Mindscan

"Your address is—" said the operator, and she read it off. "Correct?"

I lifted his right eyelid. His eye tracked to look at mine, thank God.

"Yes, yes, that's right. Hurry! My father's collapsed!"

"Is he breathing?"

"Yes."

"Pulse?"

"Yes, he has one, but he's collapsed, and he's not responding to anything I say."

"An ambulance is on its way," said the woman. "Is anyone else with you?"

My hands were shaking. "No. I'm alone."

"Don't leave him."

"I won't. Oh, Christ, what's wrong with him?"

The operator ignored the question. "Help is on its way."

"Dad!" I said. He made a gurgling sound, but I don't think it was in response to me.

I wiped away the drool and tipped his head back a bit to make sure he was getting plenty of air. "Please, Dad!"

"Don't panic," said the woman. "Remain calm."

"Christ, oh Christ, good Christ…"

The ambulance took me and my dad to the Trillium Health Centre, the nearest hospital. As soon as we got there, they transferred him to a gurney, his long legs hanging over the end. A white male doctor appeared quickly, shining a light into his eyes and tapping his knee with a small hammer — to which there was the usual reflexive response. He tried speaking to my father a few times, then called out, "Get this man a cerebral MRI, stat!" An orderly wheeled Dad off. He still hadn't said a coherent word, although he occasionally made small sounds.

By the time Mom arrived, Dad had been moved into a bed. Standard government health care gets you a space in a ward. Dad had supplemental insurance, and so had a private room. Of course.

"Oh, God," my mother kept saying, over and over again, holding her hands to her face. "Oh, my poor Cliff. My darling, my baby…"

My mother was the same age as my dad, with a round head and artificially blonde hair. She was still wearing her tennis clothes — white top, short white skirt. She played a lot of tennis, and was in good shape; to my embarrassment, some of my friends thought she was hot.

Shortly, a doctor came to see us. She was a Vietnamese woman of about fifty. Her name tag identified her as Dr. Thanh. Before she could open her mouth, my mother said, "What is it? What's wrong with him?"

The doctor was infinitely kind — I'll always remember her. She took my mother's hand and got her to sit down. And then the woman crouched down, so she'd be at my mother's eye level. "Mrs. Sullivan," she said. "I'm so sorry. The news is not good."

I stood behind my seated mother, with a hand on her shoulder.

"What is it?" Mom asked. "A stroke? For God's sake, Cliff is only thirty-nine. He's too young for a stroke."

"A stroke can happen at any age," said Dr. Thanh. "But, although technically this was a form of stroke, it's not what you're thinking of."

"What then?"

"Your husband has a kind of congenital lesion we call an AVM: an arteriovenous malformation. It's a tangle of arteries and veins with no interposing capillaries — normally, capillaries provide resistance, slowing down the blood-flow rate. In cases like this, the vessels have very thin walls, and so are prone to bursting.

And when they do, blood pours through the brain in a torrent. In the form of AVM your husband has — called Katerinsky's syndrome — the vessels can rupture in a cascade sequence, going off like fire hoses."

"But Cliff never mentioned…"

"No, no. He probably didn't know. An MRI would have shown it, but most people don't have routine MRIs until they turn forty."

"Damn it," said my mother — who almost never swore. "We would have paid for the test! We—"

Dr. Thanh glanced up at me, then looked into my mother's eyes. "Mrs. Sullivan, believe me, it wouldn't have made any difference. Your husband's condition is inoperable. AVMs in general affect only one in a thousand people, and Katerinsky's affects only one in a thousand of those with AVMs. The sad truth is that the principal form of diagnosis for Katerinsky's is autopsy. Your husband is actually one of the lucky ones."

I looked over at my father, in the bed, a tube up his nose, another in his arm, his hair matted, his mouth hanging open.

"So, he's going to be okay, then?" said my mother. "He's going to get better?"

Dr. Thanh sounded truly sad. "No, he's not. When the blood vessels ruptured, the adjacent parts of his brain were destroyed by the jet of blood pounding into the tissue. He's…"

"He's what?" demanded my mother, her voice full of panic. "He's not going to be a vegetable, is he? Oh, God — my poor Cliff. Oh, Jesus God…"

I looked at my father, and I did something I hadn't done for five years. I started to cry. My vision began to blur, and so did my mind. As the doctor continued to talk to my mother, I heard the words "severe retardation," "total aphasia," and "institutionalize."

He wasn't coming back. He wasn't leaving, but he wasn't coming back. And the last words of mine that ever would have registered on his consciousness were—