Wow, I've been away from this forum too long.



I wanted to share something I wrote on neighboring. Here's a snippet:

Quote:

Mom's head trauma was so significant that the swelling removed all facial features. Her hair was shaved off for surgery. Her eyes were swollen shut. Two small slits stared at us where her nose should have been. Her ears were subsumed. It's hard to describe, but her head and face were as round as a basketball. "Her condition is very serious," the doctors carefully and kindly warned us. "She has bleeding from the corpus callosum into the ventricles." No one had ever survived such an injury, to their knowledge.

Thus began our long vigil. We found a hotel in walking distance to the hospital, and we took 12 hour shifts by mom's side. My brother took the day shift and I the night.

Neither of us spoke any German, and since it was 1996, there were no smart phones or internet to guide us around the city where we knew no one.