A part of me doesn’t want to meet her. I refuse to believe that Dahlia won’t wake up in the next few days or weeks, but another part of me knows that I can learn a lot from her. Dahlia has just been moved out of ICU and I don’t want to keep her in hospital a day longer than necessary. I know I can get a better and a more dedicated staff to care for her at home, and I am terrified she will succumb to one of these virulent strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria that exist in hospitals. Dr. Medhi’s warning about pneumonia still sends shivers down my back.
Bernadette is seventy-two years old, but her nails are painted red, her make-up is immaculate, and her blonde hair beautifully coiffured. If I saw her in the street I would not have picked her out to be the extraordinary woman who has dedicated her thirty-three years of taking care of her vegetative husband in the hope that he will eventually wake up.
She tells me they met at a dance in the 1960s. The memory makes her smile. ‘He was joie de vivre in human form’ she says wistfully.
Now her husband feels, smells, hears and jumps when a dog barks, but he cannot see, crack a joke, laugh, or dance.
Her day starts before seven. After a solitary breakfast it becomes a mix of changing clothes, shaving, preparing and blending food, feeding him, helping him go to the toilet. Sometimes when he has a bad night she spends the night with him too.
She takes me to his room and something inside me dies. He has hardly aged but for a few white hairs. However, he is a shell of the vibrant joie de vivre man in the photographs she showed me. He lies there as still as a breathing corpse. I simply cannot imagine this life for Dahlia and me.
‘He can recognize the sound of my voice,’ she says looking at my aghast face.
I turn towards her in surprise. ‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ she confirms.
‘How can you tell?’
‘When you love someone you can tell,’ she says with conviction.
‘I see,’ I say politely.
‘Yes, that is why you must keep talking to her. It is love that heals beyond all else.’
At the end of my visit I take her hand in mine to thank her for agreeing to see me, and she grasps my hand with both of hers and says, ‘It is worth keeping her alive, Zane. Medical science evolves. If one day they know what to do with her, you will be ready. One day she will come out of it.’
In two hours I am back in England and I go straight to the hospital. I walk in on a nurse washing Dahlia and it is almost too painful to watch. To see those beautiful limbs that had been so full of life and vitality handled as if they belonged to an inert puppet. The nurse looks up at me and smiles in an encouraging fashion.
‘I’m going to clean her face now. Often it will stimulate them to open their eyes when we perform intimate things like brushing their teeth or shaving for the men.’
I move closer and stare at the nurse as she squeezes water out of a piece of yellow sponge and gently starts to clean around the life support machine tube. I hold my breath as she lays her thumb on Dahlia’s temple and wipes her closed eyes. My heart clenches with hope.
This is it. She is going to open her eyes.
But of course, she does not.
The nurse looks at me, her expression both disappointed and reassuring. ‘It can happen anytime. You know, the best thing you can do by the bedside of a loved one in a coma is to talk to them. They can hear you. Tell them you love them. Let them know you’re going to stay with them. You’re not giving up on them. Offer them hope.’
The next day I begin to make the necessary arrangements to move Dahlia back to the house.
I hire two twenty-four hour nurses to take turns to watch her and to move her every hour so she doesn’t have bedsore or skin problems. I also contact a kinesiologist recommended by Dr. Medhi to ensure her lungs are clear and her muscles exercised to avoid choking and atrophying.
I also hire a professional to come to the house and make a list of everything that needs to be done before a patient with Dahlia’s needs can be catered to. He gives us a long list. It runs from a bathroom for the nurses with hot and cold water to a reputable back-up generator for the life support machine in the event there is any kind of disruption to the electrical supply, to the best carbon based air filters on the market.