Commencement

It was May 10, 2006 and the end of the semester of her senior year at Smith College. Graduation was approaching, but that morning things were not right. Maggie did not feel well. She called her father and told him, “I have a really bad headache. It's behind my ear, kind of different than any headache I've ever had.” He told her to go to the infirmary, but she didn't. She stayed in her single room.

That afternoon one of her friends heard an “odd sound” coming from Maggie's room. She tried to break into the room and asked friends for help. They couldn't open the door because Maggie was on the floor pressed up against it. Security couldn't get in either, so one of her enterprising girlfriends climbed out through the dorm window into the adjoining room. She found Maggie unconscious.

No one knew what had happened and why she was unconscious. But once she was in the ambulance en route to the local community hospital near Smith, she began to have seizures. Perhaps that explained the noises coming from her room. In retrospect Nancy thinks it “was her banging around a bit.”

It was a truly disturbing picture that was outside anyone's control. The doctors at the local community hospital did a computerized axial tomography or CAT scan and found serious abnormalities whose treatment was beyond their abilities. They realized that they were over their heads and Maggie would need to go to a bigger hospital that had a full complement of neurologists and neurosurgeons. It was not the sort of problem that a small hospital could handle. They were going to airlift her to Worcester Hospital but fog set in, and so a ninety-minute trip was made by ambulance.

At Worcester Hospital, specialists determined that Maggie had a blockage in a major artery in her brainstem, in the lower part of the brain just above the spinal cord. This blockage resulted in a stroke and her state of unconsciousness. After midnight she was taken to surgery to extricate a blood clot in the basilar artery, a thin little vessel responsible for supplying the brainstem with blood flow.