In All This Rain

1

The neighbor dowsed our yard with a peach branch, watching it bend when he walked on water. Dad and I followed a few feet behind, out of his path. It was a science, well witching. He could find springs too.

2

The radiologist located, with a CAT scan, the area where blood had pooled in my dad’s brain. Couldn’t confirm its source, though.

An attending, pointing out the pear-shaped bleed, wanted to get in there and find the hemorrhaging vessel.

“We drill a burr hole to relieve the pressure,” he said. “What if you miss the spot?”

“We usually don’t.”

He wore cowboy boots and winked at the interns.

3

My husband digs dirt for a living. Excavating foundations, creating ditches for utility lines, building driveways and motocross tracks, specialty jobs like grading bocce-ball courts. But his meat-and-potatoes work centers around water runoff, water retention, diversion ditches, and conveyance areas. Good to know how to find water’s source for this work. Sometimes he, too, uses a peach branch.

It’s best to start digging after rain, to eyeball the runoff, the saturated areas. But it’s difficult to get the machines in during those swampy days. He likes to mark areas with flags and return when things are dried up; otherwise, too much land’s disturbed. A backhoe comes in at nine tons, an excavator at thirteen tons. Just hauling in material to line the ditches—gravel, riprap, limestone—can get a tri-axle good and stuck.

My dad, a retired teamster, hauled for my husband only on dry days, solid ground. Didn’t like the embarrassment of getting stuck, didn’t like water pooling in his tracks.

4

The ventricles are fluid-filled areas in the center of the brain. A bleed can cause so much edema in the first ninety-six hours that the drains from these ventricles get squeezed off, herniate. Neurologists sometimes place extraventricular drains to relieve hydrocephalus, to help the cerebrospinal fluid flow normally again. This procedure is completed bedside with local anesthesia and a “twist drill.” It’s called a “freehand pass.” Once the patient’s hair is clipped away and the scalp is cleaned with Betadine, the surgeon bores a hole through the cranium and feeds a catheter through the pia and dura layers, advancing it “no more than seven centimeters.” The medical team knows they’ve hit the spot when they see the fluid flowing through the catheter.

5

Too much rain, too quickly, is like having no rain at all, my husband says. Diversions help slow the water down, or else it overwhelms the streams. The water table for shallow wells can get contaminated.

It’s good to have a wet-weather pond, a place to collect rainwater. Farmers like diversion ditches for their fields. They need the water, but they need it slow and steady, not all in a rush. Runoff carries all the seed to the end of the field.

A hard, heavy rain creates its own pathways. You can try to predict where it will run and pool, but it’s not an exact science, and you can’t see the damage right away. That’s why we’ve been having these hill slides, trees uprooting and falling down without warning. The ground can’t take any more.

6

Hippocrates described the phenomenon of sudden paralysis as apoplexy, from the Greek word meaning “struck down with violence.”

Oswaldus Gabelhouer, in The Boock of Physicke (1599), suggests “Cinnamome water for the stroke of God’s hande.”

The Hippocratic Writings states, “It is impossible to cure a severe attack of apoplexy and no easy matter to cure a mild one.”

Our answer to drilling into Dad’s skull: No.

7

After the stroke, Dad had complete left-side deficits. His left limbs wouldn’t work. He would need extensive rehab.

“The brain will reroute messages if one even thinks about moving,” a physical therapist explained.

He said, “Look at the faucet and think about turning it off with your left hand.”

My dad tried. Nothing. No movement.

“Also, we can use mirrors to make the brain relearn.”

Bunch a bullshit, Dad would have said, but his speech wasn’t back yet. Or maybe he believed him. Maybe I was the one saying “bullshit.”

8

Also from Hippocrates: “The diseases usually peculiar to rainy periods are chronic fevers, diarrhea, gangrene, epilepsy, sore throats, and apoplexy.”

9

Dad would never drink city water. “Piss and shit mixed in there.” When I was small, I’d go along with him to the spring near the sand and gravel plant once a week. After he finished filling up the jugs, he’d lean down and drink straight from the pipe. Sometimes he wouldn’t even wipe his mouth.

When Dad could speak again, he asked for nothing but water. We had to add thickening powders so he didn’t choke.

“There are three levels of thickness,” the doctor explained, “pud- ding-thick, honey-thick, nectar-thick. Your dad should do fine with nectar-thick.”

“Spring water,” Dad insisted when we offered him the liquid my husband said looked a little like slurry.

“Spring water,” he said, every day, reaching out his good hand.

I stirred in the powder, shaking my head, explaining how we didn’t want it to go down the wrong pipe. He shook his head back at me.

10

A decade since the stroke, my dad’s still unable to stand up, turn over, lift anything with his left hand, feed himself without spilling. When his eyes water, he only wipes the right.

I usually take my husband along for visits. Dad likes to hear about the jobs, how the equipment’s running, if anything’s broken down. When my husband talks runoff and dirt, Dad listens. He’s intrigued by placing culverts, building the breastwork of ponds, the keys, the emergency spillways.

I try to forget that someday, when Dad dies—whether from another stroke or some other hit—my husband will likely dig his grave.

Dad was along many times when they hit underground springs while excavating grave holes and readying the spaces for precast concrete vaults. He often joked, “Make sure to seal my vault tight. I want to stay nice and dry.”

But now I wonder if he feels the same. I wonder if he’d mind if water infiltrated the vault and even swept the casket and him away, if he’d somehow continue on, moving, flowing, as part of this underground sea, these streams and creeks, the runoff, the puddles, the rain.

note: This essay’s title is the same as that of a collection of poetry (LSU Press, 1980) by John Stone, a physician and poet. Also, the quoted information in section 4 is from “External Ventricular Drains: Management and Complications,” by Rajanandini Muralidharan, an article from the 2015 volume of Surgical Neurology International.

Read more from Issue 15.2.