But the numbers were only increasing; the pressure wasn’t releasing. And so there the doctors concluded they needed to remove a portion of Jack’s skull to make space for his brain to swell. Now, I’ll spare you all the gory details, so as not to gross you out, but even after his craniectomy, Jack didn’t make much of a recovery. When the consultants took him out of the medically induced coma, he wouldn’t wake up, no matter how hard they tried. He was in a natural one.
I didn’t cope well in this scenario, as you can probably imagine. On the one hand, because having a loved one in a coma sucks. On the other, because back then, I was a type-A personality who didn’t know the meaning of the words faith, trust or surrender. Jack’s recovery was beyond my control and beyond medical control. It was out of our hands and in the hands of God, and all I could do was sit by his bedside every day—multiple times a day—during visiting hours and hope and pray that one day he’d wake.
To put things into perspective, he was a no. 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale (which is one off being brain dead), but I thought he’d make it despite the odds. By some miracle, he did. Now, Jack today isn’t the Jack I knew and loved before the accident, of course. He remained in a rehabilitation centre for over a year but made only a partial recovery.
His frontal lobe damage resulted in issues with his speech and mobility, but it was his inability to talk, not walk, that disturbed and perturbed me the most.