|
Take my word for it, it's a very famous
poem, and he should have left that verse in. At any rate, it kept Ann
giggling long enough to keep her from talking about the plants, until
finally she was laughing so hard she said she was getting dizzy.
I stopped making jokes.
Twenty years ago, shortly after I met Ann,
she suffered a bleed inside her brain from a congenital defect called
an arteriovenous malformation (AVM). For weeks her life hung in the balance.
The lesion was inoperable, but she made a complete recovery, and our love
blossomed. Within a couple of years we were married.
Since then Ann has experienced no symptoms
from her AVM, but it's been like the sword of Damocles hanging over our
heads, both a threat and a blessing - a reminder of Life's fragility.
Although Ann's pregnancies were considered risky, she gave birth to two
beautiful children before we finally decided to stop pressing our luck.
This October, Ann and I will have been married
17 years. As the saying goes, marriage is for better or worse; our years
have mostly been better. But after you've been married a while, the moment
finally comes you never expected: You're sick of each other.
Perhaps we're the only couple to ever experience
this. At any rate, our marriage has suffered a, well...off year. And we
have fought like two teenagers falling out of love.
The week before the wedding in Vermont, my
twin brother Chris was visiting from New York. He called me as I was driving
home from the hospital to let me know that Ann was having trouble moving
her left arm and speaking. My foot pressed the accelerator, and in less
than five minutes I was walking through the door. Chris was talking to
Ann. She was slurring her words. Before I reached her, she had lost consciousness
and begun convulsing.
It was obvious she was having another bleed
in her brain. I grabbed her and held her tightly, and all my medical training
evaporated. I cried like I did before I learned not to cry. I begged her
not to die. Then I placed her body on the ground and became a doctor again.
Her lips were turning blue and she was frothing at the mouth. I stabilized
her airway and checked her pulse. All bad feelings and resentments were
forgotten forever. Holding her dying body, smelling her skin mixed with
my tears, I just wanted my beautiful wife to live.
Ann stopped seizing, and by the time the
ambulance got us to the hospital she had regained consciousness. The CAT
scans and MRIs showed no evidence of a life threatening bleed. In a few
hours her memory returned. We went home the next day. Of course, I planned
to cancel our trip to Vermont. But from her hospital bed Ann told me in
no uncertain terms that the reason she had her seizure this weekend was
so she could go to Eva's wedding the next.
And so a week later we are standing together
in a Vermont field. I am fending off mosquitoes and watching my beautiful
wife Ann. She fights off tears; she is almost overcome by the beauty of
the vista. I know she longs to express with her paintbrush or pen what
in her heart and soul she feels and knows. An artist's life can be so
lonely, and her husband, a surgeon with concrete purposes, is perhaps
not the most receptive audience.
But as I watch Ann, the mother of my children,
my closest friend, standing there full of wonder and joy, I fight off
tears of my own.
For I understand beauty, too.
|
