Okay. You want the other crow story I mentioned in yesterdays post?

I'm warning you that it's very sad. No really, I'm not kidding. It's a sad story.

Years ago, before The Hub and I were married and I was still working at Beneficial (which was almost bad enough in and of itself) he and and his first wife, Angela, who was my best friend had broken up. She was living with a guy named Bob down in Hanover, and in April of that year they were both in a small plane crash. Bob died at once, but Angela's life was saved by surgeons at Hopkins Hospital. And for a time it looked like she might recover.....

I mean REALLY recover, with possibly only a minimal type of brain damage. Because although she had suffered a pretty severe blow to the head, it was to the front of her head. Now, nobody thinks it's easy to make it without all of your higher brain functions but there are people who do....people who re-learn all kinds of things, and have a quality of life. And, whatever else anybody has to say about Bob, probably the last act of his life was to try to protect her from injury, though he might have known that in sheilding her he was worsening his own chances of survival.

The point is that, in most cases, if people are going to experience swelling of the brain, which leads to damage all over the brain, they experience it shortly after the accident. But in Angela's case, days and days went by and she did not. She had other, really horrific injuries to other parts of her body and she was on a respirator so she was being kept in a medically induced coma. But it became clear that she could be weaned off of the respirator and there began to be optomistic talk about her recovering. The intracranial pressure - the pressure inside her skull was being monitored in case swelling did begin, but, caught quickly enough a shunt could be put in to alleviate it.

Though I was terribly shocked by all of this, I was beginning to have a great deal of hope. All of us, her friends and family, were.

I promise, I'm getting to the crow.

Naturally, because I was not a blood relation to Angie and I had to support myself I kept working and just went down to visit every night after work. I used to pick up her mail from Bob's best friend and deliver it to her brother, to whom, by that time The Hub had signed over Angela's medical and legal powers of attorney. I was acting as this weird sort of buffer between Bob's people and The Hub's people...those were very strange days on a lot of levels.

One day while I was at work I was doing some mind numbingly inane task. Suddenly I heard, very clearly Angela say to me: "You'll have to go on without me." I was not as surprised as you'd think I'd be. I'm not saying that I wasn't surprised at all, but Angie and I were each known for picking up a ringing phone and saying things like, " So what time do you want to meet tomorrow?" or "What did he do now?" instead of "hello". I wasn't happy that I was hearing voices, but since it was the only time it ever happened, before or since, and I WAS very stressed out and not sleeping well.....Well, I was much, much more upset about the content of the message than I was the means of delivery.

"I'm going over to 7-11 to get a coke. You want anything?" I said calmly to my boss.

"Little early for you, isn't it?" he remarked, because I was in the habit of getting a soda every day but usually not until the afternoon and it was about 11:00 in the morning. "Get me a snickers, will you?"

I nodded and bolted for the 7-11 where I sat down on the curb and tried to calm down. It doesn't mean anything. You're just tired. Go on and get your soda, you can call the hospital or somebody when you get back. There's no reason to think anything is wrong. All the news has been good, getting better. She'll be fine, she'll be fine, she'll be fine.

I paid for the soda and the candy. It was an overcast day and there had been some rain. There was a breeze but it wasn't windy. I'd picked up a Snapple for my boss as well, because he always had one with his Snickers, he'd just forgotten to ask for it, and I was walking back accross the parking lot with my hands full. I felt a little distracted and weird and was making some effort to avoid the puddles (in spite of the back of my skirt being damp) when I looked up and saw, right at eye level, a crow flying directly towards me at a pretty good clip.

This surprised me very much, and so I did what I always do when I'm surprised which is stand still. The crow let out a tremendous cry. I know it said what crows say, which is "Caw!" but for all the world it sounded to me like "Go ON!" and as it passed me the very tip of its wing touched my cheek.

It was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had in my life. And that's saying something.

The day seemed to go on forever, and each time I couldn't reach anybody at the hospital, or any place else, my anxiety rose. I kept telling myself that neither the first nor the second experience....or were they really just one experience? - meant anything. I was tired. The crow was just off course. Crows can't talk.

By the time I got to the hospital I was practically running through the lobby. The main lobby, I remember was under construction, and so I had to come in through the lobby that served the entrance children usually used and there were all these stuffed animals in cages, as if at a zoo, which made the surreal situation of the hospital even more bizarre. I saw Bob's best friend walking towards me (with the mail) and as I raised my hand in greeting he shook his head. And then I ran full tilt, and he grasped my arms in case I might fall and said, "Her brain is swelling and they can't get a doctor to stop it."

"What do you mean they can't get a doctor? This is Hopkins Effing Hospital!" Only I didn't say "effing".

"It has to be her neurologist to give the order for the shunt. They all know what to do, they just can't do it. Her brother is there, he put a call in to, you know, her ex.. It's that heavy set guy we met. Dr. Z. Nobody can seem to reach him or else hasn't called back."

"How bad is the pressure?" I asked as we made the elevator.

He said a number. I don't remember, now what the number was, but at the time I knew exactly what it meant. Nothing good, it was way too high, "Oh Jesus!" I blurted out, "How long has it been that bad? I mean,do you know?"

He nodded. "It started going up when I got here about 11:00 in the morning.

I don't remember what all happened next, except for that when Angie's nurse got off at 9:00 that evening, she sat with us in the waiting room, waiting for Dr. Z. to show up, which he had promised to do, declining to give instructions over the phone. Though she was very professional and never said anything she ought not to have said, every one of us knew what was going on. She radiated a kind of anger and frustration, and I knew that she wanted to be there to make sure he wasn't going to squirm out of our questions. I think she wanted to look into that guy's eyes when he told us that Angela's chances of ever coming out of her coma had dropped less than 2%.

Dr. Z. finally did show up, strolling in about 9:30 or so. At about 9:45 he sat down on the vinyl chairs with us and said that he didn't see what good it would do to put a shunt in now: the damage had already been done. Though of course, he could do it, if we wanted. It took all of my self control to not scream at him that he was a murderer. My fists were actually clenched, and Angie's nurse turned away because she started to cry. I don't even remember if they did put a shunt in.

To this day, I've never been able to decide if Dr. Z. was incompetant or if he was "playing God". Did he just decide that Angie wouldn't have had much of a quality of life if she did recover or if he just decided it wasn'tworth it to call back, or if he just didn't give a shit.I guess he has to answer to a higher authority, or maybe even to Angie herself. Or maybe to a harsh voiced black winged bird: The Raven of Native American Lore.

All I know for sure is that it turned out Angela was right: I did have to go on without her. And though it hasn't been easy, in honor of her memory, I have.