevin’s current supervisor. The man dies on the floor at work, and he’s concerned about whether his boss knows or not. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that everyone at work knew, because everyone at work watched it happen. Everyone saw him hit the ground. Saw them rip his shirt open. Saw the head of safety, a trim, athletic man, start the compressions by throwing himself on top of my husband’s chest and beating into his ribcage as hard as he could. They all saw his body arch after they yelled “Clear!” and the defibrillator sent 1000 volts surging through his torso.

“Yes, Steve already knows. I spoke to him and some others at your job already.”

“Steve’s a great guy; he’s the best boss I ever had.”

“You’ve said that. He must be awesome.”

“He is—Chris?”

“Yes, honey?”

“What happened? Why am I in the hospital?”

“You had a heart attack, Kev.” And so on. 

I memorized a routine, hyper-aware, paying massive attention to small details. Was his IV infected? When were the nurses due? Was he more or less lucid than 15 minutes ago? The need to remember what he couldn’t extended to everything. In the elevator, I memorized the faces of people who got in silently, pushed the buttons, and looked down. No one wanted to intrude on my pain, force me to smile and chat when I couldn’t. 

I remember doctors in the space standing apart from the rest of us, trying to avoid questions, or worse, imploring eyes that said, “You wear that badge, those scrubs, that stethoscope around the neck of your bleached white coat—you must know how to make it go away.” But they were just people who couldn’t work miracles every minute, or even any minute, and certainly not in transit. On the elevator a silent pact was made, the learned behaviors of trauma surfaced, and everyone somehow remembered what not to say. 

I also remember those that helped us. Stacee, Kev’s nurse, whose name was written on the board as only that, took his vitals, ran his I.V., pestered the O.R. for his labs, and hunted down doctors for his meds. Her job is to help you remember, to be the record keeper, the person responsible for giving the information and data that leads to all other decisions. She also bathed him, returning him to human form after they dissected him like an animal during surgery, and calmed him down, commenting on what a beautiful family he had to distract him from the pain. Her name, written on the dry-erase board line inches away from his head, was the first thing he saw when he woke up vulnerable every morning, and the last thing I saw as I left each night to go home.

Becoming hyper-aware illuminated changes in me as well. I noticed my brain making decisions for me automatically, shielding me at times, filtering information, altering my senses, and dulling my response levels so I could survive. A forced calm, created by a rider who knows you'll buck the carriage if you can see oncoming traffic and puts your blinders on as you trot down the street. I recall controlling the adrenaline that magnified my sensory responses, geared me up for split-second decisions, and kept me going at home with my children. It’s muscle memory now, Pavlovian, resurfacing whenever he says he is tired or something doesn’t feel right. 

On the night he finally returned, I was also forced to reflect on my children. Upon seeing Kevin, my nine-year-old spontaneously burst into his first tears. The days he spent away from his dad were wrought with thoughts and fears he did not express. I see now how he was afraid to know, and remember that even as a child, he stayed strong for me. My 14-year-old, stoic and unassuming, rushed down the stairs and stopped just short of the hug he desperately wanted. He was sick, concerned for Kevin’s health, trying to protect him. They never saw Kevin in the hospital, because I couldn’t bear to put the images and happenings of a trauma that threatened our existence as a family into their minds. 

But that means that now, I’m the only one who remembers. There is no sharing of the burden, because I shielded them from truths they shouldn’t have to know. And ultimately, I did that for Kevin as well, choosing to share only pieces of information that would help, until he was able to deal with it all. I am brimming with the details of someone else’s trauma; recording it and reflecting on it made it mine. 

This is the role of the caregiver, a role I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as I dip my toes in. You can lose yourself in the current when you define yourself this way. To be ready for the role, somewhere along the way you have to learn to ignore your own instincts for self-preservation and control your own negative emotions, so the patient can have his. You absorb the stress he deflects to you, complementing his struggle instead of reflecting it. You let it seep out drop by drop in the shower, where it can’t be seen or shared, where it can’t hurt him more than he already is. You do this, because you are not sick. You are not in pain. Your broken is not the same as his, and the love you feel for him is now tethered to the guilt of comparison.

A few weeks after he came home, we drove back to the hospital for personal items they requested we pick up. Automatically, I shifted into autopilot, traversing the familiar onramp into the parking garage. “Do you know where you are going?” he asked. Of course I did. I drove it a hundred times. “Because I’ve never been here before,” he muttered, except that of course, he had. Following me down halls I could navigate with my eyes closed, I showed him the “Healing Garden” bench I sat on when I was taking a break, the cafe where I got my coffee, the elevators we used to come and go. Nothing looked familiar to him. 

My heart palpitated inside my calm exterior, a learned response to the environment, as the woman at patient services examined his canceled driver’s license in disbelief. The picture on the card didn’t look like him anymore, which was not surprising, because he was nowhere near the same. When she couldn’t find anything for him, I remembered. “JAM3033,” I said as it all hit me. “Look under JAM3033. He came in, unidentified, until several hours later.” He studied me as she left to retrieve whatever they had. “I don’t remember that at all,” he exclaimed. Of course he didn’t. How could he?

The woman returned with a sealed plastic bag containing his lacerated clothing and the missing keys to his car we were looking for. On the way home, he busied himself with his phone, concerned with trying to do some semblance of work that week, despite still dealing with ongoing memory loss, a feeble attempt to restore normalcy after so long away. 

“Strange isn’t it?” I said out loud by accident. 

“What is?” he said, still engrossed in his phone.

“This is a bag full of the clothes you died in. This is what you were wearing when you died.” 

A moment passed, gravity pulling down on us, the world turning, the absurdity of the statement spinning with it. He closed the phone, visibly perturbed. At home, he turned to me and said, “I’m putting them outside in the trash. I don’t want them in the house.” I understood. But out of sight isn’t always out of mind. He put off work a little longer. I waited for the trash collectors to take it all away.

Five months later, he regained control of most of his short-term memory, and life continued, but the details of his episode were gone forever from him. I haven’t shared all that I remember, because he’s already broken in a way he can’t recover from, and sparing him the gory details of the event that did it feels kinder. Instead, I chronicle our time together now, toggling between intimate clarity and distanced perspective. 

It’s challenging, because I struggle to feel easy in the present I am recording in my mind. Fear of what could happen always mingles with the memories of what did. But regardless of how many details we each retain, I can tell you one thing we have each agreed to remember. Less than two percent of those with Kev’s experience survive. He has been given a very, very rare second chance. So he focuses on creating moments he wants to remember, and I try to forget what could hinder our enjoyment of them, and despite those nine minutes, we go on.