Positivity: ‘I Can Still Be a Mother’
I saved this for the weekend, because it’s a two-parter (Part 1 at BizzyBlog, which is, like Part 2 below, is a small excerpt, was posted Saturday morning), and each part is long — but worth every word.
Oh, and a warning — The story carries a triple-hankie alert, and if there isn’t a Pulitzer in this for Doug Most, there ought to be an investigation.
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From various places in Greater Boston:
February 17, 2008
Her limbs gone but her heart strong, Monica Sprague begins the long road back to the life she knew, driven by the desire to be there for the husband who stood by her and the daughters who need her.
HE NURSES CHANGING the dressings on Monica Sprague’s arms and legs a few times a day developed a unique routine. Most important was shielding Monica from seeing her own limbs - so they would distract her, ask her to close her eyes, or simply stand in her line of sight. And then they would slowly unwrap the cream-colored gauze slick with Vaseline from the tips of her fingers all the way up past her elbows and from the tips of her toes up past her knees. The limbs were dead, all black and shriveled, hard for anyone to look at, never mind the person whose own body they were attached to, and so once the bandages were off, a fresh coat of Vaseline was applied and fresh gauze delicately wrapped on.
“Her hands were the most horrendous I’d ever seen,” says Kate Davignon, one of the nurses in MGH’s surgical ICU who helped change Monica’s bandages. “Her fingers were the size of a child’s. They were all shriveled, small and thin. They were black through and through, the nails and the skin.”
The nurses were successful at protecting Monica from seeing her wounds, until one day when she stopped Davignon.
“I want to see,” Monica said.
It was early in September 2007. Barely one month ago, Monica had given birth to a beautiful daughter, her second, and had been so close to going home healthy to her apartment in Ayer and starting her new life with her fiance, Tony Jorge, their newborn, Sofia Maria, and Madalyn, her bubbly and precocious 9-year-old from her first marriage. But that all seemed so long ago. Now Monica, a passionate, spry, and outgoing 35-year-old woman with a perpetual smile, was slowly accepting the hard truth that a rare and mysterious flesh-eating bacteria had nearly killed her in the hours and days after her delivery at Emerson Hospital in Concord and that she was alive only because of the fast and aggressive care she got from trauma surgeons at Mass. General.
But even they were not miracle workers. The bacteria were gone from her body, but not before doing irreparable and devastating damage. The only way she was going to live, the only way she was ever going home again was if she let doctors amputate both her arms and both her legs. Those surgeries were now days away, and Davignon, all of 28 and an MGH nurse for five years, had hoped to make it to the operations without Monica ever glimpsing her dead limbs. But Monica had insisted.
“Well, they’re really pretty bad,” Davignon replied when Monica said she wanted to look. “I’m not sure if you want to see.”
“No, I want to see. I want to know what I have to work with.”
And so Davignon slowly undid the gauze on the left hand, showing Monica the back of her hand first, because it was the least damaged and because her black fingers were hidden, curled beneath the hand. But Monica realized that Davignon was being kind. The hand was like glass, hard to the touch, and the dead skin stretched up her forearm.
“Turn it around,” Monica said.
Monica glanced at the fingers, and Davignon saw a look of shock come over her face.
“I’m trying to move them,” Monica said, “and I can’t.”
And that’s when she knew. She had no choice. When her surgeon, Marc de Moya, came to check on her, she told him “I just want to get this over with.”
A few days before the surgeries, Tony went to the hospital with Sofia and Madalyn, and they all crammed into her small room. Amy Brennan, a registered nurse with three kids of her own who’d grown close to Monica, gave Madalyn some crayons to play with. But at one point, Monica blurted out to Madalyn: “You know, they are going to take my hands.” Brennan cleared everyone else from the room, leaving mother and daughter alone. A few minutes later, Madalyn came out and went straight to Brennan.
“She would die if they don’t take her arms, right?” Madalyn said.
“Yes, that’s right,” the nurse told her.
On September 7, 2007, de Moya amputated Monica’s legs below the knees. Four days later, Monica had a relaxing “spa” day at the hospital with Davignon. The sweet nurse conditioned her hair, massaged her shoulders and scalp, and talked to her about how strong Madalyn was. Then David Ring, an orthopedic surgeon, took her away and cut off her arms below the elbows.
REBECCA MURPHY, A SHORT and sassy middle-aged blonde from Brooklyn who wears colorful eyeliner and chunky, stylish jewelry, has been a clinical social worker with intensive care patients at MGH for a decade. “I can sit with patients at their most vulnerable times and allow them to express themselves,” Murphy says. “I assist them in their journey.” After seeing Monica up close in the ICU in late August, however, Murphy didn’t expect her journey to last very long. “I thought she’d die.”
Instead, on September 16, Murphy found herself helping Monica move from the ICU to the seventh floor, a fast-paced wing known as Ellison 7, with 36 beds and a staff of young, energetic therapists, where post-surgery patients begin their physical rehabilitation. It was here that Monica’s shocking story began to circulate in the hospital hallways. Some who only knew her as “that pregnant woman who had the flesh-eating disease” assumed she had died when they hadn’t heard about her for weeks. Now they learned that not only was she alive but that she was, only six weeks later, beginning her recovery, minus her arms and legs. On the day Monica moved up to Ellison 7, Roberta Dee, a case manager who helps patients line up their insurance, remembers the ICU nurse telling her that this was “the sickest patient to ever come out of the ICU and survive.”
As Murphy, Dee, and others in Ellison 7 got to know Monica, they found themselves nervously anticipating the inevitable, hysterical “Why me?” meltdown from the mother of two. But it never came. What they encountered was a determined and surprisingly cheerful woman who loved her apple juice and oatmeal and who, even in her groggiest, most medicated state, even when her surgically induced menopause reduced her to a puddle of sweat and tears, would point with her amputated arm to the bedside picture of her two daughters as her motivation to keep going. “We were all pushing for her,” one of her nurses, Vilma Pacheco, recalls. “But if the patient doesn’t want to do it, it’s like pushing a boulder uphill.”
Monica needed little pushing. Each day, her exercises grew more intense: reaching forward across her body with her arms to improve her range of motion; strengthening her core as much as possible, given that her abdominal muscles had been surgically removed; and learning to sip from a cup, feed herself, and even sign papers (like the consent form she signed with an “X” to agree to this story).
By the end of the month, Monica was making her goals clear to anyone within earshot. On September 27, she told Rebecca Murphy she wanted to change from Monica Sprague to Monica Sprague Jorge, to take the name of the man who gave her Sofia and who was there when she opened her eyes after all those surgeries.
And once that was done, she wanted to go home, to be with Tony, Madalyn, and Sofia. “I can still be a mother,” she told Murphy. “I may not have my limbs, but I can still be a care provider for them emotionally. I went in to have a baby. I am going to go home.”
And so Murphy set out to throw her patient the perfect wedding. …..
Go here for the rest of the story.
