Managing the unseen chain

My mother was the victim of medical malpractice 18 years ago after an elective, routine surgical procedure. She was 67 years old, in perfect health, and ready to embrace a new chapter in her life.

My father had passed away two years earlier after a battle with cancer. She was just emerging from mourning her lifetime partner and starting anew. She had met a boyfriend, sold our childhood home, and moved to an apartment right down the hill from my house.

With our hands full with three young children, my wife and I were overjoyed with the prospect of Grandma being right next to us — and so was Grandma.

I was a young partner at a large New York City law firm at the time, mired in a complex case for a demanding client when I got a fateful phone call rousing me out of bed very early on a Saturday morning. On the phone was the doctor I had pleaded with just hours earlier, begging him to find out what was wrong with my mother.

When I had visited my mother at the medical facility where she was recovering post-surgery, she was disoriented and clearly not herself. The procedure had taken place the day before, but things seemed chaotic and not headed in the right direction.

My mother’s surgeon, I would later find out, had jetted away for the weekend and was not in touch. Instead, an internist who had never met her before was now charged with her care.

I told the internist this was not remotely my mother’s normal condition, and I was very alarmed. I requested that they do some tests and figure out what was wrong. But unbeknownst to me, the internist never contacted the surgeon and mistakenly chalked up my mother’s condition to “sundowning” and ordered not a single blood test or workup.

Now he was on the other end of the phone in the middle of the night, apologizing profusely and telling me to come immediately to the hospital ICU as my mother had slipped into a coma. When she emerged from her coma days later, she had suffered a traumatic brain injury, and her life was permanently shattered — as was a precious piece of ours.

My mother had actually been suffering from undiagnosed hyponatremia — a condition where the body stops properly absorbing water, causing the body’s cells to swell and burst, if left untreated. It’s a condition that can happen post-surgery, particularly to women in my mother’s age demographic.

The untreated condition had caused a massive hemorrhage in my mother’s brain.

The prognosis was unclear, but there was the real possibility that she may never walk, talk, or even see again. When my mother emerged from the ICU, we had her admitted to the best special brain injury unit in New York City.

Over the course of the following months and years, we worked with specialists in brain injury to rehabilitate my mother as much as possible. Endless work with painstaking progress. She defied all the worst predictions, but she was never her full self again, and remained dependent on nurses, aides and institutions.

Luckily for my mother and for my family, my former mentor, Charles Moerdler, introduced me to the Hebrew Home in Riverdale, and my mother was able to spend 17 years as a resident there under their superb care.

Over the ensuing years after her traumatic injury, I have often reflected on the actions and inactions that led to the tragedy that hit my mother and changed her life and our family forever.

My dear mother passed away six months ago, and my reflections over this extended period have crystallized the realization that we, as human beings, are all vitally connected to each other by an unseen chain. Our interdependence is so elementary to our survival that we do not even consider it as we go about our daily lives.

But behind the veil, we depend on each other to do our jobs, to fulfill our duties faithfully and to the best of our abilities, no matter how seemingly menial or minute the task. We depend on the doctor, the nurse, the bus driver, the pilot and air traffic controller, the train driver, the engineer, the inspector — each with our very lives.

And the list goes on ad infinitum.

We depend on that other person to not recklessly run through the stop sign or the red light. To not get behind the wheel when drunk or otherwise impaired. Each time we shirk any of these responsibilities, we are breaking a link in the unseen chain.

And any time a link in the chain is broken, devastating lifelong consequences hang in the balance.

When we stop and realize how much we all depend on one another, we can also better see the essential humanity of each person and our importance to each other. Unfortunately, the current atmosphere of polarization and tribalism is blinding us to the inherent dignity of our fellow citizens and our vital interdependence. We literally need each other to survive.

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought this truth to the fore, but we keep trying to avoid its necessary conclusions. We all depend on each other, regardless of differing political views — whether it is the elevator inspector, the food service employee, the pharmaceutical scientist or the cyclist in the bike path — all of them are links in the chain, as are we all.

So, as we move through this new spring season, let us all do our part to combat these efforts to permanently divide us, to fetishize our differences. Instead, let us remember the chain of humanity that binds us together and sustains us.

The author is a trustee at RiverSpring Health and the Hebrew Home at Riverdale