I LISTENED while the nurse asked Joan a slew of questions about my medical history, trying to determine, apparently, whether I might have gotten dizzy and fallen or if I had, in fact, slipped and fallen, as I’d told the paramedics. I listened closely, hoping to discover some telling facts about myself. This variable made a difference, I later learned, in terms of my possible diagnoses and treatment.
Although they had me on a nothing-by-mouth diet because I’d been vomiting, Joan mentioned that I’d had weight-loss surgery, with a band inserted around my stomach, so, among my other dietary restrictions, I couldn’t eat much more than a cup of food at a time. I couldn’t remember this, of course, but I’d already lost more than fifty pounds since I’d topped out at three hundred and seventy.
Once the nurse left, I told Joan the few snippets of what I could remember leading up to and right after the accident, then promptly forgot them.
“I remember taking one step into the bathroom and my feet flying over my head,” I told her. After I fell and hit my head, I said, “I just could not get up; I kept slipping.”
She was listening to me, but I still felt a need to persuade her I was telling the truth. “Look,” I said, extending my palms toward her. “There’s something oily on my hands.”
But I could see that she was not convinced, and I could understand why. “Honey, there’s nothing on you,” she said, running her fingers over my palms. “They must have cleaned you up.”
I may be confused, I thought, but in this case I know what I am talking about. My mind was whirling as I tried to absorb and retain new information, so it seemed extremely important to communicate to Joan the few details that I could remember about my accident before they too left me. I distinctly remembered that the floor had been slippery from whatever greasy substance had been spilled there, and after I’d managed to get up, I had seen and felt it all over my hands and arms. I also remembered flashes of rubbing my hands in the ambulance, trying to determine what the slimy substance was and how to get it off me. I needed her to believe me, but my thoughts didn’t settle in the most logical order. It was also frustrating to try to express myself now that there was no oil on my hands. How could I prove this to her from my hospital bed? I pulled back the blanket to see if there were oily spots on my pants and shoes, only to find that I wasn’t wearing them anymore. All I had on was one of those flimsy patterned gowns that ties in the back. Where were my clothes?
I struggled to come up with some other way to prove my story. “Get my pants,” I insisted. “Let me show you.”
Joan reached under the bed, where she found a plastic bag that contained the black polo shirt and olive-green pants I’d been wearing. Once she acknowledged the oily, dark blotches, I was finally able to relax a little. Then I moved on to the other important part of the story.
“There were two men, the security guard from the front desk and a custodian in the bathroom, who were helping me and getting me paper towels to hold on my bleeding head,” I said.
I told her what I’d said to the guard and relayed his direction to the custodian to clean up the mess on the floor. With all that out of the way, I was done talking for the most part. My head was killing me. The nurse kept asking how much pain I was in, and I kept saying “ten” because that seemed fitting. But she apparently figured it had to hurt a little bit less after the morphine she’d already given me, so when she suggested, “An eight?” I said, “Okay.”
Feeling the need to protect myself from further harm or any conflict, I mostly tried to agree with what she and Joan said—anything so as not to raise more red flags than necessary over my condition. I also figured it would be best to let Joan take over and be my voice. Let her figure things out for me.
Joan was nice, but she kept asking me questions when really all I wanted to do was close my eyes and sleep.
“Are you feeling okay?” she kept asking. “Are you feeling sick?”
“Pain,” was all I could manage. “It hurts.”
They’d given me something for the nausea, but I was still throwing up and feeling dizzy. It also didn’t help that I couldn’t answer most of Joan’s questions, which only made me more frustrated, embarrassed, and scared because I didn’t understand why I didn’t know the answers. I did my best to focus, to pay close attention, to listen and learn, making new connections with words and concepts whenever I could. Even so, Joan was starting to realize that my condition was worse than she’d thought.
I heard her tell the nurse and doctor that she used to work there and at another hospital as an ER nurse. That helped explain how she knew so much, such as when to put cool cloths on my head, which felt good. So did her touch.
As I nodded off, the memories of my fall and these early conversations with Joan soon faded into a blur of the emergency room chaos.
When the results of my blood work and CT scan came back normal, Dr. Douglas Smith figured I had a bad concussion and he was ready to send me home. Wherever that was.
Joan, however, seemed very uncomfortable with the idea of my being released in this state; she sensed that something else was wrong.
“He’s always had a very high pain threshold,” she told the doctor. “It’s unusual for him to complain of so much pain.”
She was also troubled, she told him, by the gaps in my memory, which didn’t seem to be improving.
I was apprehensive myself. No matter what the tests said, I felt anything but normal. And I had no idea what “home” was other than it meant leaving this place where people were taking care of me and giving me medicine for my pain. I was still in too much agony to move, and I was scared of doing anything to hurt myself further.
Dr. Smith didn’t seem all that concerned about my headaches, saying they were a normal symptom of a head injury like mine. They were taking steps to discharge me when around 10:00 A.M. I noticed a dark area beginning to form in the bottom of my right eye, like a black pie-shaped wedge between four and eight o’clock in my field of vision. As if the pain and memory loss weren’t enough to deal with, was I now losing my sight too? I tried not to let Joan see the panic that was building inside.
“What’s going on with my eye?” I said. “Part of my eye is dark. I can’t see.”
Joan looked even more scared than I was.
“I’ll draw it for you,” I said.
She grabbed the cardboard tissue box next to the bed and handed me a pen out of her purse. I turned the box upside down and drew a circle as if my field of vision was a clock with the dark hours shaded in.
She immediately motioned for a nurse, who sent the doctor over. Joan had become the interpreter of my new, small world, like a mother watching over a baby, only she wasn’t aware of her role and I didn’t want her to be. I watched for her reaction to determine how I was supposed to feel and to interpret the mumbo jumbo the doctors and nurses were saying. I quietly collected every piece of information I could and held them close, as if they were the bytes I needed to rebuild the master file that held my moments, knowledge, and identity—all deleted in the fall. But for now, I needed these people to keep helping me because I didn’t have the faintest idea how to use those bytes to survive on my own.
I watched Joan’s face as the doctor shone a penlight into my eye. She looked worried, and now the doctor seemed concerned too, which only made me feel more uneasy. Telling us he was going to call a specialist for a consultation, he left the room but returned a short time later to inform us that the doctor was busy.
“We’re going to keep him and have the neuro-ophthalmologist evaluate him upstairs on the floor,” Dr. Smith told Joan.
I looked at her for a translation, so she explained. “He’ll be able to look in your eye and figure out what’s wrong.”
It seemed like forever while we waited for them to transport me to my private room. Joan kept checking with the nurses about the room status and let them know when I needed more pain medication, which was once an hour. After I complained that the morphine wasn’t doing the trick, they threw in some Tylenol.
Around noon an ER nurse said my room was ready, and we waited for a tech to wheel me into the elevator and up to room 636. There I was relieved to find that my new bed was much more comfortable—larger, softer, with controls that allowed me to raise and lower the top half of my body. This was a big improvement because, while lying flat, the pain in my head was unbearable.
It was a smaller room than my corner of the ER, but it had a great box with moving pictures mounted on the wall next to the window. Joan controlled the gadget that changed the picture box for me, which I soon learned were called a remote and flat-screen TV. I gradually started to learn my previous programming likes and dislikes because she stopped when she got to one of my favorites, such as the Fox News Channel, King of Queens, and Everybody Loves Raymond.
Once I was settled in, Dr. Johnny Walker, an upbeat doctor in his midforties, came in and introduced himself as the primary care doctor who would be coordinating my treatment. “He seems to have suffered a severe concussion, but everything should start coming back to him in the next few days,” he said, directing his comments to Joan and me as I watched both of their faces. “The neurologist and neuro-ophthalmologist are on their way to see him.”
Walker asked me the same questions I’d heard before, and little by little I was learning some of the right answers. I didn’t want to look stupid, so I listened most closely to things I knew I’d be asked again.
“What is your name?” Walker asked.
By now I knew that one, so I told him.
“Who is the president?”
“Bush,” I said.
“Well, that’s close. Barack Obama just won the election.”
I didn’t really understand what that meant or what a president was, but I mentally chalked up the correct answer. At least now I knew what to say next time.
“What is your birth date?”
“February 23, 1960,” I said, repeating the same answer I’d been giving.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joan mouthing to the nurse, “That’s my birthday.” Catching that, I internally noted that I was still wrong and that I needed to figure out the right answer, my own birthday. But at that point I didn’t realize that I’d gotten her birth year wrong as well.
Walker had me do a series of tests that he and the other doctors kept repeating—pushing my hands against his, squeezing his fingers, and pushing my feet against his hands.
“For now, just focus on resting and getting rid of the pain,” he said.
Right before he left for rounds, he told us he’d Googled me and noted that I’d played in the NFL. Baffled by the terms Google and NFL, I just played along.
“You’re a tough guy,” he told me. “You’ll do fine.”
I understood the gist of what he was saying and wanted to believe him, but somehow I still wasn’t convinced.
After he left I asked Joan about the terms he’d used. “What’s the NFL?”
“The National Football League,” she said. “You played professional football.”
That still meant nothing to me, any more than Joan’s explanation about Google being a search site on the Internet, because I didn’t know what those words meant either. So I just filed them away to figure out later.
I got some answers that evening when I came across the NFL playoffs as I was flipping through the TV channels.
“Oh, there’s football,” Joan said.
“I played that? Get out of here,” I said, skeptical that I could have done something shown on TV.
“Did I play on television?”
“Yes,” she said, which also left me amazed.
Oddly enough, I still knew certain football terms and rules such as offside, penalty, and holding; I also understood what a touchdown was and what was happening on the field. But I had no recollection of playing, how many players were on a team, or any players’ names.
The neurologist, Dr. Richard Goodell, showed up about an hour after Walker left. He checked out my eyes and threw a bunch of medical terms at us that went right over my head, but luckily Joan understood them. Although he couldn’t see a hemorrhage in the retina or vitreous, he said that was likely the cause of what he called my “posttraumatic visual defect.” Less likely, he said, was that the fall had caused a trauma to my occipital lobe, the part of the brain that controls what you see. After he left Joan tried to explain what he said, but her explanation still left me mostly in the dark. Now that I was in a private room, the nurses hooked me up to a morphine pump, which helped bring the pain down to a slightly more manageable level. And there, on the wall, was a chart showing the pain scale—with a happy face at zero and a progression of crankier expressions from one through nine, with a crying face at ten—which helped me keep things straight. It was frustrating to need the drug, but I felt that if I could get the pain to stay at a five or six rather than sliding back up to an eight or nine between doses, my mind would clear a bit and I’d be able to understand more of what was going on around me.
Joan had been continuing to ask me questions between doctor visits and was slowly seeing just how little I knew, which prompted her to challenge Goodell’s prognosis.
“But he has these large memory gaps,” she said. “He doesn’t know our business, where we live, or any details about our twenty-four years together.”
And she didn’t even know the half of it. Nonetheless, Goodell didn’t alter his prognosis, saying the neuro-ophthalmologist would be by shortly. All business, he was the kind of doctor who got annoyed when Joan’s cell phone rang while he was talking, and he left us with the same reassurance as the other doctors: I had a bad concussion, and my memory should come back within a couple of weeks. The headaches could last as long as two years, he said, but their intensity should lessen. I didn’t understand the difference between two weeks, two years, and twenty-four years, but based on Joan’s comment, it sounded like we’d known each other for a long time.
At 3:15 Dr. B. K. Suedekum, the neuro-ophthalmologist, brought in some special equipment and put drops in my eye. After examining me, he said he couldn’t tell for sure either, but he thought I might have a retinal tear, so he wanted a retinal specialist to take a look at me.
Clueless once again, I looked over at Joan to figure out what that meant. Seeing her crying for the first time was a clear enough indication that the prognosis couldn’t be good. I’d learned as much from the pain chart.
Given the severity of the situation, Joan thought it best to let our family and my bookkeeper know I was in the hospital. When she told me that Grant and Taylor were coming to visit, I had no idea who she was talking about.
“You didn’t forget your kids, did you?” Joan asked.
I nodded reluctantly.
“Well, do you remember what they look like?”
I shook my head, so Joan picked up the rectangular metal thing she’d been talking into and pointed to a photo of Grant, then opened a flat, folded pouch for a picture of Taylor.
Joan started telling me about them, that Taylor was sixteen and a cheerleader. “Everybody says she’s a mini-me,” she said.
Grant was nineteen, she said, pausing. “He’s more quiet. Used to ride motocross. Very competitive. He’s really tall, like you.”
“Are we close?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re a very close family,” she said. “We deal with whatever comes our way. We handle it.”
Despite my attempts to hide it, the vast extent of my memory loss was starting to sink in for Joan, so she tried to give me the information I needed in simple terms. She informed me that my children loved me and that I’d always been a good and active father. Trying to ease my anxiety, she underscored that head injuries could cause a temporary memory loss. But honestly, I was in so much pain I wasn’t paying much attention. I was barely able to acknowledge what she said.
Around 2:30 P.M. a beautiful athletic blond teenager walked into the room and started crying as soon she saw me lying there, still hooked up to the blood pressure monitor and morphine drip.
“Daddy!” she said, coming over to hug me. I hugged her back and gave her a kiss. Even though I felt no emotional attachment to her, I did feel what I can only guess was an instinctual urge to comfort and protect her. That said, I couldn’t tell if she was crying because she was sad or scared or both.
A very tall—six feet three inches—and broad-shouldered young man with light brown hair came in behind her, waiting his turn to lean over and give me a somewhat cooler partial hug and pat on the back. I didn’t feel the same level of affection from him as from the girl, but it was obvious from the way they touched and interacted with me that family meant something more to me, and vice versa, than did the doctors or nurses, who showed me a brief and much more superficial level of concern.
Taylor seemed afraid to come too close at first, not wanting to cause me any more pain.
“Let me see the back of your head,” Grant said.
I turned to show him where they’d shaved off my hair to put in the four staples, which seemed to satisfy the young man in some way.
“Do you want to see?” Grant asked his sister enthusiastically. She screwed up her face to say no but couldn’t resist looking anyway.
“Yeah, when I had my staples, they drove me crazy, itching,” he said, as if we now shared a special bond. I noticed that Grant had both of his ears pierced with dime-size objects.
Taylor really was a mini-Joan, curling up next to me on the bed and asking me a bunch of questions, exploring how much I really didn’t know.
“Do you know we have two dogs?” she asked.
I could answer that one. “Yeah,” I replied. “We have a yellow and a brown.”
“No, the yellow lab, Cody, died,” she corrected me. “We have the black one, Aspen.”
I shook my head blankly to convey that I didn’t remember that. “And the brown one is Anthony,” I offered.
“Dad!” Taylor said, looking to her mom and brother for support.
“What?” I asked, confused. Taylor seemed upset, but Joan and Grant were laughing.
“That’s Taylor’s boyfriend,” Joan explained. “The brown one’s name is Mocha.”
It was strange how, occasionally, these few little glimpses of memory came back to me, but they were all scrambled up. Later Joan told me that I often teased Anthony about being Hispanic but didn’t mean anything by it. I also found out later that Anthony had just crashed Taylor’s car the day before my accident, and I had been understandably quite angry, so they were both hoping I would forget about that too.
While we were talking, Taylor and Grant pulled out these flat contraptions that looked like the one Joan had been talking into. I watched the kids staring down and moving their thumbs around on them, and wanting to fit in, I figured I should have one too. Even if I didn’t know how to use it.
“Do I have one of those?” I asked.
“Yes, right here,” Joan said, pulling mine out of her purse, where she also had been keeping my watch and wedding ring, which the nurse had given to her. The screen on my gizmo, which they told me was called a BlackBerry, said I had missed two calls.
“Do those names look familiar?” Joan asked about the people who had called me.
“No,” I said, wishing they did.
As I started touching the different buttons, trying to see how it worked, Taylor sat perched on the bed beside me, clicking through the various photos of people and airplanes I had stored in my phone. She kept asking if I recognized any of them, but none of them triggered a single association, emotional or otherwise.
From the way Taylor smiled at me, touched me with so much care and compassion, I could tell that we must have had a very special relationship, and I so wished that I could have felt more for her. I sensed I was supposed to feel an emotional bond with my wife and children, but I couldn’t access any of the good times and tender moments I’d shared with them. My memory bin was like a giant black hole of nothing. All I had to go on was what was going on in front of me now—their warm touches and their worried expressions.
Even though my family was there beside me, I still felt very alone, as if I were trapped in a person I no longer knew. The more questions they asked and I couldn’t answer, the more panicky and overwhelmed I felt. I wondered if perhaps my memory would never improve. Is this the way it is always going to be? How could this happen to me? And, as if I’d had a choice, I wondered how I could have let this happen to my family. Not remembering that I’d been a strong patriarchal figure, I had no sense of how much I meant to them or how much they had always relied on me for love and support. Still, deep down, I knew I wasn’t the same person. I feared I would never be normal again.
Taylor had to go to cheer practice, and Grant had to drive her there, so I tried to send them off reassured by parroting back what the doctors had been telling me: I was going to be okay, they shouldn’t worry, I’d be coming home soon. By this point, I’d picked up that home was someplace they were going once they left the hospital.
As strange and unimaginable as it was to forget my children and the love of my life, I was trying to stay positive and have faith in the doctors’ prediction that my memory would return. I clung to that hope, but after losing part of my sight, I was also scared that my condition might get even worse.
Dr. Derek Kunimoto, the retinal specialist, stopped in about 6:00. He was young, articulate, friendly, and confident, and he seemed very capable, which helped me feel more confident too. After shining a light in my eye with a silver tube and adjusting a little wheel, he gave us the first piece of good news we’d heard so far: my retina was still intact. He said he didn’t know what had caused my dark spot but suggested that I might have a microhemorrhage in my optic nerve, which Joan later explained meant bleeding in my eye that was too small for us to see.
After I was discharged, he said, I should go to another specialist for additional testing and an opinion on whether my full vision would ultimately return.
Joan looked relieved after he left. “Thank God,” she said. It was nice to finally see her happy.
I liked having her there. I had to trust someone, and she was by far the best candidate. But now that the kids had left, saying they were going “home,” I figured she would want to leave too, so I thought I should repeat what the kids said and send her off. Even though I really didn’t want her to go.
“Go home,” I said.
Joan could see from my lost expression that I was just trying to please her. “No,” she said. “As long as you’re in the hospital, I’m not going to leave this room.”
She told the staff she was spending the night, so they brought in a foldout chair that flattened into a bed, which they positioned in the small space between my bed and the wall, which had a tiny bathroom on the other side of it.
I still didn’t understand who she was to me and why she cared so much for me, but if I felt alone with her there, I didn’t even want to imagine what it would feel like with her gone.
I got little sleep that night because the nurses came in every two to four hours to shine lights into my eyes and check my pupils, ask for my name and birth date, and have me do the push-pull tests. Every time one of them woke me, Joan got up too, asking them more questions, fluffing my pillow, and putting cool washcloths on my forehead.
I was still throwing up, so Joan asked the nurse to try switching my nausea medications. She did this assertively but without angering them, and the new meds finally quieted my stomach. It was reassuring to have someone so medically informed to advocate for my needs.
As morning approached Joan ordered breakfast for both of us—scrambled eggs and oatmeal for me, something my stomach would accept.
“That should be easy for you to swallow,” she said.
Before breakfast we tried to formulate the questions we were going to ask Dr. Walker. Joan was growing increasingly concerned about the severity of my incessant pain and my profound memory loss, which only served to heighten my own anxiety.
When Dr. Walker asked how I was doing, I told him my headaches were still unbearable. He asked me the same list of questions, and I was still giving him Joan’s birthday.
“I know that’s not it, but that’s the only one I know,” I told him.
When he asked me who the president was, I thought I knew the answer this time.
“Barack,” I said.
“That’s his first name. It’s Barack Obama,” he said. “You’re getting closer.”
He also asked me for the date and day of the week and the name of the hospital. I was still getting those answers wrong, but after he left I noticed that the nurses had written the date and day of the week on the whiteboard across from my bed. So when Dr. Goodell asked me those questions later that morning, I looked at the board and was able to give him the correct answers. I don’t think I was really fooling anyone, but at the time I thought I was outsmarting everyone.
After Joan reiterated her concerns about the memory gaps, Goodell tried to reassure her that my confusion would likely resolve in a few days to a week. However, he finally agreed to order an MRI to see if they could find something that wouldn’t show up on the CT scan.
Not wanting to leave me alone, Joan stayed while we waited for the test, describing past events and sharing more of our family history. Still on the morphine drip, I listened as best I could, but I kept fading in and out as she talked, so she waited patiently until I came to before starting up again.
She told me, for example, that when we met at Northern Illinois University, she was on the gymnastics team and I was on the football team. I’d gone on to play professional football in the NFL for the New England Patriots and Cleveland Browns. None of this meant anything to me; I just nodded and tried to take it all in.
The television was always on, so we often took breaks from the conversation to watch the shows I used to like. As she was flipping around on the remote, she found a Blue Angels flyover on one of the education channels. I was intrigued by the way the planes flew so close together in a V formation, spinning around without crashing into each other.
“That would be a cool job, to be a pilot,” I said.
“You are one,” Joan said.
“I am?” I asked. “I don’t remember that.” Tears welled up in my eyes as the magnitude of this hit me. I not only didn’t recall the little things, I couldn’t even remember a high-powered activity that required experience, skill, and a love I’d probably felt my entire life.
“Not that kind of pilot,” Joan said quickly. Not wanting to overwhelm me with information, she briefly explained that we’d worked together for the past several years on two aviation businesses—one that chartered jets, which we’d recently sold, and one that managed and maintained planes for other companies.
By then Joan was crying too. I didn’t know exactly why but thought maybe we were thinking the same thing—how could I have forgotten so much just from hitting my head? It wasn’t until about a month later that I learned that if my vision problem didn’t clear up, I would never fly again. That’s what Joan was thinking at that moment; she just didn’t have the heart to tell me.
Joan stood by my bed, kissed my forehead, and rubbed my chest through the gown. I didn’t really like being touched like that, but I went along with it.
“I know how I can make you feel better,” she said, moving her hand down under the hospital covers and playfully touching my private area. Startled, I batted her hand away, wondering what the hell she was doing. I felt uncomfortable, that her hand didn’t belong there. Joan looked surprised, as if this was completely out of character for me, but I was in too much pain to worry about her feelings. I had unwittingly become a forty-six-year-old virgin who didn’t even know what sex was.
When Grant showed up around lunchtime, Joan went home to shower and change. She told me she was dressed up because she’d been heading to a fancy charity luncheon—whatever that was—when she got the call to come to the ER.
Grant described more memories, trying to find a trigger to retrieve some of the moments we’d shared while he was growing up. He told me that he’d started riding motocross dirt bikes at twelve and that I used to watch him compete in hockey and motocross. He competed in several national races and at the pro level in Arizona, quitting when he was eighteen, just a year or so ago.
“Do you remember any of that?” he asked hopefully.
“No, I’m sorry,” I said.
It was clear from his disappointed expression that this wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but I was trying to be honest with him. I was starting to pick up on how much my memory loss was making my family sad; it was as if I’d taken something precious away from them by forgetting the positive events that had shaped our relationships and strengthened the bonds between us. And no matter what the doctors said, none of us knew if we would ever get that back.
Valiantly, my son asked more questions, still searching for something I could remember—anything—until, drugged and fatigued, I dozed off.
When I came to, Grant was curled up on the foldout where Joan had slept the night before, sobbing. I didn’t understand why a young man would be so emotional. It seemed a bit over the top; it wasn’t like I was going to die from this head injury.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
Grant sniffed and grabbed a tissue to blow his nose. “It just makes me sad that you don’t remember anything that we did together,” he said.
I didn’t know what else to say other than to repeat the doctors’ optimistic prognosis. “It’ll get better,” I offered.
This seemed to calm him down, and I felt I’d done all I could. So, like any two typical men, we stopped talking about our feelings and watched TV in silence.
Joan returned soon afterward, and Taylor showed up after school later that afternoon.
Joan, who kept leaving the room to make phone calls, told me she still hadn’t heard from Thomas. I didn’t know she was talking about my business colleague, but I eventually got the picture: she, Taylor, and I were all supposed to take Thomas’s private plane to Las Vegas in a couple of days to watch Taylor’s cheerleading team perform at a national championship. I’d seen cheerleaders on TV during the playoffs, but Joan said Taylor’s team did moves that were more like dancing and gymnastics—two more terms for me to tuck away and figure out later.
After months of training, Taylor was torn between wanting to go and staying home until I got out of the hospital. She didn’t want to go without us. As she tried to describe her conflicted feelings, she broke into tears. “I don’t want to leave Dad,” she said. “I’m scared. I don’t like that he doesn’t know anything.”
She was worried, she said, because I wasn’t bouncing back like I usually did. Joan told me that I’d had nine surgeries on my ankles, knees, and shoulders, and I’d usually felt well enough to stop at the office on my way home from the hospital. I honestly didn’t know what to think about the man I used to be because everything I knew about him came from stories like these, filtered through my family’s perceptions. That said, they were all I had to go on. My new life depended on them.
Joan took Taylor into the hall, but I could still hear them talking. “This is your national competition,” she said. “Your team is counting on you. He’s going to be discharged. He’s going to be fine, and we’re just going to go home.”
I would soon learn that Taylor had been on the team for more than eight years, she’d been practicing several days a week for this contest, and she was one of the best on her team. Joan had gone to most of Taylor’s competitions with her, but the three of us usually went to this national event together to cheer her on.
Joan continued to juggle calls with the charter company handling the flight and also with the other family that was supposed to fly with us as she developed a contingency plan. She kept me abreast of what was going on, but I maintained my poker face, not revealing that I didn’t know any of the people she was talking to. Oddly enough, I still had my critical thinking skills and a vague sense of how some things worked, so I was able to suggest other options for Taylor, such as taking a later flight after I was released. But often when Joan thought I was exercising my previous problem-solving skills, I was actually just parroting back what I’d just heard her—or someone on TV—saying.
For example, when I reassured Taylor that it was okay for her to go on her trip, I was actually reinforcing the parental message I’d heard Joan delivering to her in the hallway. “You should go be with your team,” I said. “Make us all proud, and don’t worry about me. I’m going to be just fine.”
When I told her to focus on doing well for the team and to keep her mind off the stresses that my injury was causing her, I later wondered if I’d been somehow drawing on my years of team sports and leadership as a captain even though I couldn’t remember a single play on the field. Taylor, not entirely convinced, went to the gym to practice.
Around 7:00 P.M. there was a knock on the door.
“There he is,” a big booming voice said. “Scottie, what are you doing here?”
The voice came from a fit-looking black man in his midfifties. His graying, closely cropped hair was balding in spots, he was dressed in casual business attire, and both he and the heavyset black woman who came in behind him looked concerned.
Feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck, I sat right up in bed. I didn’t understand why this guy was coming into my room unannounced, and I didn’t like feeling unprepared for this visitor.
How do these people know me?
With nothing to rely on but my friend-or-foe senses, I felt that this guy was the latter, and I wanted him out as soon as possible.
“JD,” Joan said, “I don’t think he knows you.”
“Oh, he knows me,” the man said, shrugging off Joan’s remark.
I didn’t like the way he ignored Joan’s attempt to smooth things over, which put me off even more. I didn’t like his attitude, and I felt my fear turning to anger.
The couple stayed for about fifteen minutes, during which Joan explained what had happened to me.
JD had a big personality and wasn’t the type of guy you’d forget. Still, I had no recollection of him. Nonetheless, as he was talking, I tried to act as if nothing was wrong, and when he asked me to pray with him, I didn’t refuse. But as he closed his eyes, bowed his head, and started to pray to the “Heavenly Father,” I left my eyes open and kept a close watch over him.
After he and his wife left, I felt relieved.
“Who was that?” I asked Joan.
How many more people am I going to see that I don’t know? This could be endless.
Joan explained that he was a recent business acquaintance who had been a wide receiver in the NFL and was now a minister; this woman was his wife. We hadn’t thought to ask how he’d heard about my accident, but we assumed that he must have called my office. We’d had a recent business disagreement, she said, and she was as surprised to see him as I was. It was curious that I seemed to have retained my emotional memory of him and nothing else. Other than my medical issues, this was the most anxiety-provoking episode I’d had in the hospital so far.
Finally at 2:30 A.M., on our third day in the hospital, the attendants came to take me downstairs for my MRI. Because this was a trauma center, the machine was in constant use, and this was the first available slot. It was reassuring that Joan had held to her promise to remain by my side, especially when I had to have tests in the middle of the night.
I was fine in the elevator, but when they tried to put me into that small narrow tunnel, I became irritated, fearful, and combative.
“There is no way you are putting me in that tube,” I said.
Concerned that the outburst could further damage my brain, one of the staff went to fetch Joan to see if she could get me to agree to the test. But I was having so many problems expressing myself that my fear had morphed into anger by the time she arrived. I was so furious that my hands were turning white as I gripped the sides of the metal cart. I sat upright, thinking that if Joan tried to make me go inside that machine she wasn’t my friend after all.
“There has got to be a different machine that they can use because I am not going in this one!” I yelled.
After some back-and-forth—heated and adamant on my side, cajoling on theirs—it was decided to reschedule the MRI so an anesthesiologist could administer a sedative. Joan acknowledged that I’d never liked confinement, and in years past I’d been tested in an “open” MRI because my shoulders were too wide for a regular testing cylinder like this one. She seemed surprised by my extreme resistance to this important test, but she proved she was, in fact, my friend by standing by me and persuading them to listen to my concerns. About 7:00 A.M. they took me back down for the second attempt, and this time an anesthesiologist gave me a Fentanyl-Versed cocktail, which produced a sense of euphoria and relaxation for a few seconds before I fell asleep. Apparently, my shoulders did fit into that narrow tube, where they kept me for about twenty minutes, out cold.
When I came to, I was being wheeled back into my room, where Joan was waiting for me.
Within a couple of hours Dr. Walker came by to tell us that the MRI results were normal, so they were sending me home and I should follow up with Dr. Goodell. Joan and I asked a lot of the same questions about why my pain and memory weren’t improving, but the answers and the prognosis were still the same: I should get my memory back within the next couple of weeks.
Then the waiting began while my discharge papers were being prepared. As the hours went by, Joan grew increasingly agitated, which only made me more uneasy and anxious. “What is taking so long?” she kept saying. “I can’t believe the staff hasn’t taken care of this yet.”
We waited so long that we finally ordered lunch, and around 3:30 P.M. it was time to go.
“Are you ready to go home?” Joan asked.
I was scared to find out what “home” was like, but I nodded and tried to prepare myself to find out.