Forty-Three Minutes

***This story is inspired by true events.***

Author’s Note: I live every day with a traumatic brain injury. My hands don’t work very well, in fact I’m much more left hand dominant after doing most of everything for the first 40-ish years of my life with my right hand. My speech is slow and quiet, so I choose not to speak unless I absolutely have to. If we go out, I’m in a wheelchair because I don’t walk very well. However, my brain works just fine, which makes the other issues all the more frustrating. So, without further ado, here’s my second chance/fresh start story.

The first thing I remember is the ceiling—cracked, beige, swimming in and out of focus like a half-developed photograph. Then the pain. Not the sharp, immediate kind, but a dull ache that seemed to radiate from my bones. My husband’s voice cut through the fog: “She squeezed my hand. Did you see that?”

But let me rewind.

Day 1:

“Her heart stopped,” the doctor said. My husband, Aaron, sat in a bereavement room—a detail he only recognized because he’d spent years memorizing hospital Wi-Fi networks for work. For 43 minutes, my pulse flatlined. CPR. Blood thinners. A ventilator. They told him to expect brain damage, if I woke up at all.

I didn’t know any of this, of course. I was somewhere else: a void where time collapsed, where the beep-beep of ICU monitors and the hiss of oxygen tanks couldn’t reach.

Day 3:

The world was a shipwreck. Voices sank through the dark…doctors speaking of a pulmonary embolism, Aaron’s shaky exhales, the whir of a ventilator counting time. I drifted, unmoored.

They said sedation would erase everything, but fragments seeped in:

· The prick of a needle in my inner elbow.

· A nurse humming “Here Comes the Sun” while adjusting my tubes.

· Aaron’s voice, frayed at the edges, reading aloud from a National Geographic article about monarch migrations.

My eldest sons flew in from Texas. I don’t remember Danny (my oldest) holding my limp hand, but later, he’d tell me he swore he felt a tremor when he said, “Fight, Mama.”

Day 8:

They discussed my brain like a broken appliance. Hypoxic injury. Frontal lobe. Uncertain prognosis.

Aaron sat vigil, translating the storm into calm:

“They’re just covering their asses,” he told my unhearing ears. “You’ve survived worse.”

A new tube snaked into my nose. My right hand lay cold and waxen on the sheet. A physical therapist lifted it, manipulated my fingers into a fist, released. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” she said, as if I were a project due Friday.

Aaron pressed his lips to my temple, a ritual he’d begun on Day 1. I didn’t stir.

But somewhere, in the deep marrow where consciousness ends and instinct begins, a spark hissed:

Not yet.

Day 10:

The ventilation tube finally came out. My first word: “Hi.” Simple, absurd, a greeting to a world I’d almost left. My body felt foreign, like a marionette with severed strings. I could blink. Nod. Cry. My right side refused to cooperate, as if my brain had erased its map. “Damage,” the MRI said. “We don’t know,” the neurologist echoed.

Aaron brought hockey games. The Office. Pudding. He joked about the ICU’s terrible sandwiches. I stared at my hands, willing them to move, while he pretended not to notice.

Day 13:

My sons’ faces pixelated on the tablet screen. “Mama,” Todd said, and I felt the word in my ribs, a vibration older than breath. “I… love… you.” The sentence stumbled out, clumsy and alive.

Later, Aaron fed me applesauce. I gagged, furious at the betrayal of my own throat. “Easy,” he said, but I shook my head—no. Easy wasn’t the point. Survival isn’t soft.

We watched The Philadelphia Story. When Katherine Hepburn wept, I cried too, salt and celluloid healing. Aaron traced the tear with his pinkie. “Proof you’re still a sap,” he said. My laugh sounded like a cough. It counted.

Day 15:

The therapist’s clipboard tapped a staccato rhythm against her thigh. “Again.”

My legs shook—not the fine tremors of before, but the raw burn of muscle memory. Ten presses. Each one a siege against gravity, against the part of my brain that still whispered you’re made of glass now. Aaron hovered by the door, pretending to check his phone. I knew he was counting.

When I finished, the therapist grinned. “Most patients take weeks to hit ten unassisted.”

I sucked oxygen through the nasal cannula, smug. “Exponentially… ahead of schedule.” The word spilled out polished, defiant, a middle finger to the MRI’s inkblot prophecies.

Later, Aaron kneaded the knots from my calves. “Bad-ass,” he murmured, echoing my morning boast to the neurology team.

I flexed my toes, willing them to curl. Almost. “Adjective or noun?”

“Verbiage pending.” His thumb found the scar behind my knee—a relic from a ice skating adventure almost 20 years earlier.

The room smelled of antiseptic and the blueberry smoothie he’d smuggled past the nurses. I sipped it slowly, sweetness sharp against the metallic aftertaste of effort. Progress wasn’t a straight line. But today, it tasted like triumph.

Day 17:

The rehab floor smelled like lemons, not antiseptic. Quiet, save for the distant clatter of dishes. “Progress,” the nurse said, as if silence alone could mend me.

I touched my nose. A small triumph, but Aaron whooped like I’d scaled a mountain. He smuggled in a chocolate bar, melted in his pocket. “Shhh,” he said, as I nibbled, sticky and furtive. For the first time in weeks, I slept without dreaming of vents or voids.

Day 20:

My stomach revolted. No food, just IV drips and the acidic tang of regret. “Setbacks happen,” the doctor said. Aaron glared.

But my fingers—left ones—drummed the bedrail. Morse code for screw this. He taught me to grip a pen, my scrawl a child’s. We wrote curses about Dr. Downer, then burned the paper in the sink. The smoke alarm didn’t go off. A tiny rebellion, but ours.

Day 22:

I finally stood on my own.

Not gracefully (my legs trembled, and two therapists held my hips) but I stood. The feeding tube was gone. My left hand could lift a fork. Progress was measured in teaspoons: a finger twitch, a whispered sentence, a laugh at Aaron’s terrible jokes. “Baby steps,” the nurses said. God, how I’d grown to hate that phrase.

Day 31:

The floor tiles were cold. Real. Not the phantom ground I’d tread in dreams.

Aaron arrived to find me orbiting the parallel bars: no hands, no harness, just my own traitorous legs remembering their purpose. He froze in the doorway, keys jangling in his fist. For three heartbeats, he stared at this new ghost of me: upright, moving, alive in a way monitors couldn’t measure.

“Julie?” he said, and I turned.

His face did the thing. The crumple-smile, the wet-eyed blink and I grinned so wide my cheeks ached. Later, he’d claim I levitated. The truth was much simpler: ten steps, then twenty, then the weight of his arms around me as I whispered, “Told you I’d beat the over/under.”

Day 39:

Concrete. Sun-warmed, cracked, holy.

I paced the facility’s parking lot like a prisoner testing fences. Left foot. Right foot. Breathe. The therapists hovered, but I didn’t fall. Not when folding into the replica front seat of a car they had in the rehab room (a ballet of hips and hope). Not on the stairs (eight steps, each a swallowed curse). Not even when my knee buckled and I rolled to the floor, laughing at the ceiling.

“You’re supposed to use the call button!” a nurse scolded as I hauled myself up using a chair.

Aaron snapped a photo. Caption: Gravity 0, Julie 1.

That night, I packed my toothbrush. Just in case.

Day 43:

Home smelled like coffee and cat fur.

No more puréed carrots. No more 5 a.m. vitals check. Just our brand new bed, my bookshelves dusty with neglect, and two long-haired cats yowling their displeasure at my absence.

Aaron carried me over the threshold, though I could’ve walked. Tradition, he said. The cats wove figure-eights through our legs as he lowered me onto the couch.

“Menu’s whatever you want,” he said, waving at the kitchen like a game show host. I chose peanut butter toast. And tacos.

When the nightmares came—the void, the ventilator’s hiss—I reached out. His hand found mine in the dark.

43 days.

One for every minute I’d been gone.

Five Years Later:

Survival isn’t the crescendo I expected. There’s no orchestral swell when I tie my shoes. No applause when I walk unaided.

What there is:

· The weight of Aaron’s hand in mine, steady as a heartbeat.

· The way sunlight slants through our kitchen window at 7 a.m., ordinary and miraculous.

· The smell of rain after a storm, sharp and green, a reminder that 43 minutes of heart-stopping silence didn’t get the final word.

I don’t believe in fate. But I do believe in the stubbornness of a body that forgot how to breathe but clawed its way back anyway.

My Second Chance:

It’s not a clean slate. My hands don’t work properly. I still can’t speak well. I tire easily. Some nights, I dream of the void, cold, infinite, and wake gasping.

Here’s the secret they don’t tell you about fresh starts: they’re messy. They’re relearning your body, your voice, your place in a world that kept spinning without you. They’re Aaron’s laugh when I beat him at Scrabble last week, my sons’ voices on the phone, the way my lungs burn now when I walk uphill: a sensation I once cursed but today cherish.

Alive. Alive. Alive.

It’s not poetic. It’s better.

For anyone who’s fought for a second breath: the mundane is magic.