She looked at me with tired eyes. “You’d be a good one.”
Mom handled her diagnosis like a boss and actually survived.
“You’d be a good one.”
***
The doctors said the word “remission” when I was 19. It felt like someone had finally opened a window after years in a dark room.
Jason graduated from high school. I finished nursing school. Life slowly started moving forward again.
And Dad? He disappeared. We heard things here and there. Someone said he married Brittany. Someone else said that he started a consulting business. But he never called, wrote, or showed up.
Eventually, we stopped expecting him to.
And Dad? He disappeared.
Ten years after he walked out, I was the head nurse at a long-term neurological care facility.
We took the cases that most hospitals didn’t want.
Stroke patients, brain injuries, and permanent paralysis.
The kinds of patients who needed patience more than medicine.
***
Last week, I sat at the nurses’ station finishing paperwork when the social worker approached with a thick file.
She sighed as she dropped it on the desk. “New admission from the ER. Massive cerebral infarct.”
We took the cases.
I nodded. “Stroke?”
“Bad one.”
She flipped through the paperwork. “Right-side paralysis. Limited speech. Needs full-time care.”
