Louise by Louise Krug Page B

lift anywhere. Once, he gives a night nurse a ride home because her car won’t start. Often, Tom sits with Louise, rubbing her cold feet for hours.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
    L ouise is given steroids to keep the swelling of her brain down. They are making her psychotic. Warner cannot handle seeing his daughter talk to walls and laugh at chairs. Elizabeth sits beside her bed, begging her to eat a baby carrot. Louise thinks she is a supermodel, and that her stepmother is trying to sabotage her diet. Elizabeth tells Louise the carrot has zero calories, and Louise eats half. Warner reminds himself that it is all about numbers, levels, and that Louise’s episodes are normal. The professionals know what they are doing. He says this again and again to himself. It does not help. He paces up and down the hallway. He hears Louise scream that her bikini line is already waxed.
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    Days later, a doctor they have never seen injects a numbing agent into Louise’s left eyeball. He needs to sew a corner of it shut to prevent the cornea from drying out, he says. The eyelid, and the entire left side of Louise’s face, is paralyzed—the result of disturbing the seventh cranial nerve in the surgery. Not surprising, the doctor says. They went in pretty deep. There are always bound to be a few unpredicted debilitations. Louise cries out from the eyeball shot and so does Janet, in her chair across the room.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
    W hen I throw up in my hospital bed, there is a special way to clean it up. Two nurses roll me to one side of the bed, lift the sheet from the mattress, then roll me to the other side. They roll me again to tie the strings on my fresh hospital gown, and to put on a clean bottom sheet. I throw up about once an hour, because of the pain drugs, they say. One night I wake up to my mother standing over me. She says she is going back to her hotel room for the night, but before she leaves, could I please eat a granola bar? I must be so hungry, she says. It’s been days. I am not hungry, but I take a bite, just to see her smile a little. I throw it up right after she leaves.
    Wiping my face, a nurse tells me I look like an actress. The mermaid in that movie, the one with Tom Hanks. The nurse says she saw it on a rerun station. And I, with a turban of bandages, the gauze protecting an opening made with a small saw, believe her.
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    â€œThe worst is over,” everyone keeps saying. “You did it. It’s all easy street from here. Everything’s a breeze now.”
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    For some reason I think Claude is here, somewhere in the hospital, waiting to take care of me. I call him on the phone my mother smuggled into the room for me. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he says. “But I have to go.”
    â€œGo where?”
    â€œI’m at work.” He sounds irritated. I imagine him holding the phone between his chin and his shoulder, busy, tapping a pencil.
    I drop the phone to the floor and howl like I’m in pain, and a nurse comes in and gives me a shot. She scolds me for using a cell phone. The signals they receive and send can mess up the machines, she says. Everyone’s main concern is:How did I get that phone? It is not allowed.
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    When the bandages are unwound from my head it takes a long time to get to the end. The unwinding happens in circles, and it takes so long I worry that my face will come off, too.
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    I still cannot tie my shoes or put my hair in a ponytail. I still cannot feed myself or bring a cup to my mouth with my right hand because my fingers are so stiff and the hand does not move and flex fluidly. My mother has been showering me. We have a waterproof wheelchair and use soap from the dispenser. I leave my underwear on for modesty. She uses a detachable showerhead to get my hair soaked. She wears galoshes. We freeze.
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    The surgeon tells my family that my cerebellum was disturbed by the surgery and so I will have problems with