A Shattered Life

Five days after I was admitted to Sutter General Hospital in Sacramento, California, and as I slowly came out of a coma, I heard a voice. The sound seemed to come from the left and seemed to be speaking to me. But who was speaking to me and why?

I struggled to open my eyes, and when they fluttered open, my surroundings — whatever they were — were hazy, cloudy.

"My father was a minister back in Illinois," the voice said to me. "And my mother's maiden name was ..." The voice told me a bit about his childhood back in the Midwest. I couldn't understand why.

As the voice continued to tell me things about his life, I began to detect that there were things — lots of things — attached to me, uncomfortable things. I was able to move my eyes slightly to the left, and then I saw him: a man was standing next to where I was lying. A fairly tall man but with a soft and soothing voice.

The man was looking at me. He identified himself as Dr. James Turner.

"Well, Omer, I have told you a bit about myself," he said. "Now can you tell me a few things about you? Where were you born, Omer?" It was a simple question — rudimentary really. But I struggled to find the answer.

Finally I mumbled, "I think it was in Missouri."

"Can you tell me the name of the town in Missouri?" the man asked.

"Um, it may have been Barnett," I answered.

"What was your mother's maiden name, Omer?" the man asked.

"Damn it, what's wrong with me?" I thought. "These are simple questions. Why is it so hard to answer them?"

"What did your father do for a living?" he continued.

Did I answer? I don't really know whether I did or not, but of this I am sure: I was becoming more and more aware of my surroundings and of the numerous wires attached to my body — to my chest, my right arm, my left arm, my head. An IV drip. A catheter. I think the man introduced himself as a doctor, didn't he?

As the interrogation progressed, several others came to my bedside, intent on looking at me and examining me. Doctors? Nurses?

I was advised that I was in critical condition and in intensive care. This must be the reason so many things are hooked up to me, I thought. But why I was there and what they were monitoring was still unclear.

"My wife, Judy, can answer all of these questions," I told the doctor. "No, no, that's not right. I think my wife's name is Diana or something like that. I'm having a hard time with these questions."

"No, I want to get this information from you," Dr. Turner explained as he continued to ask me more questions.

A day later, another doctor who would attend to me with great regularity over the next month as I remained in critical condition in intensive care, a Dr. David Dozier, broke the news of what had happened to me. I had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm and an associated hemorrhagic stroke. The doctors couldn't understand from a medical standpoint why I hadn't died on the spot when the artery feeding blood to my brain burst.

Dr. Dozier recounted my admittance to the hospital, the desperate measures that had been taken to save my life, the prolonged operation involving numerous physicians and nurses, and the new procedure that had saved my life — at least temporarily — developed and tried for the first time in Northern California on me. The primary doctor who led the surgical team was the only person on staff having been trained in London in the new procedure. As it turned out, this particular doctor got on a plane, as scheduled, the day after he saved my life. He was, and remains to me, a beneficent phantom.

The artery that had burst in my head was the one that feeds blood to the brain. The new surgical procedure conducted by the phantom doctor, and assisted by several other physicians and nurses, was intended to stop the flow of blood that was spilling over the brain.

During the next several days of my hospitalization in ICU, as new nurses, technicians and orderlies came to assist or monitor me, they would invariably ask the same question: "Where is your zipper?" At first I didn't know what they meant. But I learned that the normal procedure for my condition was to remove the skullcap, to clip the aneurysm, to then put the skullcap back on and sew it up. None of the nurses had ever seen a coiled embolism like mine.

The procedure, as I understand it, went something like this: In the hope of stopping the flow of blood across my brain that resulted from the arterial rupture, the surgeons had begun by making a very small incision in the area of my groin. In an operation that lasted several hours, the medical team carefully threaded platinum coils through arterial veins all the way up to and through my heart and then through the carotid artery in my neck. This artery, as it turns...