At precisely two minutes to one o’clock last Tuesday, I rose from my swivel chair, padded down our speech pathology clinic’s carpeted corridor and swung open the door to the waiting room. Leaning against a brushed-steel railing was my client: a petite, sixty-something woman with a heart-breaking past. Her mixed-breed service dog was in tow.
My client smiled weakly at me, then at her furry companion. “C’mon, Winnie.”
Winnie responded to his human’s broken syllables. My client’s adoring gaze at Winnie spoke her eternal gratitude to him for for not judging her staccato speech and missing phonemes the way others had.
Winnie lumbered his low-slung, 15-year-old frame beside us. We’d taken several steps down the hall together when my client then stopped. Her eyes rolled back and she listed to her right side, bracing the wall for support. Winfred froze and looked up at her, concerned.
My client was okay, she insisted. She uprighted, steeled herself, and continued on. Several, her steps later, her arms jibbed far to her right and she slapped her open palms against the wall to break her fall. Now on her knees, she told me she’d been dizzy all morning, had a stiff neck and was short of breath. That she drove to the clinic without killing herself or anyone else was a miracle, I thought.
Still, she downplayed her symptoms and bristled at my intention to call for help: “I have a wake to go to tonight!” Winnie flung his head back and howled in protest.
“I have to agree with Winnie,” I countered. I wasn’t about to have my client’s family go to her wake.
Within seconds of my distress call, first responders arrived. Doctors and nurses enveloped my client, wrapped her in yards of biomedical cable and took vitals. Staff barraged her with questions, then furrowed their brows at the latency of her responses. “The delay was slightly longer than normal,” I piped in. “Her verbal apraxia is close to baseline.”
I held Winnie by his leash as he strained toward the foot of the gurney where his mommy lay. Winnie looked mournfully at me. I picked him up, wedged sideways between my fellow providers, and set Winnie down at his mommy’s feet. She bent her knees to make room for him.
The medical team decided my client should be admitted to the nearest hospital. As EMTs gathered her and her belongings and transferred her to their portable gurney. My client grabbed the muscled bicep of one of her rescuers.
“What about Winnie?” she asked. The EMTs and the medical team shrugged.
For the next two hours, Winnie waited by my side for his “aunt” whom I’d called to come pick him up. I figured that, after all the excitement, Winnie would have to potty so I walked him on the hospital grounds. After we returned, I propped Winnie up on a chair next to me, the one where his mommy sat. While I furiously typed my client’s incident report, Winnie draped his snout over the armrest and licked my elbow. His scraggly beard tickled, lightening my mood, if not my serious prose.
I gently rubbed Winnie’s wiry chest hairs and closed my eyes. I never had to wonder whether my mommy was coming home.
Fortunately, Winnie’s mom did.