My Daughter, Myself
An Unexpected Journey
Also by Linda Wolfe
The Murder of Dr. Chapman
Love Me To Death
Double Life
Wasted: The Preppie Murder
Private Practices: A Novel
The Cosmo Report: Women and Sex in the Eighties
The Professor and the Prostitute: True Tales of Murder and Madness
Playing Around: Women and Extramarital Sex
The Cooking of the Caribbean Islands
The Literary Gourmet
For R.S.B. and M.J.B.
Table of Contents
Part One: Every Mother’s Nightmare
Chapter One: Mother’s Day
Chapter Two: The Great Mother, Son-in-Law Struggle
Chapter Three: New Pathways
Part Two: The Long Road Back
Chapter Four: Trapped
Chapter Five: Eighty Feet
Chapter Six: A New Beginning
Chapter Seven: I’m Her Mother
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Part One
Every Mother’s Nightmare
Chapter One
Mother’s Day
The nightmare began, although I didn’t recognize it at the time, on a Mother’s Day weekend a few years ago. I was in San Antonio, Texas, having flown down from my home in New York City to spend the weekend with my daughter, Jessica, her husband, and their children, my two young granddaughters. Sometime in the black-as-pitch hours before dawn on Sunday morning, Jessica was startled into wakefulness by a splitting headache. She went to the bathroom, used the toilet, splashed water on her face, and was headed back to bed, when suddenly one of her legs gave way beneath her and she fell.
Asleep in the guest bedroom across the hallway, I was not aware of this. Nor was I aware that Jessica pulled herself up from the floor and, convinced she’d feel better if she got some more rest, lay down in the queen-sized bed she and her husband shared, curled up beside Jon’s slumbering body, and went back to sleep.
I didn’t know that when she woke up again it was light out and her head was still hurting, only now it was hurting so much it was making her nauseous. I didn’t hear her gagging in her bathroom or dialing her doctor’s office, didn’t know that a covering doctor, upon learning her symptoms, told her to go at once to an emergency room. Nor did I hear her discuss with Jon which emergency room to go to—the one where her doctor practiced, or the one closer to home, where they’d taken their elder daughter when she’d gotten a cut that needed stitches.
We’d had a wonderful weekend until then. My plane had come in late on Friday night. Jon and the children were already in bed, but Jessica had waited up for me. Thirty-eight years old, she was slender and tall, with an olive-tinted complexion and brown eyes that sparkled beneath twin scimitars of dense eyebrows. She’d looked especially pretty that night, her thick chestnut hair newly bobbed to a fashionable shoulder length. She’d cut it, she told me, for her new job—she was doing political and judicial research for Texas’s Bexar County, whose capital is San Antonio. It was her first job in what was for her still a new hometown. The family had moved to San Antonio from Berkeley, California only a few months earlier, when Jon, who’d just gotten his Ph.D. in political science, had landed a teaching position at the San Antonio branch of the University of Texas. Jon liked his new job, Jessica had told me, and hers was perfect. She loved the work.
I’d gone to sleep happy for my daughter, and on Saturday gave her and Jon a break from childcare by playing “House” and “School” for hours with my grandchildren, three-year-old Miriam and eight-year-old Rachel. Saturday night I’d taken the family out to dinner at a restaurant my son-in-law wanted to try—a new Chinese place, festive with red and gold Good Luck banners. The menu was filled with an alluring array of dishes, and we had ordered expansively.
That dinner seemed to be what was on Jon’s mind Sunday morning when I came downstairs for breakfast at about 8 a.m. “Jessica’s not feeling well,” he said to me as soon as I appeared. “She’s been throwing up. I think maybe she’s got food poisoning. Can you watch the girls while I take Jess over to the hospital to get her checked out?”
“Of course,” I told him, pleased to be put in charge of my granddaughters; living so far away, I didn’t get that assignment very often. But “food poisoning?” I asked Jon doubtfully. “None of the rest of us is sick.”
“Yeah, but she ate the crabmeat and none of the rest of us did.”
Then Jessica came downstairs. She looked awful, waxen as an Easter lily and all bent over, her normally strong and vertical stride a shuffling parenthesis. She grabbed her wallet—her medical insurance card was inside it—and said goodbye to her daughters. A moment later she and Jon were gone, though not before she whispered to me, “Mom, I woke up with a headache in the middle of the night. But it wasn’t just a normal headache. It was like the inside of my head was ripping apart.”
I discovered what time truly is that afternoon. A minute is 60 seconds. An hour is 3,600 seconds. A May afternoon is 21,600 seconds. All day, the seconds plodded funereally forward while I tried to keep the children distracted. They knew their mother wasn’t feeling well, but Jon had told them it was nothing serious, and when he assured them it was just a stomachache and she’d be back in time for the Mother’s Day celebration they’d been planning, they had accepted his explanation. I wasn’t able to, not when she’d looked so dreadful. But for their sakes, I pretended not to worry and flung myself into round after round of let’s-be-this or let’s-be-that games, mostly chosen by Rachel, who was forever making up games and writing plays. Among her recent hits was “The Prince and the Bowling Ball,” which featured a princess who puts a bowling ball under a visitor’s pillow to determine whether he’s really, as he says he is, a prince. I’d brought my video camera with me to Texas, and after lunch proposed that the girls act out the drama. “Grandpa Max will love it,” I coaxed. “He feels bad that he couldn’t come with me this weekend, and if we make him a movie, he’ll be so happy.”
It worked at first. But after an hour of gathering all the props—the crowns and cloaks and beads, the feather for the prince’s hat, the large rubber ball that could serve as a bowling ball—Rachel suddenly turned sulky and refused to go on with the show. “We acted it out when we were in New York last time,” she bawled. “Grandpa saw it. Grandma! Don’t you remember?”
Was she feeling my anxiety? Was that what was making her so cranky? I couldn’t be sure, but there was no diverting her. Miriam wailed but Rachel prevailed, and I decided we needed a change of venue. The afternoon had grown increasingly hot, and although going outdoors would be less comfortable than staying in the air-conditioned house—at least for me, who was unused to Texas torridity—I began to insist that we do something outside. Play ball? Make chalk drawings on the sidewalk?
The children grimaced, but I figured outdoor play would quiet them down, break up their quarrel. Besides, I wanted to be out front, where I could spot Jessica and Jon’s Toyota the moment it rounded the corner.
“All right, Grandma,” Rachel finally acquiesced, “but no playing ball and no drawing on the sidewalk.” I took my cell phone outside with me. It was 2002; Jessica and Jon hadn’t yet bought cell phones, but Jon had promised they’d call from the hospital after Jessica was seen by a doctor.
Once the girls and I were settled down in front of their house, Rachel devised a game that involved gathering twigs, pretending they were tantalizing toys and having Miriam, for whom the concept of money was a total mystery, “purchase” the imaginary toys with bits of rock and stone. It was an endless game, and an endless afternoon.
Around five o’clock, my two stepdaughters, Jude and Debby, called—Jude from California, Debby from Oregon. They were Max’s children, ten and fifteen years older than Jessica. I’d come into them, as we always put it, when Jessica was an eight-year-old, but we’d been a family for so many years that they, too, felt like blood daughters. They were calling to wish both Jessica and me a happy Mother’s Day. Happy. Talking to Jude and Debby, I made light of Jessica and Jon’s absence. No point in worrying them. Maybe it was food poisoning. Maybe that headache was just a headache. Maybe I had exaggerated how pale Jessica had looked, how stooped. Sometimes, for a few moments at a time, I could talk myself into believing these things.
Around six o’clock the children began complaining that they were hungry, and I gave up waiting for the sight of the car and took them back into the house. I was searching through the refrigerator for something to fix for their supper and had my hand on a carton of eggs when the house phone rang. Eggs in tow, I raced to pick it up, slamming the fridge door shut with a foot. It had to be Jessica. Please let it be Jessica! My hands were shaking, and as I raised the receiver with one hand, the egg box slipped from the other, sending a flood of sticky yellow puddling onto the counter and trickling down to the floor.
“Mom?” I heard Jessica say. “I’m okay, Mom.”
“Thank God!”
“I had every test known to woman, and the ER doctor says I’m all right. We’re picking up something at the pizza place, and we’ll be home right away.”
I could tell she was in a hurry to get off the phone. I couldn’t let her, not without knowing more. “What else did the doctor say, honey? I mean, why were you so sick this morning?”
“He said it was probably migraine.”
“But you’ve never had migraine before.”
“Yeah, but they did a spinal tap and a CT scan and they didn’t find anything. So the doctor said that sometimes people develop migraine in their late thirties, and it was probably migraine. Listen, Mom, the pizza’s ready. We’ll be home in a few minutes, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
She hung up, and I went down on my knees, not praying, just wiping up eggs. She was okay. It was migraine. Nothing life-threatening about that.
Jessica looked a bit better when she got home—she’d been given painkillers and anti-nausea pills at the hospital—and she was in a hurry to eat. After she’d consumed her first slice of pizza and was reaching for her second, I commented that I was surprised she had an appetite after all she’d been through.
“I don’t really have what you’d call an appetite,” she said. “It’s more like just a big hole in my stomach. From not having a bite in the past twenty-four hours.”
“Of course.”
“Besides, now that I know there’s nothing serious wrong with me, I feel I ought to eat. To get my strength back.”
The pills she’d received had taken away her nausea, and her head wasn’t hurting. Still, after dinner she decided to go to bed early, though not before we had a little of the Mother’s Day celebration the girls wanted. “We worked all week making stuff for you,” they pleaded. What they’d made turned out to be glitter-ornamented flower vases they’d created at school and huge, sticker-bedecked cards they’d made at home.
I hugged the girls and Jessica kissed them, and then she produced a gift they’d helped her pick out for me—a necklace of jade beads—and I gave her the present I’d brought her from New York: a silky blue bathrobe. The gift-giving over, Jessica started upstairs, asking me to give the children the cake and ice cream they’d been promised and read them their bedtime stories.
“Is Mommy all better?” Rachel asked when I finished reading and shut off her lamp.
“I think so,” I said. And I did. So did Jon. So did Jessica, though she left a message on her boss’s phone that evening saying she’d been sick over the weekend and thought she’d best not come to work until Tuesday.
The following morning, Jon took the children to school while Jessica slept late. I got anxious waiting for her to appear. I was supposed to fly back to New York in the afternoon, and I wanted to see how she was so I could decide whether to keep the reservation or remain in Texas.
She didn’t come down until eleven. I offered to make her French toast, but she declined, saying, “I’m a little nauseous again.”
“Honey, I think I should cancel my flight.”
“No, Mom. It’s nothing serious. I just don’t feel like eating. Stop fussing.”
She was wearing the silky blue bathrobe, and she lay down on the couch. I sat beside her, automatically putting my palm on her forehead in that classic maternal gesture.
“No fever, Mom,” Jessica protested. “I already checked.”
“I’m glad I got you that robe,” I sighed. “Seems to have come in handy.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t I wouldn’t have gotten sick,” Jessica teased, “because I wouldn’t have had what to wear.”
Jessica loved to tease me, and the fact that she was her usual playful self made me think she was right about there being nothing serious wrong with her. It’s possible that I wanted to think this. I’d been working on a new book for the past two years, and the deadline for turning it in was fast approaching. I needed to get back to work on the manuscript if I was going to make it. Still, I was hesitant to leave. So I asked again, “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?”
“It’ll be better for me if you don’t. I’m still knocked out, and if you go, I can rest.”
“You can rest even if I stay. I won’t bother you.”
“Yes, but you’ll be here. And I’ll feel I ought to entertain you.”
“I don’t need entertaining. I’ll read a book.”
“Mom, even this conversation is tiring me out. If you leave, I can go right back to bed and rest all day. Jon is taking the kids to the library after school.”
Jessica had never been sick with anything more serious than a few stomach flus and bad colds. Her illness repertoire included nothing that hadn’t been cured by staying home from school or work and waiting until whatever was messing up her system went away. It’s the repertoire of the healthy. And she’d always been remarkably healthy.
“The girls love the library here,” she said. “They’ll be there all afternoon, and I’m sure I’ll be better by the time they get home.”
Better. Jessica’s CT scan had been read while she was at the emergency room by a radiologist who’d reported to the doctor in charge that he’d seen nothing amiss. Neither Jessica nor Jon nor I knew then that this radiologist had been wrong. As was hospital practice, Jessica’s CT scan had been reread a while later by a second radiologist who had detected a suspicious mass in her brain, which he described in his report as “a hyperdense appearance of the internal cerebral veins.” None of us knew that, given his alarming finding, this second radiologist assumed that Jessica had already been admitted to the hospital, and thus, negligently, failed to pass his report along to the ER doctor, who had already sent Jessica home. We didn’t find out any of this until much later, and, in my ignorance, I flew back to New York.
I called Jessica as soon as I arrived home. “I’m okay,” she said. “Just feeling a little bit tired.”
“And the nausea?”
“It’s back again,” she sighed. “But just a little. Jon thinks I might have a stomach virus.”
I called the next morning to see if she felt any better, but Jon said she was resting and couldn’t talk to me. Nor, he added, could he, because Rachel was throwing up. “It looks,” he groaned, “as if they’ve both got a stomach virus.”
Six hours later, I was sitting at my desk, working on my book, The Murder of Dr. Chapman, when the phone rang. I picked it up to hear Jon, his voice cracking, say, “Jessica’s sick. Very sick. She’s got a massive blood clot in her brain.”
Jon’s words took him only an instant to speak, but in that instant the orbit in which my days had been spinning gave way, and all my plans and expectations crumbled to dust.
Jessica had had a stroke. I knew virtually nothing about stroke at the time, had always assumed it was a disease of the elderly. How could my healthy 38-year-old daughter have had a stroke? Later, I would plunge into finding out as much as I could about stroke, learning that it assaults some 800,000 Americans a year, killing about 17 percent of them and damaging the lives of many who survive: leaving some partially paralyzed, some mute, some robbed of all ability to respond to the world around them. Later, I would find out that while the primary victims of stroke are, indeed, people over 65, some 10 to 15 percent of stroke victims are, like Jessica, under the age of 45. And perhaps because many ER doctors receive only minimal training in neurology, if any at all, a recent study found that one out of every seven young stroke victims is given a misdiagnosis. These patients are told that they’ve drunk too much alcohol, or that they have vertigo or an inner ear infection, or—like Jessica—that they’ve developed migraine. After which they are sent home without receiving the kind of treatment that could prevent death, or a life forever marred by impairment.
Strokes, I would also discover, result from an interruption of blood flow to the brain. The majority of interruptions are caused by a clot developing within a blood vessel either in the brain itself or in some other part of the body, generally the heart or the large arteries of the neck and upper chest. The clot clogs the vessel and, depending on whether it is in an artery or a vein, prevents blood from reaching or leaving brain tissue. If blood fails to arrive, brain tissue is deprived of its principal sustenance: oxygen. If blood can’t leave—flow freely out—there is a build-up of pressure that could crush the brain within the skull.
Jessica, I would find out, had suffered this last kind of stroke. But that all came later, long after I learned that she had come downstairs sometime between my morning call to her and Jon’s six p.m. call to me and wandered unsteadily into the laundry room. When Jon asked her why she was going there, she couldn’t say, and when he began quizzing her about simple things, she couldn’t supply answers. She couldn’t even tell him the age of their daughter Rachel, home from school because of her stomachache.
That’s when Jon had bundled Jessica and Rachel, too young to stay home alone, into the Toyota and sped to the hospital. There, Jessica’s disorientation had been so apparent that even Rachel remarked on it to the admitting nurse. “I think,” she told the nurse, “Mommy’s brain is asleep.”
Jessica was my only child. Bright and energetic, she’d gotten a job in Washington, D.C. as a staff assistant to a New York congressman after graduating from college. Two years later she began working for a small federal agency, writing and editing many of its publications. When she and Jon moved to San Francisco, she took a position with San Francisco’s Chamber of Commerce. At first she did research and organized lobbying trips, but gradually she assumed a more visible and public role, testifying at hearings, lobbying the state legislature, and being introduced to the Mayor at a press conference announcing San Francisco’s first-place ranking on a Fortune magazine list of “top cities for business” as the person whose responses to the magazine’s questionnaire made the honor happen. Deeply interested in public affairs, she’d shaped a career for herself that supported those interests and had become a woman of confidence and consequence.
This not only delighted but awed me, for she’d been uncommonly shy as a child and teenager. Extreme shyness runs in our family. My father suffered from it until he reached his mid-forties; I myself, until my late thirties. Jessica fought against—and overcame—this debilitating genetic inheritance while still in high school.
She approached the task with persistence, devouring self-help books in an effort to master techniques for overcoming shyness and, despite being afraid of emoting in front of others, accepting a role in a class production of scenes from “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
“Back then, everyone was trying to draw me out of my shell,” Jessica once wrote about the experience. “But it was only when I appeared on stage, exclaiming in my most preposterous English accent, ‘My own Ernest!… that name has a music of its own. It produces vibrations,’ that I began to discard the shell.” Afterward, she said, “Nobody would have known me as the shy teenager I was. The drama teacher not only succeeded in drawing me out of my shell, he made me feel like a star.”
She’d held onto that new confidence, taken it with her when she entered the world of work.
Jessica was also the center of my universe. Perhaps this was because all children are the center of the universe to their mothers. Or perhaps it was because when she was five years old, her father and I had separated, and Jessica and I had lived without him in that interdependent intimacy that often develops when a child and a single parent forge ahead together. We’d formed a bond that was impregnable, and it remained that way even though, after just a few years of single motherhood, I remarried.
The man I married, Max Pollack, was a professor of neuropsychology at a major university, a Renaissance man knowledgeable about art and music, literature and medicine, film and food, who had a penchant not just for weighty books but for silly things like wind-up toys. Max was home, watching television in another room, when Jon called that Tuesday evening and said Jessica had a clot in her brain. I must have cried out when Jon gave me this news, for almost at once Max picked up the extension and began firing off questions. “What hospital is she at? Has she been seen by her own doctor or just the emergency room staff? Where in her brain is the clot?”
With his scientific training, Max knew what to ask. I not only didn’t know, but couldn’t speak. My teeth were chattering so furiously I couldn’t get words out.
Still, I understood the answers.
Jessica was back in the emergency room at North Central Baptist Hospital, the same hospital where on Sunday she’d been so casually told to go home.
Her internist, Dr. Randall Vanover, practiced at a different hospital and had not yet been apprised of her situation.
As to the clot, it was in a vein in the superior sagittal sinus, which runs like a highway divider along the middle of the head, from front to back. The phone shaking in my trembling hand, I listened silently to Max and Jon, still unable to get a word out. I heard Max say, “She needs to be seen by a top specialist. Not just by emergency people. Call Vanover, find out who he recommends, and ask him if she should be transferred to his hospital.”
“Right,” I heard Jon say.
“Right away,” Max said. “And call us back as soon as you can.”
Then Max was in the room with me, wrapping a sweater around my shoulders, and my teeth were no longer chattering, and I was digging into my file drawer.
“What are you doing?” Max asked.
“Looking for something,” I whispered, my vocal chords working again—but barely. My hands were flinging files onto my desk, and Max was staring at me as if he was afraid that now that I’d found my voice I was losing my senses. “I know what I’m doing,” I muttered. “I’m looking for the name of that guy who was a dean at the medical school in San Antonio.”
Max glanced down at the clutter of files accumulating on the top of the desk and slowly began nodding his head. “Stanley Leff’s friend,” he said.
“Yes.”
When Jessica and Jon moved to San Antonio, our friend Stanley had told us that his childhood buddy, Marvin Forland, lived there. “He’s terrific,” Stanley had said. “He’ll help the kids find an internist. And a pediatrician for the girls. He’ll even help them make friends. He knows everyone in San Antonio.”
I’d passed the information along to Jessica, but she’d failed to act on Stanley’s tip.
“Oh, Mom, stop nagging,” she’d said to me only two months earlier when, for the fourth time since she’d moved, I’d asked if she’d looked up Stanley’s friend yet. “Lots of friends gave us the names of people to look up in San Antonio, but we’ve been so busy getting settled, we haven’t had time to follow through. Besides, I did call Stanley’s friend after the last time you brought it up. No one answered, and I just haven’t gotten around to trying him again.”
I tried him. I found his number, dialed it, and when a man answered, got out, “Hello. I’m Linda Wolfe. Stan Leff’s friend. You don’t know me, but. But—oh, God—something awful has happened to my daughter.”
I couldn’t go on after that, so Max took the phone from me and began to talk to this stranger, this friend of a friend, someone who didn’t know us from Adam, telling him in a rapid but calm manner what little we knew about what had happened and asking if we should fly down a consultant from New York.
Forland told Max that a New York doctor wasn’t necessary, that San Antonio had a number of highly qualified neurologists and neurosurgeons. “Who’s your daughter’s internist?” he asked. “If he’s a good man, he’ll be able to put together a team of top specialists. Give me his name and I’ll check him out and get right back to you.”
The return call came moments later. “Randy Vanover’s fine,” Forland said. “He trained with us.”
By “us” Forland meant the Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. “If your daughter can be moved, she ought to be under Vanover’s care at Northeast Baptist,” he said.
There was no time to waste. Forland said he’d call our son-in-law and personally advise him about what to do.