By the next morning, we had a name for what was happening: a subdural hematoma, a collection of blood pressing against my sweetie’s brain.
At 6am, the hospital called and told me I needed to come right away. Things had changed during the night, and what they had been monitoring had become an emergency. They needed me there to sign papers, make decisions, and consent to surgery.
I was there within minutes.
I was concerned, of course, but I was also relieved that something concrete was finally happening. The uncertainty of the night before had been its own kind of torment. Now there was a plan, doctors who knew what they were looking at, and something I could actually do, even if that something was simply saying yes.
A few days earlier, I had done a reading for myself. I had seen no sadness or loss there, and I held onto that—not as a guarantee that everything would unfold exactly as I wanted, but as a quiet reassurance that I didn’t need to spiral into fear. Whatever came next, we would meet it.
That trust mattered because I spend much of my life working in healing spaces, listening to intuition, energy, and the wisdom of the body. In that moment, healing looked different. It looked like recognizing that these doctors knew things I did not. It looked like asking questions when I needed to, listening carefully to the answers, and trusting the team we had been given.
I could feel the possibility that life might look different after this. Maybe he would need a lot of care. Maybe recovery would be long. Those thoughts came, but they didn’t take possession of me. If that was what came, then we would meet that too.
I was strong…mostly.
In true Pisces fashion, I could move from calm certainty to tears and back again with astonishing efficiency. Sometimes the tears came because I could feel what my sweetie was going through. He had been confused, restrained, frightened, and unable to understand what was happening around him.
Then there were the other tears, the ones that came simply because people were kind.
Once people began to understand what was happening, love seemed to arrive from every direction. Word traveled quickly through family, friends, and the musician grapevine, and suddenly there were messages everywhere. People offered to help with the dogs, bring food, take care of things at the house, or simply be available if we needed them. Some prayed. Some sent love in whatever form made sense to them. Some simply checked in. The language varied, but the intention underneath it was the same: You are not alone.
It was remarkable how quickly that web formed. While surgeons were caring for his brain, other people were quietly reaching toward the edges of our life and asking where they could help hold it, and that kindness brought tears too.
The first surgery went forward, and afterward he came back into the ICU on a ventilator. Tubes, machines, monitors, the steady business of keeping a body safe while it heals—none of it felt abstract anymore.
I watched his son watching his father, and I could see the concern on his face, especially about what the brain injury might mean. He has his own experience loving and caring for someone with special needs, so I knew his mind could travel to places mine might not. We still didn’t know what recovery would look like.
So we waited.
The doctors decided to postpone the second surgery until the following morning, which meant another night of living inside that strange suspended world of the ICU, where time seems to behave differently.
At some point that evening, Sweetie opened his eyes and we both moved to his side.
I could tell he was trying to ask what had happened. I told him he’d had a brain bleed, a subdural hematoma, and that he had needed surgery. His son said, “You’ve had an accident, Dad.”
Sweetie looked at us, processing the information, and simply said, “Wow.”
Then again. “Wow.”
And once more. “Wow.”
That was all he had, and somehow it was enough. They increased his sedation and he drifted back down, and we returned to waiting.
The second surgery was scheduled for seven the next morning. It took longer than I expected, and afterward he remained on the breathing tube for several more hours. As he became more aware, he kept trying to write questions to me, but I couldn’t understand his handwriting. I could see the frustration in him, and I wanted so badly to answer whatever he was asking.
Still, I trusted that we would get there. The tube would come out, we would talk, and little by little we would learn what had changed and what had stayed. Whatever came after that, we would meet it together.
Throughout those hours, love kept arriving. Messages. Offers. Check-ins. People asking how he was, how I was, whether there was something they could carry for us. I began to understand that while I had thought my job was to stay beside him, other people had quietly decided their job was to stay beside us.
There is a strange kind of grace in being unable to control what is happening. You discover what remains when control is taken away: presence, trust, kindness.
And sometimes, when life narrows to one hospital room and one person you love more than you can explain, you look up and realize that you are being held by far more hands than you knew were there.
I didn’t know what the next day would bring or what recovery would ask of him, of me, or of our family. I only knew that my sweetie was still here, that extraordinarily capable people were caring for him, and that love had begun gathering around us from every direction.
For the moment, that was enough.