“She did. A stroke from a burst cavernoma.”
“That seems like something I should have known sooner.”
“Maybe if you’d gone to medical school you’d have learned all about it.”
“Are you giving me shit about medical school right now?”
He pursed his lips together at the curse word—which seemed like the least of our problems. Next he tilted his head forward like he was forcing himself to take a calming moment. Then he said, “I’m telling you, you can’t wait. You have to do this right now.”
“I can’t do it right now. I don’t have time.”
He lifted his eyes to meet mine. “That’s exactly what your mother said.”
Oof.
Then, before I’d absorbed that, he added, “And she might even have been wearing that very same robe when she said it.”
I looked down and took a breath. Time to stop arguing. “So you’re saying … she had this same exact thing?”
“Yes. It’s inherited.”
“And she knew she had it?”
“Yes.”
“And she was advised to have it fixed?”
“Yes.”
“But she didn’t? And then she died?”
He nodded. “Precisely.”
“Why didn’t she have it fixed?”
My dad looked away. “I don’t think we need to get into that.”
“What else could there possibly be to get into?”
“I don’t want to dredge up the past.”
I lifted my hands, like, What the hell? “Too late. It’s dredged.”
“The point is—just get it done.”
To be honest, I wasn’t going to fight him. My dad might be a complicated, difficult, overly formal, pathologically reserved, not-particularly-fond-of-me person … but he wasn’t stupid. He was, as Lucinda could verify, a “very prominent cardiothoracic surgeon.” He knew his shit. He understood—if nothing else—the workings of the human body.
The point is: When Dr. Richard Montgomery, MD, FACS, FAHA, and chief of cardiothoracic surgery for UTMB, drags you down to a coffee shop in your mother’s bathrobe and tells you to go have brain surgery, you don’t argue.
You just go have brain surgery.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do the surgery. After you tell me why Mom didn’t have hers.”
“And I’ll tell you about Mom,” my dad shot back, “after you do the surgery.”
Four
THE BEST THING—and possibly the only good thing—about the day of the surgery was meeting my new Trinidadian neuropsychologist, Dr. Nicole Thomas-Ramparsad.
When she first arrived, a nurse was beginning her third attempt at starting my IV. “The problem,” the nurse was saying, “is that you’re so tense.” She tapped my arm some more with the pads of her fingers as if to say, See? Nothing. “You’ve shrunk your blood vessels.”
I peered at my arm like I might be able to help her find one.
“You need to relax,” she told me.
“I agree,” I said, trying to slow my breathing down from hummingbird rate.
She added a second tourniquet. “When we get scared, our bodies pull all our blood into our core to protect the vital organs.”
Relax, I commanded myself. Relax.
“Look at these veins,” she called to another nurse, tapping around some more.
Nurse Two came over for a peek, giving a little headshake at the sight. “They’re like quilting threads.”
That did not sound like a compliment.
“She can’t get this over with until you relax,” Nurse Two said to me, a little scoldy.
“But I can’t relax until it’s over with,” I said, aware of the Catch-22.
“Are you always a difficult stick?” Nurse One asked.
I wasn’t loving that terminology. It made me sound uncooperative at best. But there was only one answer to that question. “Yes.”
Nurses One and Two exchanged a look.
I tried to defend myself. “This is just how needle situations usually end for me—with tears. Or dry heaving. Or fainting.” At the words dry heaving, I could feel my veins shrinking a little smaller.
Relax, damn it. Relax!
But that’s when my future new favorite person walked in.
And let’s just say she brought a totally different energy to the room.
Dr. Nicole Thomas-Ramparsad didn’t just walk in, she strode—greeting me loudly as she did, her voice warm and rich. “Hello,” she practically sang. “You’re Sadie Montgomery, and I’m so delighted to be working with you today.” And with that, she put a firm, comforting, totally-in-charge-of-the-moment hand on my shoulder, and said, “Please just call me Dr. Nicole”—pronouncing her name like Ni-call.
Let’s just say her doctor voice sounded nothing like my dad’s.
Which was a very good thing.
Because her voice—warm and motherly and confident—absolutely took over the room. She was such a big presence that she eclipsed everything else. It’s important to note that she, in her light blue scrubs and surgical hat, looked pretty much like everybody else who worked in that hospital. She shouldn’t have stood out like she had her own personal spotlight.
But she did.
Maybe it was her big fearless smile. Or the warm glow of her tawny skin. Or the laugh crinkles at her eyes. Or her tall posture, like she was the number one grown-up in the room. Or the fact that she seemed about the age my mom would be now, if she had lived.
Whatever it was, she appeared—and then positively hijacked my consciousness, leaning in close, squeezing my hand, and telling me more about herself in the first five minutes than most doctors revealed in years: She’d come to Houston from her hometown of Port of Spain, by way of McGill University in Canada—originally training to be a neurologist before getting fascinated with neuropsychology and switching tracks, much to her parents’ chagrin, since psychology was not a “real” science. Her favorite types of music were calypso, soca, and steelpan, because they reminded her of home and made her feel peaceful. Her favorite flower was the bird-of-paradise, which “grows like weeds” in Trinidad. And she made the best coconut bread in the world, if she did say so herself.
“I’ll bake you a loaf sometime,” she told me.
“Thank you, Dr. Thomas-Ramparsad,” I said.
“Dr. Nicole,” she corrected, patting me on the arm.
And that’s when I looked down and noticed that Nurses One and Two were gone, and the IV was already taped happily in place like there had never been anything difficult about it.
Oh god, she was a genius. Bless her.
Anyway, I adored Dr. Nicole from that moment on—instantly, the way a teenage girl might love a pop star. I would’ve gladly hung a poster of her on my wall.
After the IV, everything got easier—especially since there wasn’t much for me to do. Also, since pretty soon I started feeling like my blood was made of maple syrup.
My dad scrubbed in for the surgery by the way—and it wasn’t lost on me that this was the first thing we’d done together in years. A little father-daughter time.
At last, something about my life he could get interested in.