A Stroke of Grace and Gratitude

Coming Back to Life in a Rural Hospital

“During this entire exam the word I’ve heard most from you is anxiety,” my Kaiser cardiologist told me. A middle-aged Indian woman, she wore a severe expression that seemed to express the fatalistic perspective of an ancient culture all too familiar with cycles of life and death and a skeptical view of the typically American refusal to accept its inevitability.

“Mr. Sommer,” she advised me sternly, “at some point you need to come to terms with your own mortality.”

I blinked, my heart missing a beat.

“Well, that’s a bit blunt,” my doctor commented when I told him what the cardiologist had said. “But it’s true.”

In mid-December 2024, I had the opportunity to test my mettle when I experienced an inner earthquake and was taken to the hospital for three nights and four days of tests and observation. It began after dinner one quiet evening at home. I was sitting in front of my computer watching a few minutes of a film when my body began to tremble and shiver uncontrollably. At first I ignored it but soon it became an unstoppable shudder. My hands shook as if seized by a restless spirit within. I felt a sudden chill ripple through my body. Heading to my bedroom, I climbed into bed and pulled the covers over me.

For a long moment I wrestled with whether to call 911 for an ambulance. I had long been resistant to submitting myself to the bureaucratic maw of an ER “workup,” five or six hours of tests in a crowded hospital maze to check whether I was having a true medical emergency. I’d been in ER four times this year already and was fiercely resistant to going again. I had actually refused to go on a few previous occasions when it was being recommended by a tele-nurse. But this time I heard in my mind the echoing imperative from my senior cardiologist just a few weeks earlier that if I was experiencing unusual symptoms of any kind, I needed to get myself to an ER without delay.

Overriding my reluctance, I reached for my cell phone and dialed 911. Within a minute I was swept into the vortex of emergency services. Within fifteen, several medics and an ambulance and a backup vehicle appeared at my door. In half an hour I was in ER at Providence St Joseph’s in Eureka with a nurse practitioner asking basic questions that in my sudden confusion I could scarcely answer. I spent a night of fitful exhaustion in a sliver of a room, plastic capillary tubes lashing me in place, an IV in my arm pumping antibiotics into my bloodstream to contain what was assumed to be pneumonia. A small residue of infection had been detected in my lower right lung, though I had no symptoms to validate the diagnosis.

In the morning I was transferred upstairs in MedSurg to a room of my own with its own adjoining bathroom. It was far from luxurious but I still felt fortunate to have been placed in a quiet corner of the hospital. Then began a continuous procession of nurses checking vitals and dispensing meds by the hour day and night with the regularity of a metronome. Having spent a total of one night in a hospital in my previous 79 years, I was acquainted with the chestnut that “you go to the hospital to get cured, then go home to get rest.” It takes a double dose of patience and fortitude to endure the routine in good humor and not every patient masters it.

Having lived a largely unscheduled life in the backcountry with unusual freedom from institutional constraints, I initially bristled at the rigid patterns of hospital protocol but soon realized that in doing so I would make my stay harder than it needed to be. Poised on the doorstep of my eighties I faced a future of more frequent visits to hospitals unless I refused allopathic care and decided to pursue alternative routes after being faced with increasing health challenges. A dear friend had also suggested that in light of facing the probability of more frequent visits to the hospital, it would serve me better to change my attitude towards them from aversion and resistance to acceptance and even gratitude.

Facing this predicament, I chose to open my mind and heart to the experience and to begin by befriending the nurses. By all accounts, nursing is one of the hardest jobs around. You get all the responsibilities of a caregiver with little of the deference accorded to doctors. You may go into the profession as a calling but you’re usually treated more like a custodian of malfunctioning bodies and impatient patients. You work twelve-hour shifts three days in a row, often all night, then spend your four days off running neglected errands, taking your kids to soccer practice and trying to make up for lost sleep. Nurses are among this society’s least appreciated but most naturally caring personalities.

I began my befriending strategy by asking those who’d been assigned as my chief day and night nurses to tell me about themselves. It was an extension of a practice I’d begun a few years ago to make a new friend a day. “A new friend a day keeps them ole blues away,” I say to myself, and I find that it almost invariably gives me a lift. I call it “warming up my world.” In the case of my nurses, when they introduced themselves, announcing “I’ll be your nurse tonight,” I gave them a cordial welcome, like new old friends. After they completed their initial assignments, I took a moment in their always over-busy days to break into their routine.

“Tell me about yourself,” I asked. I have no formula for questions to ask; they emerge in the moment out of the context and my natural curiosity. I’ve learned over the years that everyone has a story worth telling but few ever get the chance to tell it. Even if they have a partner, he or she long ago ceased asking to hear about what they think they already know too well. In the case of the nurses I got to know, they’re mostly carrying their burdens on their own apart from the grueling routine of nursing. Their former partners are often long gone. As single parents, they’re fully occupied with juggling work, kids, bills, maintaining a household and managing their own health. They spend their days or nights tending to others, hearing their stories and complaints but seldom finding anyone with whom to share their own.

When I expressed interest, they readily opened up. You’d think these stories would all run together; after all, theirs are not outwardly unusual lives. But every life is unique and if one has the time and interest to notice, each story and each way of telling it is unique. Eileen (not her real name) is in her thirties with two kids whom she treasures beyond all else. She is by nature a warm and caring soul. When the doctor stopped by for a few minutes to notify me on my third day in the hospital that the MRI revealed that I had had a stroke, she asked him more questions to slow him down and elicit more details. After he left, she knelt beside my chair and put a hand on my arm.

“I’ll be here for you whatever happens,” she said gently. In my initial shock at the doctor’s diagnosis, I was in a somewhat fragile emotional state. Eileen’s words and gestures were just the treatment I need to lower my chronic high blood pressure. I teared up, then thanked her. I noticed that my feelings were more intense than usual. I was suffused with gratitude for her being here for me in a moment of uncertainty. The doctor’s objectivity was essential but it doesn’t address the emotional dimensions of my state of being. My nurse’s empathy did.

Mid-evening on the second night, another nurse entered and announced in the manner of a drill sergeant that she would be my nurse till 6 a.m.

“My job is to keep you safe,” Martha proclaimed. “I see that you’re at risk of falling, so I’ve put you on bed alert. You won’t be able to leave the bed without a nurse accompanying you.”

It’s like she put me on lockdown. Not only did she take no prisoners. I was one. I chafed under this unprecedented restraint on my personal freedom. Sleeping only fitfully, I awoke shortly after dozing off when bells and buzzers started going off. I had inadvertently attempted to shift position. Three nurses burst into the room, flipped on the lights, and stood at the ready prepared to walk me ten feet to the bathroom. The sole freedom I still enjoyed was when I’m inside the closed door doing my duty. When the sergeant nurse reappeared on the third night, I asked her to turn off the bed alert so I could at least turn over without calling out the National Guard. She threw a stern expression in my direction as if censuring my impertinence. I asked her for a few extra blankets. She fetched them from a stack of pre-warmed covers.

“How do you want them?” she asked. I was surprised she was even asking.

“Just tuck them around me,” I requested.

“Like a burrito bundle?” she asked.

We both smile. “Yes, just like a burrito,” I said. “With a side of hot sauce.”

She started to tuck me in.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve realized how good it feels to tuck someone in.”

My daughter’s plane from L.A. touched down at the airport at 1:58 p.m. at just the instant when Beth entered to announce that I’m being discharged. Maybe it was pure coincidence but to me it represented “continuity of care” at its best. I felt I was being handed forward from one warm heart to another. I was raised without a religious background and am still not sure if I believe in a higher power. But since my stroke I’ve come to feel the sometime presence of grace. I feel like I try hard to bend things to my will but often as not fail to achieve what I’m aiming to accomplish. It’s when I accept things as they are and appreciate them for what they are that life itself starts to accommodate my wishes in the most surprising and heartening ways.

I read recently that one of the best ways to reduce stress in your life is to express your appreciation to others for all the ordinary and sometimes extraordinary ways they go out of their way to be kind to you. This is deeply surprising, almost the opposite of what you’d expect. You don’t ask them to appreciate you. This is not a transaction; it’s a freely given gift from you to them. You expect nothing special in return. Grace is when, after all you’ve done to bend the arc of fortune in your direction, you give up and accept life as it is. Sometime later, as if altogether unrelated to your surrender, grace delivers what you’ve been yearning for, wrapped up in a different package. Then grace taps you on the shoulder from behind and says with a twinkle in its eye,

“Pardon me, but were you looking for this?”