Not that I could think about anyone else right now. There’s a flat-screen TV playing sitcom reruns on TBS and a spread of magazines, and I wonder who could sit here and watch Seinfeld or read about Selena Gomez’s new eyebrow shape without wanting to break shit and start wailing. The nurse at the desk looks like she’s seen it all; she looks like that Munch painting, The Scream, only with bangs. We’ve been here an hour. Cass has been here an hour and forty-five minutes. Her doctor, Dr. Chowdhury, who wears green scrubs and has a handsome, angular face with a prominent forehead vein, told me I can’t see her until she stabilizes. She seized for twenty minutes, they’re guessing, from the time she fell to the time she responded to the dextrose solution they gave her in the ambulance. They don’t know how long her brain was without oxygen—probably not long, they think, but combined with the overactivity from the seizure (“like an electrical storm”) and the mild concussion, it could cause lasting side effects.
