by Rhonda Crone

Created on: September 20, 2008

(Another) Hole In His Head
Fourteen years after Tommy broke his neck, his head underwent yet another near-fatal incident.

The day I was, well, extinguished from my low-paying joke of a position at a estrogen-infused corrupt non-profit that I will leave un-named, I received a call from my sister. "Tommy has spinal meningitis. He's at Hillcrest Hospital. We're leaving tonight." Spinal Meningitis? I looked up the term in my three-inch-thick Symptoms, Illnesses and Surgery book. I freaked out after doing that.

My husband Jakob and I packed up and headed to Big Boulder to arrive to bad news: it may not be spinal meningitis, but he has an abscess on his brain. Abscess? Like a tooth? "He has a 90 percent chance of survival if he makes it through the night." Where do they get prognoses like that? So our entire family and several friends waited through the night. He must have beaten out that ten percent. For two months, there was a consistent inconsistency in his diagnosis. And although he was a doctor himself, the treatment and information from the nurses at Hillcrest Hospital was questionable, to say the least. You would think that maybe doctors would get more impressive treatment. They get worse. He was moved to St. Paul's hospital. No one knew what the hell was happening. He went through two surgeries, in which they drilled more holes in his head (to add to the collection he accrued when he broke his neck), lost 20 pounds, and finally, there appeared to be hope for his recovery.

Our rather large family practically moved into his big house outside of town. We worked in shifts to take care of his four children, to be with him in the hospital room, and to get food for everyone. Food was always important. Being there was important. The funny thing is, if I had not been exterminated, or lost that crappy job, I would not have been able to be there. I found myself thinking that maybe there is a reason for everything that happens.
Tommy didn't resemble the vibrant, tanned, beer-drinking golfer that he was just two months ago. A respirator assisted his breathing. But he was going to be okay. One day near the end of the hospital stay, we were all standing around his bed. He had been on morphine for pain, and entertained us by saying things like "I like the night life, I love to boogie," in his psychedelic state. Everyone laughed, a bit perplexed. But when he said that a medicine man came into his room every day, about one o'clock, and took him away to heal him, our mouths dropped open. We were all thinking that maybe, just maybe, after the miracle that we had witnessed, he wasn't imagining that one.

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