Page 115 of The Fall

Fifty-Seven

In the morning, a neurosurgeon, Dr. Khatri, enters my hospital room with a file tucked under his arm.

He’s tall with gray-streaked hair and glasses perched halfway down his nose.

His face gives nothing away; it’s like trying to decipher a blank page.

He has the steadiness of a man used to delivering life-altering news.

Blair sits up straighter beside me, his hand closing over mine. My father rises from his chair.

“We have your results,” he says, tapping the file against his palm. “I’d like to discuss them with you and your family.” He glances toward Blair and my father, who’ve been camped out in my room since dawn. “Dr. Lin will be joining us shortly.”

If I were fine, wouldn’t he tell me?

No one speaks as he turns to the computer and pulls up my records, including a series of brain scans that he casts to the monitor over my bed. My brain looks ghostly gray-blue with scattered bright spots that mean nothing to me.

Dr. Lin slips in, nodding to us before joining Dr. Khatri. They trade a few hushed words while my heart hammers, and before either can speak, I blurt out, “What’s wrong with me?”

Dr. Khatri moves to the monitor. “We’ve found a small lesion here, on your right temporal lobe.” His finger traces a bright spot on the scan. “This condition,” he continues, “is called temporal lobe epilepsy.”

The three words land in the sterile air of the room. My thoughts scatter, leaving only the echo of his voice. Epilepsy.

“I don’t understand,” my father says. “Wouldn’t we have known if Torey had epilepsy? There would have been seizures.”

“Not necessarily. TLE often manifests in less obvious ways than through convulsive seizures most people associate with epilepsy. Focal aware seizures are one hallmark of TLE, which can cause a variety of symptoms.”

“What symptoms?” Blair asks, his voice tight.

“They often begin subtly,” Dr. Lin says.

“Headaches. Dizziness. Sometimes intense emotional experiences. Often, when a focal aware seizure occurs, the electrical impulses of the brain will create experiences that seem indistinguishable from reality. Patients with TLE describe familiarity with the unfamiliar, or complex experiences that have only taken place within their mind, during a seizure. And sometimes,” she continues, “patients experience more complex hallucinations, such as fully-formed memories of events that never happened.”

The sounds in the room drop away, leaving only Dr. Lin’s last words in the air. Fully-formed memories of events that never happened.

“To patients, the experience is completely real,” Dr. Khatri says.

I stare at Blair and my hands, clasped together on top of my blanket. A wave of light-headedness blurs my vision, and I panic. Is this— Another one? Happening right now? I force my eyes from our hands to his face, searching.

Was everything… misfiring synapses? Did a piece of damaged tissue lead me to Blair? Did these seizures build a world so real I almost died for it?

A muscle works in Blair’s jaw, a constant, small motion that betrays him.

He’s crumbling from the inside out, trying to hold himself together for me. Each breath he takes, each careful word he doesn’t say, screams louder than if he’d shattered completely. His terror becomes mine, doubled and reflected back.

“Blair…”

His eyes find mine, and for a split second, his mask slips. He’s drowning too.

“We also,” Dr. Khatri continues, oblivious to the earthquakes moving through me and pulling up another scan. “Found evidence of this lesion in your previous scans from Vancouver, after your first major concussion last year.”

I stop breathing. “What?”

“This is from last year,” he says, tapping a specific spot on my brain.

“And this is from when you were admitted three nights ago.” He toggles between the two images.

On the first, there is almost nothing, barely a faint smudge, a whisper of gray against gray.

On the second, the smudge is a defined shape.

“The lesion was nascent then, nearly impossible to detect. But now it’s grown.”

I stare at the two images, trying to process what he’s saying. My mind keeps replaying Dr. Khatri’s words: events that never happened.

“In hindsight, this explains a lot, Torey.” Dr. Lin’s voice is so gentle. “We should have had you in for scans months ago.”

Her words hit a wall inside me, a place already battered into rubble.

They offer no comfort, only a cold accounting of my body’s failure.

A hot spike of anger pierces my daze. Everyone missed this; the doctors, the trainers, the infrastructure that’s supposed to keep us safe, and they all missed it. I kept playing. I kept getting hit.

Blair finally tears his gaze from the image of my brain and turns to Dr. Khatri. “So what does this mean? What do you do for it?”

“There are options,” Dr. Khatri says. “Medication can manage the symptoms and the seizures for many patients. But, given your profession, Torey, and the progression we’ve seen, medication alone would not be sufficient for you to continue in your career.

You would not be cleared to play professional hockey with medication management alone. ”

A high, thin ringing starts in my ears. Blair’s hand clenches around mine, his thumb digging into my knuckles.

He is the only thing keeping me from floating away.

My eyes drift from Dr. Khatri to Dr. Lin, and she offers me a small, tight-lipped smile that feels so empty against the amputation of Dr. Khatri’s pronouncement.

“That is the first option,” Dr. Khatri says. “The other one is surgery. The lesion is in an operable location.”

Surgery. A scalpel tracing the outline of my thoughts, hands reaching into the deepest part of me. I want someone to say it’s not real, that there’s another way, but no one speaks.

Blair’s pulse hammers through our joined hands.

And then my dad’s voice breaks the silence: “You’re talking about brain surgery?”

Dr. Khatri nods. “A temporal lobectomy. We would go in and resect the damaged tissue. That is, we would remove the scar tissue in your temporal lobe that is causing these electrical disturbances. With successful surgery and a smooth recovery, there’s a very good chance of completely eliminating your seizures and symptoms.”

I blink at him. His words float somewhere above me. Remove. Resect. Cut away pieces of the organ that makes me me .

“When you say remove—” My father’s voice catches. He clears his throat and tries again. “How much are we talking about?”

“The lesion itself is approximately two centimeters. We would remove that and a small margin of surrounding tissue to ensure we get all the affected area.” Dr. Khatri’s hands move as he speaks, sketching invisible boundaries in the air.

“The temporal lobe processes memory, emotion, language comprehension. But the brain is remarkably adaptive, especially in someone Torey’s age.

Other regions can often compensate for what’s lost.”

What’s lost. How do you measure what gets carved away with damaged tissue? Which memories go with it? Which parts of who I am are deemed expendable?

The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. One flickers, just once, and in that fraction of darkness, doubt floods in. What if this is another seizure? What if none of this is real? The thought spirals outward until Blair’s grip tightens, pulling me back.

“You said there’s a good chance,” Blair says. “What exactly does that mean? What are the actual numbers?”

“For temporal lobectomy in cases like Torey’s, we see complete seizure freedom in approximately 60 to 70 percent of patients. Another 20 percent see significant reduction in seizure frequency and severity.”

Sixty to seventy percent. Not even a guarantee.

Blair squeezes my hand again.

What happens if I wake up changed? What happens if some part of me—the part he loves—doesn’t make it back?

The monitor above my bed hums on, indifferent to any of us.

“And the risks?”

I’ve never heard Blair sound like this. Raw and scraped down to nothing, every word costing him something precious.

The questions he’s asking for me, because my voice has gone somewhere I can’t follow.

Because he knows if he doesn’t ask them now, I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering about the answers I was too afraid to hear.

Dr. Khatri shifts his weight. “The primary risks are what you’d expect from any neurosurgery. Bleeding, infection, stroke—though the incidence is low, around 2 to 4 percent. There’s also a small chance of affecting surrounding healthy tissue.”

Two to four percent. Such small numbers until they’re attached to your brain, your memories, your everything.

“Memory loss is possible,” Dr. Lin adds, her voice softer than Dr. Khatri’s clinical precision. “Usually temporary, though some patients do experience permanent gaps. Language difficulties can occur, given the location, but again, these typically resolve within weeks to months.”

Gaps. Resolve. Typically. Medical vocabulary.

My father hasn’t moved since Dr. Khatri started listing percentages. He’s frozen by the window, one hand braced against the sill like he needs the support. The morning light catches the silver threading through his hair.

“How long would recovery take?” Blair asks. “When everything goes well?”

When. Not if. Blair already demanding success.

“The surgery itself takes four to six hours,” Dr. Khatri responds.

“Hospital stay is typically five to seven days, barring complications. Full neurological recovery varies. Some patients feel like themselves within weeks, others take several months. For return to professional athletics...” He pauses, considering.

“Six months minimum. More realistically, eight to twelve months before you’d be cleared for contact sports. ”

A year. An entire season gone, maybe more. Training camp would be starting while I’m still learning how to trust my own thoughts again.