“Mom?” I said. The single word encapsulated not just the title for the woman who had raised me but my surprise at seeing her eyes open after fifteen months in a comatose state.
She was positioned half sitting, her eyes huge under a wave of unkempt white hair.
“Is that your son?” the nurse asked, pointing in my direction.
I waited, but my mom made no move to acknowledge me, her cool blue eyes landing on a point beyond me, out in the hallway.
My body was filled with emotions I was not used to. Anger. Guilt. Happiness.
Fifteen months earlier, I was chasing a suspect in the biggestcase of my career. When I pushed him too hard, he broke into my mother’s nursing home and poisoned her with a paralytic called vecuronium.
“How do you feel?” I asked, my throat tight, the words struggling to escape.
Her eyes moved to the nurse. “I had a stressful dream.”
Fifteen months of silence, and her voice sounded the same. Slightly hoarse. Maybe a touch weaker. But the doctors had warned me that she would probably never open her eyes again. Never speak again.
My mother glanced around. Was she searching for something familiar? After the attack, she had been airlifted from her nursing home to a trauma center. Weeks later, I moved her here—to a long-term care facility.
I pictured the last time I had seen my mother awake and in person. She had helped me solve something complex. Then, a minute later, she’d disappeared into the void of Alzheimer’s.
Because of her age and condition, the doctors had made the decision to anesthetize her after the attack, in an effort to stabilize her. But last month, I had worked out a plan with her physician, Dr. Eastman, to begin withdrawing the anesthesia. He told me there was little guarantee she would wake up.
“I was somewhere else,” my mother said, her voice hoarse. “A beach in South Carolina.”
I swallowed, controlling my breathing. When I was a child, we’d travel to Kiawah Island every summer. I would stay on the beach until the sun dropped below the horizon and the sand grew cold under my feet. Then I would climb onto my mother’s lap, where she’d cover me in towels and blankets so we could stay out even longer.
“You’ve been asleep,” I said, walking closer to the bed. “For fifteen months and nine days. It’s not unusual to have strange dreams.”
“Fifteen months?” My mother blinked.
The most common scoring system for the condition of a comatose patient is the Glasgow Coma Scale. The GCS measures responsiveness over three areas: eye opening, verbal response, and motor activity. One of those is rated on a 1–4 scale, the next on a 1–5, and the last on a 1–6. Dr. Eastman had totaled up my mother’s scores ninety days ago and landed on a five, which was only two points above complete unresponsiveness.
My mother began whimpering, and I moved closer to take her hand. It felt cold and small. The skin on her fingers was loose against my wrist.
This was the reason I’d put a plan in place to try to wake her up. According to her doctor, my mother’s system would not tolerate another two months of muscle loss or respiratory decline.
Dr. Eastman came into the room. “You got here fast,” he said. “When you’re ready, we should talk.”
I spent a few more minutes with my mother, then found the doctor in his office just past the nursing station. Eastman was five foot eight, with wavy white hair and sun-wrinkled skin. He wore a tailored suit jacket over a blue shirt, a look that read more aging European fashion model than geriatric specialist.
“So,” he said. “What do you think of our patient? Remarkable, isn’t it?”
The sun had gone down while I traveled west, and looking out the window, I was reminded of the flatness of Texas. “Does she remember anything?” I asked.
Eastman squinted at me. “Mr. Camden,” he said, “we opened abottle of champagne. Nurses were crying. A man of your intelligence must understand how rare this is.”
“Do you have a plan?” I asked. “She appears to be nineteen pounds lighter.”
Eastman glanced at his desk, picking up my mother’s chart. “Eighteen point five, actually.”
“You’ll get her going with therapy, then,” I said. “PT to start. A diet regimen?”
“She’ll have a different therapist every hour,” Eastman said, his face forming a gentle smile. “Even psychiatric. It’s not every day that a well-regarded behavioral expert goes up against one of our own.”
Years ago, my mother was a respected figure in the psychiatric community. Before she retired and moved west, she was on retainer with the Charleston Police Department. There, she consulted on dozens of investigations, including two well-known serial murders.
“But let’s take a moment,” Eastman said, “to be positive.”
