Page 12 of The Doctor's Simple Life

“Are you done with this, sweetheart?” she asks, standing up to collect my plate.

“Yes, thank you. It was delicious, as always.”

“Always the best for my little girl.”

“I’m not that little anymore, Gramma,” I say with a chuckle.

She fixes me with a blazing look, one that could be mistaken for something negative if I knew her less well. “You’ll always be my little girl to me.”

She picks up my plate, stacks it on hers, and takes it over to the sink. I pull up my phone to check my messages.

And that’s when I hear the biggest shattering noise I’ve ever heard.

I drop my phone to the table and gasp, my hand flying to my mouth. “Gramma?” I scramble to my feet, the chair tipping backward as I rush to her, dropping to my knees beside her.

Broken ceramic and tomato sauce lie like a halo around her head, and her arms twitch, her eyes rolled back in her skull. “Oh, God,” I whisper to myself. “Oh, God, Gramma, please be okay.”

Quickly, I roll her into the recovery position, trying my best not to panic. This is the kind of thing I’ve been trained for, emergency response. It looks to me like she’s having a seizure, so I quickly grab a bunch of kitchen towels from the drawer and bundle them under her head.

Then count the agonizingly slow seconds.

The facts. I have to focus on facts right now.

First fact: the longer a seizure goes on, the more dangerous it is. That’s why I’m counting.

Second fact: make sure that the area around a person having a seizure is clear. This is to make sure there’s nothing they can hurt themselves on. If Gramma hurts herself and it’s my fault, I’ll never forgive myself.

Third fact: you’re not supposed to restrain someone mid-seizure. You have to make sure they’re safe, but even if they start rolling around on the floor, you have to let them. You don’t want them to get hurt.

Watching is the worst part.

I want to reach down and hold her, shake her, take her hand, make sure everything’s okay. But I don’t. I just sit with her, watching the clock on the oven, tick, tick, tick. The whole thing only lasts a few seconds, but it feels like an eternity.

I can keep calm in a crisis. It’s part of my job. But keeping calm doesn’t mean that I haven’t been sitting here thinking the whole time. What if this is when I finally lose her? What if this is the moment when I’m never going to see her again?

When she comes round, I almost cry with relief. “Gramma, are you okay?” I ask.

She mumbles something in response, and I take her hand. “Squeeze once for yes if you can’t talk. Do you know where you are?”

Squeeze.

“Do you know what your name is?”

Squeeze.

“Do you know what happened?”

“I think so,” she croaks. “I was standing here one second, and the next I was on the floor.”

“Are you still dizzy?” I ask.

“A little. But not as much.”

“All right.” I breathe a sigh of relief.

She shuffles as if she’s about to get up, and I shake my head firmly. “I need you to promise me you’re not going to move. I don’t want you to stand up and then fall over and hurt yourself even more, okay? For a change, just listen to me as your doctor, not as your granddaughter.”

She squeezes my hand hard. “Yes, doctor. But where are you going?”

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