I knew my grandma Maria was not in good health due to smoking, but I did not realize how bad off she was. That was until the day before my family was preparing to leave for  vacation, and we learned the awful news. It was the last day of July 2015, and my grandma had to get a procedure done to test the functionality of her heart. The doctor reminded her that she was not in a situation where she needed to immediately have this test, but since she was not feeling well, she was nervous, anxious and she scheduled the procedure. My mom was on a business trip that week and she had a feeling that something was not right.  After finally catching my grandma on the phone, my mom tried to have her wait so they could both go to the Cardiologist together.  Despite the attempts to have her wait, my grandma went to her test in the morning, scared of what would happen if she waited too long. Somehow, during the procedure, two pieces of calcified plaque were knocked off the side of the walls of one of her arteries, and the calcifications traveled through her bloodstream into her brain. The two pieces then got stuck in the area of the brain that houses the communication center for speech and understanding. This caused an acute stroke in the doctor's office and she had to be flown to a hospital in Philadelphia. The Neurosurgeons were only able to extract one of the calcifications.  As a result, part of her brain has died.   We found out about her condition the day before my family and I were going on vacation.

“What are we going to do,” my dad yells from the other room.

“Well we can still go on vacation since we’ve been waiting for months, we just have to be careful and make a plan,” my mom states trying to calm him down. My grandparents also came over to discuss the situation since they go on this trip to Maryland with us too.

“This is not going to be easy, but we can still make a go of it” my grandparents nervously say. That’s when my mom came up with the idea that saved our vacation.“I can just rent a car, and drive back to the hospital since she will be heavily medicated this coming week”.  My dad then asks “Are you sure you want to do that? We can always reschedule this vacation?”  “No” she mumbles in a sad voice. “I don’t want to ruin the family vacation by cancelling; we’ll make it work ”.

The car ride down was long, slow moving, and sad, because I realized this vacation, I would not be seeing much of my mother, and I also had to worry about my grandma who may come out of this situation and may never be able to talk again.  We finally got to the hotel in Maryland, and I was feeling better until I saw the grim faces of my family. My smile slowly faded, and I went to the back of the car to help my family unload the luggage. As we walked into the hotel, I continued to tell myself that this vacation would still be fun like all of the other years. Throughout that week of vacation, I did have fun, but I also had to listen to the constant conversations about my grandma, and her condition, and what was going on. Many mornings, I woke up to hear that my mom had driven back to Philadelphia to check up on my grandma. I was quite upset, because for the past few years, I mainly spent this vacation catching up with my mom.

After the vacation, the rest of August went by fast, and school was approaching. I knew school, sports, and my grandma would put more on my parents plate, so I prepared myself to become as independent as I needed to be. Everyday through the month of September, my parents would look for a rehabilitation center where my grandma could live and continue to recover.  After a while, they found the right one very close by and right in our area.  It was Bridgeway Care Center. I continued listening to my parents talk about her, and that’s how I found out she could not formulate sentences anymore. The only thing she would say is “yeah”. She could not even laugh or smile for many months.

The first time I saw her again was around Christmas. We decided to have lunch with her on Christmas Eve day. When I got out of the car to go into the center, I felt a sudden pang of fright, not sure of what I would see when I got into the center. We walked in and were immediately greeted by a nurse wishing us a “Happy Holidays” very enthusiastically. My mom then signed us in, and she began to ask some of the nurses where she was. I ignored my mom's badgering, and decided to look around a bit. The hallway was filled with shiny Christmas decorations, and old people sitting in a wheelchair all bunched up.

After a few short minutes of walking around the center, we got to my grandmother’s room. She was sitting in a wheelchair in her room at Bridgeway, and I immediately recognized how bad the situation was. My mom was trying to hold herself together, so I went over and comforted her to make sure we did not make more of a mess of the situation. When we walked up next to her, she looked at us with a blank expression as if she did not recognize who we were, and uttered a quiet “yeah”. We then wheeled her to the cafeteria. The whole visit was mainly quiet, except for my mom who was talking to her, as if my grandma was still the same person who could talk, and show emotion.

“So Maria how are you” my mom would ask, but no answer would come. My grandma was just looking out in the distance, like she didn’t even know we were there. This type of talk continued throughout the whole visit. My dad and I both knew my mom was in denial, and we just let this one go not wanting to disrupt her.

Through the rest of the year, she was in physical therapy working on very small and basic movements, and the nurses and speech therapists were trying to help her get as much speech back as possible.

Through the year when we visited her, many things seemed to return to her. Her emotions came back, the color in her face that had been missing had come back, and she was now saying some new things, like “ok”, “where”, “I was here”, and “I am”. Unfortunately, she had lost all movement in the right side of her body, but with the other hand, she was able to color, signal, wave and she was able to use her left leg to move herself around the center for various activities and events. 

By next summer, the doctors had told us that the condition she was in now was the best she would be. The doctors informed us that she had Expressive Aphasia, which is when someone can communicate non-verbally: with hand motions, but she is not able to speak or hold a conversation. Luckily, she was able to start identifying everyone. In addition, she learned how to get up and down, but she does need help, and she also learned how to get in and out of a car. Her final stance in speaking is saying up to seven words.

When I first heard about this, I thought about it as if the glass was half empty. I used to say, I want my old grandma back; the one that would not fail to make me laugh, and always had crazy stories to tell. The stories that always made everyone nuts, but we still loved her.  She was the grandma that bought me things, and cooked for me, and sang to me. But then I realized that was selfish. I realized that’s how everyone felt. After a while, I started to think about this change as a new beginning. I now think about it in a better way.  I get to see my grandma, I draw for her, I tell her stories when I can.   Even though she can’t do all of the things she used to, we will always remember her in our hearts as the funny, creative, and talented Maria that she used to be.