chapter 16

JOHN

ONCE the kids and Polly were back home on the Cape, I had even more reason to get well and get out of the hospital. It looked like it was going to be at least three months before the next stage of surgery; the muscle and tissue in my face needed time to heal completely. The jawbone on both sides of my face had been discontinued. I had temporomandibular joints (TMJs) and a piece of my chinbone left—all of this was wired shut to heal. Once the soft tissue had healed, the plan was to insert a steel bar to connect my TMJs to what was left of my chin. The experimental part of the reconstruction would come next. They would hang a micromesh stainless steel net from the steel bar and pack it with osteoblast cells—these are the marrow cells from which bone develops. The hope was that, in time, I would “grow” enough new bone in my face to have a working jaw again. To be able to eat and breathe, at least. Would I be able to talk? The doctors said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

I was facing months before they could go in and start the rebuilding work. But there was no way I could stay in the hospital until Christmas. I had to show them pronto that I could walk, use the bathroom, and feed myself if I wanted to go home.

I’d lost about thirty pounds or so but was building up strength every day—walking the halls with my IV pole, keeping my mind sharp with chess and science fiction books. There were still days when I would get blinding headaches and couldn’t seem to keep a thought in my head. I just wanted the pain to stop. These were some kind of injury-related migraines that no medication could touch; they had to pass. When the pain finally went away I felt like I had a new lease on life. There was still discomfort, but it could be managed with meds—nothing like the pain of those headaches.

It was especially hard to be an invalid since I’d spent so long on the force marking my place as a guy who could handle anything physically. I was confident, had done some boxing and enough karate to defend myself, and knew that I could take any call without needing to bring in backup from a big guy like Arthur the Bear or Monty. The sergeants felt the same way about me and sent me out one night to bring in a felon named Danny Mannis—an ex-con and ex-pro boxer on parole from a federal mental prison in St. Louis. A convicted bank robber, Danny had lost it while doing time and finished his sentence in the mental lockup. Who knows what happened to him in there, but he wasn’t a well man, obviously.

Danny was living back in Falmouth and one night tore the locked door off of a Dunkin Donuts (never did figure out why—maybe he was pissed they were closed). Two federal marshals were there to get him but they needed local backup, and I was their guy. The marshals had heard that Danny was bad news—and one look at the door confirmed it. He’d torn it clean off—aluminum metal frame with the dead bolt and everything. He was a formidable physical specimen—a bit taller than me, he’d spent his time in the can running, lifting weights, and doing boxing workouts. He wore a World War II aviator’s cap and rode a bicycle when going anywhere in town. Nobody messed with him, with good reason. He was a deadly combination of really crazy and really strong. The marshals wanted nothing to do with him.

When we got to the scene, I explained to Danny why he had to go with them, that he had to let them chain, cuff, and manacle him. “I don’t want to have to fight you,” I explained. “They don’t want to have to fight you either. But if push comes to shove, I will bundle you, and you will have to go with them anyway, so let’s do this the way you want to.” He went willingly. I don’t know if his choice had anything to do with the fact that I was ready to take him on physically, but it doesn’t really matter. The job got done, and it got done because I was ready to handle it any way I had to, which is why it was my call and no one else’s. I wasn’t exactly Dirty Harry, but not bad. After a few years on the force, karate training plus tactical squad training and good old common sense had turned me from a know-nothing rookie to a very competent officer of the law.

I loved being a cop, but after my shooting I found myself wishing I had applied to the fire department like I wanted to when I was younger. Lord knows I had the opportunities, and I’d thought it through, too, even talked to Polly about it. The pay was the same, and with training I could have worked my way up to paramedic within a year. I was certainly exposed to the same risks on occasion. I’d spent a few calls crawling through houses as they burned, looking for occupants, and even sifting through ashes after fires, looking for victims, then loading them onto stretchers and transporting them. There was one guy who was burned so badly that when we picked up the stretcher, he flew up into the air. We were expecting him to weigh his living weight, which had been reduced drastically in the fire. Most embarrassing to have to reload his corpse and buckle it down.

I spent a lot of time in the hospital thinking about what could have been, how things might have been different. It’s hard to believe the old saying that “things happen for a reason” when the things happening to you are god-awful and you just want them to be over with. No matter how I looked at it, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that this had happened for some reason that made any sense.

My last week in the hospital was spent with Polly and me both learning how to care for my wounds and keep me fed and watered. Polly felt okay leaving the kids in Falmouth for the day with Kelly and the guards to come up for a couple of visits. I got the distinct feeling that the only reason the doctors were letting me go home was because of Polly’s nursing training, so thank God for that.

Once I was ready to go, my trachea hole would be covered with gauze. I didn’t need the respirator anymore; I could breathe fine through my nose. But with what was left of my jaw fused shut with wires, there would be a lot of fluid in my throat that we’d need to remove, so they were giving us a suction machine. They’d been using suction on me in the hospital, but this was a portable device, a small metal box that you plugged in. It had a gauge on it to adjust the amount of suction you needed from the attachment on the end of the tube—kind of like a vacuum cleaner, only smaller. After they showed us how to use it, my favorite nurse on the floor explained that we’d need to do this at least three times a day, and I would need to try to cough up anything I could and suction that out as well.

“I would recommend keeping these pieces of equipment away from the children, as it might scare them,” Nurse Kathy pointed out. Polly and I both nodded in agreement. Might also scare us a little, I thought, looking at the odd contraption plus all the gauze, ointments, extra tubing, and formula cans they were sending home with us.

Feeding was a whole different process, but equally unpleasant. Every two to three hours, Polly or I would need to withdraw whatever liquid was in my stomach through the GI tube using a syringe. This was to measure how much residual was there to determine how much I needed for my next feeding. But then, so I didn’t remove the enzyme needed for digestion from my stomach, I had to return the contents of what I’d drawn out back in, then add more fresh stuff to level it off. The whole process was pretty bad, and the smell was truly horrible. How Polly could stand it, I don’t know. The stuff we had to draw out of my stomach was basically puke, and smelled like it. And then I had to put it back in. It’s a wonder I didn’t just vomit, but I tried to distract myself by mixing up the can of formula for my next meal and just getting on with it. When it was feeding time, I would hook the container up to my GI tube and sit there watching the fluid go in. When it was gone, I was done. We flushed the GI tube with water to keep it clean, clamped it to keep it from dripping, then used medical tape to secure it off to the side until my next feeding, and that was it. Bon appétit.

I would also need a special bed, since I couldn’t lie flat until the trachea hole was healed, so a bed was ordered and shipped to the house from a medical supply store. It was a lounge bed chair that I could sit up in like a hospital bed. With two pillows or so propped under my head, I found that I could breathe just fine.

Dr. Keith came in to see me before my discharge to explain the next steps. I could tell he wasn’t entirely comfortable with me leaving the hospital, maybe because I was his pet project and he didn’t want me getting more body parts blown off before he could try rebuilding my face. “You need to come back in three days for a checkup. If your health is satisfactory at that point, you can go home. But then you need to be back in three more days for another checkup,” he told me. “That’s a lot of driving,” he added, after a beat, eyeing me. I think he was waiting for me to say that I’d changed my mind and that I’d rather just stay in the hospital. Instead, I wrote on my pad. “Then what?”

“Then you come back in a week. And eventually, when you’re stable, you can come in every two weeks for us to check on your progress.” He looked down at my file for a second. “If all goes well, we’ll do the next surgery on December twenty-sixth,” he finally said. “How does that sound?”

“Great,” I wrote on my pad. ‘And Merry Christmas to you too.” I was just so happy to be going home, I would have agreed to almost anything.