I can’t remember the first time I met Dr. Patil and I don’t know what my brain looks like inside. He does.

My memory is shot these days but I remember the banana and almonds I’d eaten the morning of my accident. And how, an hour or so later after weighttraining at the gym, I got on an elliptical until my stomach started to ache. Somehow – maybe I fainted or perhaps I just slipped – I fell and cracked my head against another exercise machine. Blood from a bisected meningeal vein blossomed into a catastrophic epidural hematoma, the growing pressure rising up against the bone. The force of the fall ricocheted my brain inside its cocoon, resulting in a seizure, a contrecoup concussion, and a subdural hematoma: a second pocket of blood fizzling on the brain.

Dr. Patil knew what my skull looked like too, and the skin that lay below it — the dura mater– and how to pull away the blood that fizzled and bloomed under my cracked bone. I was lucky; I wasn’t alone, the paramedics responded, the ER doctors called him in, and he sat beside me while I faded into the unconsciousness of a fading brain. He knew what time meant while I was already gone.

A nurse yanked the wedding rings off my fingers. A resident shaved off my hair in prep. Josh blasted in, scribbling through the paperwork shoved at him; affirming, yes, he understood the risks of his wife’s emergency craniotomy, and, yes, he legally approved it. What could he do but nod when Dr. Patil warned there was no other option but this one? Josh called our parents. He stood alone in the ER room when they wheeled me out, standing beside a pool of my bright blood on the floor.

A brain injury, and the brain surgery attempting to fix the broken pieces, is immeasurably complex. The damage and those first weeks of my body’s recovery, when it was all boneless fingers and alien eyes and slug-legs, felt incomprehensible.

I was told the infamous Dr. Patil would stop by to observe the crusty-stapled craniotomy scar that arced in a question mark from my forehead to crown to ear, but I never saw him. I slept abruptly, often.

Josh was always there. He took up a cot beside me. He called the friends of friends who knew doctors and conferred with a pharmacologist cousin. He squeezed into my hospital bed and together we watched Lucille Ball’s last TV show, Here’s Lucy, a weird 70s version of her black-and-white days, this time without Desi. He brought me Samoa Girl Scout Cookies and YA novels. We whooped and giggled like long-lost twins when he’d burst into my hospital room after work.

The day before my hospital discharge, Josh slid my wedding rings back on my ring finger. I hadn’t realized they’d been gone.

It wasn’t until the surgical follow-up a few days later that I first remember meeting Dr. Patil. It was the beginning of the end of our working relationship.

He strode in, wearing a sharp grey suit and puckered blue tie, and exchanged pleasantries with Josh in a way I can only imagine Ringo and Paul meet whenever there’s a Beatles reunion: Proud. Tacit. Weary.

Dr. Patil looked at me, my eyes still pooled with burst blood vessels, and smiled, calm and satisfied. Surprisingly, it pleased me. Like I’d just been asked by the quarterback to save him a spot on the field trip bus even though I was only a freshman with raging acne.

Weird, I thought, when I smiled back at him. I don’t even know you.

He explained how he had closed my skull with titanium plates and bolts then sewn the skin together with a standard baseball stitch and staples.

“We even had a little extra time, so I took the opportunity to reattach the muscle to the inside of your skull,” he said. “Otherwise, your head might heal concave; it was only cosmetic, but, like I said, I had extra time.”

He shrugged. No big deal. Then chuckled, “I met your mother.”

“Oh. She told me,” I said, feeling a bit embarassed.

He laughed again, thinking of my mother, or maybe all the mothers he meets, maybe his mother.

“I came in to check on you but you were sleeping,” he said. “She was adamant I not wake you up.”

I laughed with him. I welled up too, visualizing her, brassy and on guard while I slept, barring even him, my neurosurgeon, my personal brain-tailor, from inspecting his own work. Josh interrupted to ask about our next follow-up.

Riding home, I gently prodded my baby-skin scalp and the stubby scabs of my swollen scar. Something pricked my finger, sharp like a tiny toothpicksword. A rogue staple? A sliver of protruding skull? Instinctively, I wished Dr. Patil could appear in the seat next to me, to assure me: not to worry, he would take care of it. Instead, I described it to Josh and he absently said we’d see if it would resolve on its own.

Over the next few months, my hair regrew. Hidden under the strands and skin my traumatic brain injury debilitated me: more seizures, migraines, memory deficiencies, panic attacks, neurofatigue, vertigo, nausea, cognitive overstimulation, depression. At home, Josh did everything he could to soften the sharp edges of each roiling day. He rubbed my back and my feet, held me as I wailed through searing migraines I thought would kill me after all. He cooked for me – quiche, soup, Mom’s lasagna, whatever I wanted – after he came home from work.

Dr. Patil saw only a bright success when he looked at me. His smiles were confident. At my next followup in June, he took me in and praised my recovery. Shaken by each day’s volatile slog, I doubted every tiny pill I took and every doctor and neurologist I saw; all but him. After all, he was my partner, we two united by my flailing brain. Dr. Patil and I had cheated death together.

Josh took me to the beach and then patiently drove us right back home as soon as the too-bright sunlight or the sounds of the seagulls crying over the fast-moving waves flooded my drunk synapses. When my moods swung into spitting anger and peaked into angst, he looked me in the eye, listened. I sobbed when I couldn’t admit to him how I missed the comforting antiseptic smell of the hospital, where on-the-clock professionals lived with the solutions to physical pain, however temporary, and where nurses dressed and undressed me and remembered everything that I couldn’t.

My last follow-up with Dr. Patil fell the week before Thanksgiving. Josh and I agreed it would be a small victory if I got myself there solo. It had been eight months since my craniotomy and the scar had healed, so the meeting was brief between us old familiars, even a little awkward, especially without my husband there to barrel through the practical questions. It was quiet.

Finally, after a pause filled with our polite smiles, Dr. Patil spoke.

“Well, I think we’re all done here,” he suggested as he rolled a little on his metal seat.

“I brought you something,” I blurted. “To say thank you.”

I shoved a box into his hands. He glanced up, surprised.

“For saving my life,” I added.

Dr. Patil knew more than anyone else about those electric mysteries so deep inside me even I didn’t know they existed, in a place so dark no one should ever see them. So I repeated myself, hoping he could truly hear me in his matching parts, before I had to leave him.

“You saved my life,” I said again.

He opened my box and inside was a black mug. In rainbow lettering, it read: YOU ROCK.

“Oh,” he said. “You’re welcome.”

Mortified at the realization of what a small gift I’d given to the man who once held the primitive roots of my life in his fingers, I almost missed how slowly he turned the mug over in his hands. But when he laughed, so did I, and he hugged me. The closest we had ever been, actually. Both of us conscious.

That done, I left, went home and fell asleep. Josh came in the door, and he and I ate dinner together at our table.

My memory is shot these days but I remember most everything about my life together with Josh. We were 19 when we met at NYU, acting in a ragged black-box interpretation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, a production as far off-Broadway as you can get and still be on the island of Manhattan. He played Sorin, a decrepit old man in a wheelchair with a youthful mocking flair almost perfectly portrayed by a sophomore without a major who was wheedled into auditioning by his roommate; I was a mute handyman named Jacob who doubled as stage crew.

Our first kiss was at the cast party in a bare South Street Seaport bar on a Sunday night in May. Stage makeup still coated our faces, fingers clutched at each other and sweaty glasses of whiskey sours. Falling in love was easy. Eight years later, we giggled through our entire first dance as husband and wife, and gleefully whispered to each other on the dance floor, “We forgot to practice this!”

It must have been a last gift of youth to assume practice is always available, like learner’s permits. And 18 months later, almost to the day, I fell and cracked open my head.

At times, all I want is Dr. Patil. Josh is not a neurosurgeon. He can’t resew the broken shards of my brain injury or stem all the blood that gushes because he’s just my partner. I miss Dr. Patil’s calm assurance that I won’t die today, we will together be okay; instead, I have Josh.

Dr. Patil was right; my brain surgery was nothing but a success. I’ll never see him again; at least I hope not. He has other patients now, has seen many other brains besides mine, performed many, many other surgeries without me.

That’s okay. I don’t need my surgeon anymore. I need Josh. He calmly assures me I won’t die today. He knows my darkest parts and I know his; Josh is wrapped around my deepest core in a different way than my titanium bolts, but he is there.

I do think about Dr. Patil. I wonder how he is, if he has a family, what he talks about at cocktail parties. He saved me, his handiwork saved Josh from becoming a widower, but it was like falling in love: it was the easy part. The long road of recovery has been the agony. Still, I have been lucky; I was never alone.

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