The Hand Squeeze of Death

(March 2010)

Michael spent 2 weeks in the ICU he was connected so many monitors and machines to help him live it was hard to even get close to him.  The monitors tracked every vital sign known to man, I didn't know there were so many things to track on a human body.  I would sit on a hard folding chair next to his bed and put my hand on his arm it all I could really do.  It didn't take long to know what each machine did and what all the numbers and beeps meant.   If Mikes vitals got to out of whack alarms would sound until they went back to acceptable numbers.  Today it's weird to think about how fragile Michael was at that time.

One day we had yet another disappointing talk with the Dr.  he told us about the injury to Mike's brain stem and what that meant.  I still don't understand completely but I'm not a neurologist.  The main thing I understood is that injuries would cause Mike to only have the use of the brain stem which lets you breath and your heart to beat and your body to do all the automatic things your body does but that is all.  I guess the non-technical term is vegetable.  He said there was the slimmest of chances that there could be signals that could get past the injured part of the brain stem and he would have use of his actual brain (I know a real Dr. is rolling over in his grave with my explanation but I graduated from the U of U so what do you expect). 

I couldn't believe that Michael was trapped in a non-existing state, I could feel him so strongly it didn't seem possible that he was just a heart beat.  I needed him to do more than have a heart beat and kind of breath so I stood by his side and took his hand.  I told him he needed to squeeze my hand that he had to try with all his might.  I squeezed his hand then asked him to squeeze mine.  I did this a couple of times and on the third attempt after I squeezed his hand he squeezed my hand back.  The effort was so great that suddenly all the machines were going crazy with alarms.  First I was scared that my request killed him I took a step back from him as the nurse rushed in to see what the matter was.  Things settled down and Mike went back to just trying to breath.  This event stunned and amazed me so much I didn't tell anyone what had happened. 

This encounter told me two things, first Mike was in there and could hear me and respond hence not just a brain stem (vegetable), second it took Mike all his strength and energy just to squeeze my hand (it almost killed him) so this was going to be a hard road.  At the time I knew the Doctors wouldn't believe me if I told them what had happened, (I am the desperate Fiance remember) and if they did believe me they out chalk it up to some automatic response or say it was nothing.  I knew this was a significant event and I didn't need a Dr. to tell me that it was or wasn't so I kept it to myself.  As time has gone on I was right Mikes hand squeeze of death was significant and one of the first signs of him coming back.