Pop 89: Twenty Minute Miracle
By Madonna Hamel
I’m sitting in a parking lot, facing the Island highway that leads north to Parksville, where I’ll be taking my brother to his next appointment. Then we’ll drive another hour to Cumberland to spend the night at friends of his who have kindly given us rooms for these extended visits for treatments. In the evenings, they feed us, share a cup of tea, and tell stories about large chunks of my brother’s life that I’d never heard before. Stories about mountains climbed, rivers rafted, and the inevitable accidents and losses that come from living a life replete with risk.
Even after a long day my brother lights up as he recalls memories of his youth. This is what life is all about we all agree: Friendships. Solid bonds. And maintaining those friendships over the years, something my brother is good at. These days, I spend most of my time with siblings - checking in, dropping in, whining and wondering. But I realize that friends can help us be ourselves in ways our family can’t because, for far too long, we’ve each been pegged as and relied upon to be the reactionary, the worrier, the bossy one, the know-it-all. This is partly to do with our place in the family - once the youngest, always the youngest. Whether you’re 6 or 66. And, of course, as the youngest and only boy in a family of six kids, my brother has dealt with his share of expectations, assumptions and projections.
And now all that is coming up for review - how does the youngest and wildest one suddenly adapt to being driven around by a big sister? How does a big sister try not to take it all on yet still be supportive? How do we get through the unknowns together? With a sense of humour and taking it all one day at a time. “Stay in the day, Madonna. Just stay in the day!” A wise friend tells me. And the day is full of mysteries and surprises and questions.
Just before my brother goes in for his appointment he snaps open his white cane. “This is definitely a perfect prop for a private detective. No one would suspect you of anything”, he says. The cane gives him plenty of respect and compassionate looks. It’s an instant measure of human kindness. These are the things we talk about on drives back and forth between appointments.
We also talk about the shock of aging - how it’s happening all the time but we only realize it suddenly. In a moment, as in: “The day I got old.” We take turns sharing snippets of our lives from the years apart - the summer he worked building fences in Southern France. The night he snuck into Stonehedge so he could sleep under a standing stone. The day his friend, roommate and fellow alpine skier died in a helicopter accident.
We talk about being the children of parents each raised on farms, living in shared rooms in small farmhouses, persevering through harsh weather and freezing blizzards. Persevering through droughts and dust storms. Persevering through poverty and loss. Persevering meant not just sticking through the hardships but re-examining choices until they each, in their young lives, before meeting each other, left the prairie to work at different jobs and then met and married at an Easter dance in Dawson Creek. My mother was a young teacher, and my father worked in a garage, working his way up the accountant and car salesman at his own car lot. We are the products of resilient, persevering, uncomplaining, rural and working class people and God willing, despite the privilege and good fortune that was granted our generation, we hope we still carry those qualities inside us.
It’s been a year and a half since his stroke, and while those of us on the outside see only his piercing blue eyes, my brother still feels his eyeballs “spinning” in his head. It’s like looking through kaleidoscopes, he says. Imagine your day beginning and ending that way, even when your eyes are closed. And yet he continues to make jokes, comparing looking for the car in the parking lot to a game of “I spy with my little eye.” Imagine experiencing something as simple as walking down the sidewalk and stepping on pieces of styrofoam floating on water. Imagine being told today is Wednesday but not actually knowing what that means in relation to everything else - from what time it is to where you are standing to what direction you should turn.
An hour ago, we were sitting in a hyperbaric chamber (which I constantly refer to as a hyperbolic chamber, which, in both our cases, would be a redundant therapy.) The chamber resembles the giant head-gear deep sea divers used to screw onto their deep-sea suits back in the early 1900s. It’s a round metal chamber, like a teeny boxer camper, with a round glass window you can peek into after you get sealed in by the oxygen operator. Once everything is sealed up, he begins feeding us oxygen via a mask we each wear. The idea is to get oxygen to damaged tissue and increase stem cell circulation. Stroke survivors have reported positive results. That’s all we need to know.
After our session in the chamber we sat quietly as I drove down island to this next appointment. We were both feeling what I’d describe as “even”, though his brain is still making his eyes swirl. We hope this next therapist, the brain mapper, will help him with some of that.
An hour later, we are back on the road, headed back to his friends’ house for the night when it happens.“Maddy,” he says, “I’m stabilizing.” “Yes, you are,” I say encouragingly. “No, no, I mean, I can see! I see the road and the hills and trees!” And for a brief but glorious twenty minutes, my brother saw the world he’s been missing so much, for so long.