My years with Mara had given me quite a bit of experience with medical matters.  I was now an expert in the uses and side effects of many prescription drugs, as well as fully knowledgeable in how they interacted with each other.  Chronic headaches, migraines, blood disorders, and mental problems (both psychological and chemical in nature) were as commonplace topics to me as the weather or football scores.  And, not to be left out, intestinal problems and bowel habits had for years been an involuntary subject of focus in my amateur studies.

But now I was about to get an education in a number of other medical areas.

To begin with, after pumping her stomach, Mara's lungs were not operating at full strength.  The doctors were not exactly sure why, although they suspected it was the sedative properties of the pills she had taken.   In fact, alarmingly, that lung function seemed to be getting worse, not better, over time.  Mara would not completely come around from her drugged state.  Receiving her nourishment through an IV, we were allowed to give her ice chips, which was the only word she seemed able to speak on those occasions when she opened her eyes.  "Chips, chips" she would whisper like a mantra, but the staff would only allow us to give her a few at a time.  Otherwise, we tried to keep her lips moist with a sponge-like tip on a plastic stick, kept in a glass of cold water.  While much of this period seems like a terrible, vague nightmare to me, I do have clear visions of the three of us (and Mara's brother, who flew down to join us) giving her ice chips and wetting her lips.  I know that Mara's father flew to Texas too, but strangely I don't remember him being at the hospital even though I am certain he was there. 

The initial problem, aside from how unresponsive Mara was, was her temperature.  Mara started with a low-grade fever and it rose until is hovered around 102, sometimes higher.  Despite days of trying whatever they could think of, this fever refused to dissipate.  The doctors couldn't find any sign of infection, and they simply could find no explanation for the fever.  But it wasn't helping matters.  Things should have been going better, but they weren't.  Mara was burning up, she wasn't responding properly, she seemed basically immobile, and her lungs were not getting stronger.  They decided at one point it was necessary to insert a breathing tube because her oxygen levels were not high enough.  This didn't sound like such a terrible thing to me, until it was explained that the longer she was getting assistance with her breathing, the weaker her lungs would actually become.  Like any other part of the body, having someone else move them for you wasn't nearly as effective as being able to move them yourself.  I tried my best not to worry about the long-term aspects of this, since there was so much to be concerned about right on front of us.

I think the problems with Mara's fever went on for about a week or longer.  The doctors tried two different types of antibiotics in case the problem was an undetected internal infection, and none of them showed any result.  Finally a young doctor came up with the unorthodox idea of giving Mara some nitroglycerin medication (the type they give to heart patients).  His theory was this would open her system up and allow her body to expel the fever through her skin, since he believed the reason the fever would not come down was Mara was skin not properly opening its pores (or something like that).  Miraculously, this seemed to work, and Mara's fever finally dropped.  Things were starting to improve.

With the stabilization of her fever, Mara was become more conscious and was able to react to us when she was awake.  It was at this point that the doctors gave us some more news we didn't want to hear.  Mara's lungs were still not able to breathe properly on their own, but the breathing tube was only meant to be a temporary measure.  In order to minimize any internal damage, and to make it easier to wean her off the breathing assistance, it was necessary to remove the tube and replace it with a tracheotomy.  This didn't sound so terrible to me, until the doctors explained that they were not sure if this tracheotomy could be reversed at a later date.  In other words, Mara might have to have a tracheotomy tube (or hole) for a long period, or perhaps for the rest of her life.

While this was not the worst moment in the entire nightmare for me, it was one of them.  I don't remember Mara's mother, who was alone with me when we got this news, ever let her guard down and her emotions show more completely then right then.  Crying, choking, and looking utterly lost and helpless, she fell apart.  Obviously she was trying to build hope within herself that Mara could recover from this not just physically, but mentally, and learn to love life.  "How can we look at Mara and tell her that things are going to be worse for her now than they ever were?  She'll just want to kill herself all over again."

I didn't have an answer.  I'd been trying not to think of the future at all, because deep down I did not believe that this experience was going to convince Mara that life was suddenly worth living.  In my mind, while I wanted to imagine she'd climb out of this hole and begin to look at life in a whole new way, I figured Mara would have only one long-term response to this suicide attempt: next time she would plan it better to make sure nobody could stop her.