I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (3 page)

As we settled into our evening routine on that Sunday in May, Jim thinks that he and I talked about the possibility of renting a movie after the kids had gone to bed. Then our thoughts turned to, “What shall we eat for dinner?”

Later I was clattering around the electric stove making macaroni and cheese, adding dollops of Velveeta to the pot because that was the way Benjamin liked it, smooth and creamy with no lumps. I may have been planning to boil some peas in another pot. Jim sat at the kitchen table, reading the Sunday edition of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
and playing the part of suburban dad. Benjamin sat in his high chair eating Cheerios. I may have also been fixing a bottle of milk for Patrick, who was crawling around entertaining himself with his toys on the carpet in the family room right off the kitchen.

It’s the next moment when Jim’s memories come into sharp focus. He distinctly remembers seeing Patrick out of the corner of his eye, crawling from the family room into the kitchen.

Nobody knows what exactly happened next. Jim’s back was turned. “I hear this noise,” Jim recalls. “I have only an auditory memory of what it sounded like. I remember being startled. I turn, and this is the picture: It’s something out of the movie
Carrie,
where I’m standing, I’m turning, you’re holding out Patrick, and as you’re
handing him to me, you’re collapsing, blood flowing from your head down your front.” As I crumpled to the floor, Jim says he watched the light in my eyes go out.

For a few seconds, Jim just stood there, his mind not yet comprehending what had happened.

“I’m trying to figure out what to do next,” he recalls, “because what I’m seeing makes no sense.”

My body lay on the floor in a heap, inert. The ceiling fan hovered a foot or so above me. Somehow, those facts were connected.

Jim’s moment of paralysis passed. He stepped around my fallen body and the swaying ceiling fan and crossed the kitchen to the telephone hanging on the wall just around the corner. With Patrick in one arm and the phone in the other, he dialed 911.

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

“I’m in my house. My wife has collapsed.”

“All right, sir. Is she breathing?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, sir. We’ll get someone there as soon as we can.”

Patrick’s voice had risen to a wail, and by the end of the call, Jim was shouting over it. Jim gave the dispatcher our address and hung up the phone. Benjamin sat in his high chair, speechless, his eyes fixed on the floor where his mommy lay.

Jim stood in the kitchen and studied the scene. I lay on the floor, a pool of blood expanding outward from the gash in my forehead. Above my limp body swung the ceiling fan, now freakishly suspended by a frayed cord. Jim’s eyes followed the cord to the ceiling and saw the bare hook that had once held it sticking out from a ragged hole in the plaster. I wonder now about that fan. Were there any other exposed wires hanging down? Was it a fire hazard? Wasn’t
Jim worried about himself or the boys getting electrocuted? How could he have left it hanging there? How is it that the oddly dangling fan could have been ignored?

The fan had come with the house. Nothing in its previous behavior had given us cause for alarm. It was quiet, well balanced, and it had always cooled the kitchen nicely.

For a few moments, panic receded and Jim’s engineer brain asserted itself. He pieced together what he thinks might have happened: “I thought back, and I can remember you saying, ‘Weeee,’ ” Jim recalls. “And I’m thinking, so, you walked over to Patrick and said, ‘Weeee,’ and picked him up. As you held him up, over your head, either his back or his feet hit the fan, and it came crashing down on you.” He reenacts this scene for me with a pillow.

I have often thought about Patrick: By what miracle was he totally unharmed? How is it the fan did not hit him? How was it that I was able to hand him to Jim before collapsing? And what about Benjamin? Jim says he was right there, sitting in his high chair. What did he see? His mom lying on the floor, in a pool of blood? How awful would that be for him? Thankfully, he says he doesn’t remember anything about that day.

Jim considered what to do next. He knew enough first aid to know not to try to move me. He thought, “Okay, the ambulance is coming and they’re going to take you. I need to figure out somewhere for the boys to be.” He scooped them up and dashed across the street to the Knotes, our neighbors and friends.

Pam Knote opened the door. Jim said, “There’s been an accident. The ambulance is coming. Can I leave the guys with you?”

Pam recalls that Jim looked “calm but frantic, you know, very urgent.” The tone in his voice told her there was no time to explain. “I mostly remember him just handing me Patrick.” She left all four kids with her husband, Mike, and set off across the street with Jim to put together a diaper bag.

An ambulance had arrived by this point and now sat parked outside our home; Jim and Pam walked in to find two paramedics tending to me. “You were lying on the kitchen floor,” Pam recalls. “There was blood on your face and under your head. The paramedics were asking you some questions, and you were able to respond, but I don’t know how coherent you were.”

Pam, too, remembers seeing the ceiling fan dangling near the floor. She also saw, protruding from the ceiling, “a hook with a lip on it that should have been up in the ceiling but wasn’t.” As she took in the scene, she marveled that I had somehow managed to keep the fan from hurting my baby. “That was your first instinct as a mom,” Pam remembers thinking to herself, “to protect Patrick.” Pam collected diapers, bottles, blankets, and changes of clothing, stuffed everything into a bag, and headed back across the street to Benjamin and Patrick, leaving Jim to stay with me.

Jim hovered over the paramedics. One looked up, gestured across the room, and said, “Sir, please stand over there and stay out of our way.”

A paramedic shined a bright pen light into my pupils. One of them had shrunk to a pinprick; the other had swelled. Neither one responded to the light the way it should. Jim watched the men stick pins in my fingers and then heard one of them say, “She’s completely unresponsive.”

Was I awake? Jim and Pam’s accounts differ on this point. Pam says she remembers me speaking to the paramedics. But is she really just remembering them speaking to me? Jim says he doesn’t remember hearing my voice or seeing me stir at any point, not in the seven minutes from when the fan hit me till the paramedics
arrived, nor in the ten minutes from their arrival until my body was whisked away on a backboard. But his memories of that day are colored by panic and shock. When he heard the paramedics say, “She’s completely unresponsive,” did they mean that I was out cold, or merely that some of my fingers and toes were numb and failing to react to the prick of a pin?

A second rescue unit pulled up; this one was a full-size fire truck. An incident commander entered the house with two or three other men in heavy fire jackets and hats. Two of them carried a backboard that was meant for me.

A big red fire engine with flashing lights and firefighters rushing around in jackets and hats must have made for quite a scene outside the door of our little home. Did our neighbors step outside to see what was going on? Did they stay indoors and peer through curtains? Did other people on El Greco wonder what could have drawn the Fort Worth Fire Department to the Mecks’ door? Did they care?

Inside our house no one was talking much, but Jim remembers glimpsing the frequent nonverbal cues passed back and forth between the commander and the paramedics, a faint shaking of heads and furrowing of brows, all seeding a sense of foreboding. “I remember them being very grim,” Jim recalls. “You know: it just did not look good, not good at all.”

The paramedics bandaged an inch-long gash on my forehead: such a small wound, but so much blood, pooling in a three-foot diameter around my head. Workers carefully fitted a cervical brace around my neck. Then several of them encircled me and ever so gently lifted me onto the backboard. They strapped my body to the board and rushed out of the house to load me into the ambulance.

Jim asked if he could come along. “No, sir,” a paramedic told him, “you can’t go in the ambulance. We aren’t covered for that.”

The ambulance door swung closed, and I began my journey to the hospital. I would like to tell you that the paramedic gazed pensively at my vital signs, steadied my wounded head, held my hand, and even though I couldn’t hear the words, he told me in a thick Texas accent, “Everything’s gonna be just fine.” But Jim wasn’t there, and I don’t remember, so there is nothing more to tell.

—ELO

I
have read through all of the medical records of my stay in the hospital, and, quite honestly, I haven’t a clue as to what much of it means. There seems to be a lot of secret medical language that us patient types aren’t meant to understand. But I do, unfortunately, notice plenty of discrepancies among the hundreds of pages of records from the hospital. In the notes from one doctor on May 25, 1988, it says that the ceiling fan struck me on the left temple, but I was actually hit on the right side. There are accounts written about my condition on June 9 describing my impaired memory, impaired communication, dysfunctional mobility, impaired judgment, and decreased attention span, and yet I was discharged the very next day. It was noted on May 31 that my
long-term memory “seems fairly unaffected.” (Really? Hmm. Interesting.) There are several pages included in my records that aren’t even mine.

I guess I expected, and was hoping, for those records to somehow hold
the key
that would give me answers and fill in gaps. I was hoping that these
official records
would be just that. Instead, the written record just raises even more questions about why I am the way I am and what the medical community did and did not do when I was first injured. It is difficult for me to piece together all the facts of my stay in the hospital from these discombobulated accounts, but I will do my best.