A Mother's Prayer

Doctors held out little hope for her son’s full recovery from a devastating brain hemorrhage

- Amy Roost

I walked alongside the gurney, gripping my 22-year-old son’s hand. The orderly stopped me at the operating room doors. “This is as far as you can go,” she said. I leaned over and kissed Spencer’s forehead. “I love you, Spoon.”

“I love you too,” he whispered back. I watched helplessly as he was wheeled away from me. Would I ever see my boy alive again?

Four weeks earlier, my strapping mountain biker son had suffered a stroke while he was camping with friends in Canada. He ended up being airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, and I arrived from my home in San Diego the next morning. Spencer was asleep when I got there, his limbs anchored to the bed rails by restraints. When I touched his cheek, his eyes opened but he gave no sign of recognition.

That afternoon, Spencer would intermittently wake and talk gibberish. “I’m going to buy a goat farm,” he announced to his dad, Steve, who’d driven from Bellingham, Washington. Steve and I had divorced years ago. I laughed nervously at these outbursts, stroking Spencer’s long curly locks until he drifted back to sleep. Then without warning, he jerked upright, pulled free of his restraints and ripped out his IV. He was having a seizure. It took four of us to hold him down, the nurse shouting for a crash cart. Dr. Louis Kim, Spencer’s neurosurgeon, arrived and told us that Spencer had suffered a second cerebral hemorrhage. After an emergency craniotomy to relieve pressure caused by the bleeding in his brain, Spencer fell into a coma.