Just Another Stroke Story

© 2024 by the author using the pen name

UpperNorthLeft

.

All sexual activity is between adults 18 years of age or older.

Major thanks to

Jalibar62

and

Comentarista82

who really earned their añejo while beta-reading this story. This tale is much better because of their keen eyes and many insightful comments.

* * *

CHAPTER 1

What was the worst day of your life? When your team lost the Super Bowl? When you got fired from a job? The day you got dumped by your true love? For me, it was the day I held the brain of my cheating wife in my hands.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Other than that, Dr. Lecter, how did your day go?”

I suppose that I’m putting the cart before the proverbial horse. My name is Thompson, not Lecter. Bill Thompson. My story begins back when I first met Sally Thomas in medical school. We were both doing a combined MD-PhD program in Houston, and had a lot of the same classes together. One morning, after an especially boring internal medicine lecture, she turned to me and said, “What a ludicrous waste of a beautiful morning.”

I laughed and said, “Agreed. So if I took you to lunch right now, would I be the high point of your day?”

She smiled. “Right now, the bar is so low that you will be, unless you eat a puppy for lunch.”

During a puppy-free lunch, we discovered a common love of big words, murder mysteries, and each other’s quirky sense of humor. Weekly dates ensued, and escalated to daily meetings, and by the end of the school year, this lovely woman and I had moved in together. Our classmates thought we were very cute, and called us ‘The Toms’ due to our similar last names.

We were too busy to get married in medical school. Classwork, clinical rotations and research projects ate up most of our time. Most days, we usually had just enough time to grab a meal, study together, and then drop off to sleep. Any cuddling activity in bed happened on weekends when we weren’t on call. After we got our degrees, our internships made life even crazier. Every-third-night call is pretty brutal, especially for two people who have out-of-phase work shifts. When that happened, one of us was usually asleep when we were home together. Quality time together was rare during those months, but the common adversity actually brought us closer.

After internship, we began our residency training — hers in neurology, and mine in infectious disease. After that, we did research post-docs at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda. That gave us enough street cred in our fields that we were able to get our first major NIH grants. We moved to Seattle and established our own research labs at the University of Washington.

* * *

We found it helpful to hash out work problems together. It’s amazingly helpful to have another smart person around with whom you can bounce ideas around. We were doing this one day when Sally said, “Bill, I need your brain.”

“Sure, always glad to help troubleshoot. What’s up?”

“No, I need your actual brain.”

“Umm… I’m sort of using it right now. I’m going to need a few more details.”

“OK, remember what I told you about my current brain research project?”

“Uh huh.”

“One of the main obstacles to that project is the shortage of fresh human brains. I’d like both of us to sign living wills so that our brains and other body parts are quickly harvested after we die.”

“It does sound a

lot

less creepy when you put it that way.” I gave her a sardonic eye roll.

She smiled, but said. “Come on, I’m serious. With us as role models, it might help encourage others to donate their bodies too.”

“OK, sign me up.”

As it turned out, our medical center already had a team that visited local hospital morgues to harvest fresh body parts — such as corneas — as soon after death as possible. Sally’s lab joined forces with them, and they caught the attention of a local TV station. After their very well-received broadcast, the flow of brains to her lab picked up nicely.

Brain donation became something of a running gag between me and Sally. Whenever she or I had a senior moment or did something dumb, the other would joke, “Maybe it’s time to have your brain harvested, since you’re not using it right now.”

* * *

So it went. We each had our own very different research programs. However, we were able to collaborate on research projects at the intersection of our two fields, and we co-authored some interesting papers together. We somehow managed to find time to raise a son, Joe, and a daughter, Cindy. We all spent many happy weeks having family adventures around the Pacific Northwest. Our kids went off to college, and then started families of their own. Life was good.

* * *

That all changed suddenly one night. Sally had just come home from an evening out with her friends. We were idly chatting before bedtime, and she was telling me about the movie they had seen.

“It was that new Ryan Reynolds rom-com. The one where he plays a geeb nonk balafy…”

“A what?”

“Balafy. Geeb balafy!”

She uttered a few more nonsensical syllables, but they were slurred and became even more garbled. This was alarming, especially when I realized that the left side of her face was drooping. Shit!

In med school they taught us the

FAST

mnemonic for early stroke symptoms:

F

for facial drooping,

A

for arm weakness,

S

for speech problems, and

T

for time to call 911. I pulled my phone out with shaking hands, and dialed 911.

“911. What is your emergency?”

“I think my wife is having a stroke!”

They took the rest of my information and dispatched an ambulance, which arrived at our house five minutes later. There are definite advantages to living close to both a neighborhood fire station and a university medical center. We arrived at the emergency department about 15 minutes later, where she was quickly whisked away to a CT scanner. The scan showed some early brain edema, but no signs of intracranial bleeding. They immediately started her on IV tissue plasminogen activator — a powerful clot-buster.

Strokes happen when the blood supply to the brain is disrupted. They can be due to bleeding within the brain, such as when a cerebral vessel ruptures. More commonly, the blood supply is obstructed by a blood clot. This seemed to be Sally’s problem, and we were all hoping that the TPA would break up the clot, and restore blood flow to her brain. Sadly, it didn’t seem to help, and by the time she was admitted to the ICU, she was unconscious.

She went down for an MR scan during the night, which showed major ischemia (decreased blood flow) in one hemisphere of her brain. It also showed some puzzling abnormalities in a part of her brain called the subthalamic nucleus. Her condition deteriorated pretty rapidly after that, and she died early the next morning.

* * *

After hearing the terrible news from her doctor, I sat numb and disconsolate in the ICU waiting room. A short time later, I heard, “Dr. Thompson!?”

It was a pair of Sally’s neurology residents, who happened to be carrying the pager for the brain harvesting program that week. They were shocked to find that they had been dispatched to collect Sally’s brain.

You quickly learn to put a certain distance between yourself and your patients during medical training. The trick is to somehow maintain a human connection with them, but somehow not be overwhelmed by their pain and their deaths. That distance vanishes when the patient is someone you know or love. We embraced and cried together, but finally pulled ourselves together to confront the task at hand.

Removing someone’s brain is a gruesome process the first time you see it done. You start with an incision at the top of the forehead, near the hairline. Then you peel the scalp back off the skull, and pull the skin of the forehead down over the face. You then make a circular cut around the top of the skull with a special oscillating saw. The top of the skull is now a lid that you can open, exposing the brain. Once you have removed the brain, you drop the lid back in place, and pull the scalp and face back into position. If you comb the donor’s hair carefully, it can be difficult to see the original incision.

Sally and I considered ourselves fundamentalist agnostics. However, we always approached the actual act of organ harvesting with respect, reverence, and a feeling of gratitude to the donor and their family.

As you might imagine, Sally’s residents and I were just too close to her to be able to do the actual harvest. I called an acquaintance in the pathology department, and she was kind enough to remove Sally’s brain for us and place it in the transfer container. Once she closed the container, we were then able to hold ourselves together long enough to transport it to the brain bank and store it properly. Then — once again, our emotions overwhelmed us. We hugged and cried for a time, and then I Ubered home.

* * *

I bumbled about the rest of that day in a profound state of shock. My wife. My lover. My research collaborator. My best friend. My biggest cheerleader in life. All gone. The pain overwhelmed me, and I wanted to be gone too. The only reason I’m not in the ground now is that my friends, my colleagues, and my kids descended on me and held me and would not let me go. They made me eat. They put me to bed. They held me when I wept. They emptied my liquor cabinet before I could drown my sorrows and maybe my life. They took turns distracting me from my misery and pulling me out of the abyss of my bereavement.

* * *

Sally’s funeral and the celebration of her life went as well as one can expect. I was surrounded by our family, friends, and colleagues from both of our labs. I was too fragile to say more than a few words, so my sister Jane gave Sally’s eulogy. She told of how her introverted, science-nerd of a little brother had blossomed into a confident man after falling in love with Sally. She recalled Sally’s passion for her family, her friends, and her research.

After the eulogy, our group shared memories of Sally. Joe’s anecdote about his fight with Sally over a high school science project made even me laugh (‘No, Mom, I’m not going to send it out for peer review!’). Cindy also got a laugh with her story of how Sally had horrified the other moms at the school bake sale by making cookies shaped like anatomically correct brain slices. Mel Thornton, one of Sally’s lab partners, gave a particularly moving testimonial to her character and her work, and how her research had advanced neuroscience.

* * *

I won’t subject you to a play-by-play of the next few weeks. Suffice it to say that the grieving process works, and you can gradually put the pain aside and get back to living. Part of my grieving process sometimes included hours of actual physical labor, which I found to be very therapeutic.

We all accumulate an astounding amount of crap during our lives. Stuff that has too much attached sentiment, or that we are convinced we will need someday. However, many of Sally’s possessions now frankly haunted me. I ached every time I went into our walk-in closet. Seeing all the clothes she had worn while making so many of our memories together was painful. Clearing out her stuff relieved some of that pain. The empty place left there also ached, but that was slightly easier to bear.

My kids helped me to dispose of a lot of her things. My daughter took some of her clothes. She and my son each took some jewelry, and we packed up a bunch of boxes to haul off to Goodwill. My son teased me about how much stuff Sally and I had accumulated. He jokingly hoped that I would be courteous enough to get rid of my own crap before I kicked off so that he wouldn’t have to go through this process again.

As we were almost done, my daughter found a set of four paper lab journals tucked away in the back of Sally’s filing cabinet. “What are these, Dad?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. Just set them aside, and I’ll look at them later.”

The kids hugged me, and then headed back to their own families.

* * *

I was surprised to see any lab journals at our house. Sally had always been very compulsive about writing up her work immediately, and then locking her notes up in her lab before going home. After supper, I flipped through her journals. I started with the most recent notebook, which was dated about two months prior. I was initially surprised to see a detailed log of sexual events listed in Sally’s handwriting. But on second thought, Sally’s research interests in neurology had been fairly eclectic. The human nervous system essentially connects all the parts of the body together, so why

wouldn’t

she be interested in the wiring of our sexual equipment?

Sally’s journal documented a lot of sex taking place among a lot of people, at lots of times, in lots of positions and places. She was fairly meticulous, and listed names for almost all of her ‘subjects’. As I thumbed through the logbook, I thought, Wow, whoever she was studying was having an awful lot of sex. One subject appeared fairly regularly in the log, but was only listed as ‘A’. Then… the bottom dropped out of my universe when I spotted my own name among the list of partners!

OK, hold on. Bill Thompson is a pretty common name. That can’t be me, because the only sexual partner I’ve had since med school is… Sally.

Oh, fuck. No, please, no!

Chill, Bill. Breathe — let it out. Breathe again… nice and slow… I spent a few minutes trying to still my mind and just concentrate on my breathing.

Finally, my heart slowed to a more normal rate. Okay, think about this logically. When did I have sex with Sally over the past six months? It was about twice a week up until the end, but remembering exact dates? Well — we did rent that B & B on Vashon Island over New Year’s. I quickly flipped through the logbooks to that date and… oh, fuck! There were several entries for me that weekend.

I wracked my brain and recalled a few other times when Sally and I had been intimate. Yep, there they were in the goddamn logbooks!

Okay, how about that meeting I went to alone in Chicago at the end of February? Flip, flip, flip… oh, shit. Multiple entries that were definitely not me.

It’s weird how your mind reacts to trauma. I started going through a mental Rolodex of D-words that expressed how I felt. Devastated. Destroyed. Disheartened. Depressed. Dumbass. Despair. And then one more D: Denial.

It still seemed inconceivable to me that Sally had cheated on me. I tried to think of some alternate explanation. We’ve always been voracious readers, and had joked about writing fiction after we retired. Could this all be part of an elaborate draft of something she was writing?

No. That didn’t make any sense.

However, it was pretty clear that this wasn’t just a diary of sexual liaisons — it was organized like any of the usual projects at her lab. Her encounters started with testable hypotheses, then listed the methods she used to test them. Then came her experimental data — lots of parameters and a complex grading scheme for each encounter. This was followed by a discussion and her conclusions. It was very upsetting to read all of this, especially when I found myself listed as ‘the control’.

OK, I had to stop reading. It was depressing enough to have her die and never see her again. But betrayal of this extent? Jesus, was everything a lie? Was every memory tainted by this shit?

* * *

It took a long time for me to go to sleep that night. When I finally did nod off, I drifted through a fairly fitful sleep, filled with vague nightmares that were eventually dwarfed by the one I awoke to.

God, what a depressing, fucking morning! Initially, Sally’s death had sent me spiraling down into despair. Today was also depressing, but was accompanied by an overwhelming rage. Fuck her! How dare she take a crap on our lives by doing such a thing?

OK, enough of this shit. I needed to let off some steam before I started breaking things around the house. Then it came to me — it was time for a trip to the transfer station.

Seattle sends most of its solid waste out by rail to a series of regional landfills elsewhere in Washington or Oregon. Normal people like me get rid of our crap by taking it to the nearest transfer station, which consolidates the waste and moves it to the railhead. I usually find trips there to be cathartic, and I sure needed some of that now.

I borrowed my neighbor’s pickup, and filled it with stuff from our yard. Logs, yard waste, that butt-ugly birdbath that Sally just had to have, and every goddamn one of her fucking garden gnomes went into the truck.

They weigh your truck when you arrive and when you leave, and then charge you by the difference in weight. The therapeutic part comes when you drive into this gigantic building, and back your vehicle up to a giant pit full of everyone else’s garbage. You get to transfer your own crap into this pit anyway you like. The bird bath was too heavy for me to throw, so I just rolled it off into the abyss.

The gnomes were another story. I was delighted to see an old TV sitting down in the pile below me with its CRT tube still intact. There was something of a competition among visitors to see who could hit it first with their own rubbish. It was fucking awesome to fling garden gnomes down on it until I finally hit my target. The CRT imploded with a giant “Whoooomm!!” and everyone in the transfer station cheered. I was then able to impale a few cast-off windows with some of the logs from my yard. I also shattered an old toilet with the final goddamn gnome. Having dispatched the last of those little fuckers purged my heart of some of its venom. I paid my dump fee with a lighter heart and drove back home feeling better.

* * *

I stopped on my way home at a local liquor emporium and bought a few bottles of extra añejo tequila. Sally used to complain when I sprang for the really good stuff. Suck it, bitch — I’m sipping Reserva de la Familia tonight! However, at the last minute, I decided that the Reserva was too good to be wasted on getting shit-faced. For that purpose, I switched to what a Mexican friend called ‘college tequila’, i.e., Cuervo Gold.

I knocked down three or four shots of the Gold while listening to some of Metallica’s louder and more violent numbers. That plus the physical effort of gnome-flinging helped me to eventually stumble off to bed, where I had a surprisingly peaceful sleep.

* * *

I woke up the next day still pissed off, but surprisingly with no hangover. Time to confront my next bleak thought: how big of a total, fucking, clueless loser was I? I had been completely unaware of all this shit. God-damn it! How could she possibly find the time to have over thirty different liaisons in just six months? Think, Bill — think!

Let’s see — she supposedly worked late several evenings per week, as well as the occasional weekend. She also spent a fair amount of time out of town for research symposia. At the time, this didn’t seem unusual, since I put in a similar number of extra hours and travel for my research. I had to admit to myself, if anyone could squeeze that many assignations into their schedule, it would be a hyper-organized and detail-oriented person like Sally.

As for being clueless? Yeah, I guess I was. But why would I bother to look for clues with someone I trusted completely? If I hadn’t seen her logbooks, I might have never known about this secret part of her life.