I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (4 page)

Jim always talks about how after I was whisked away in the ambulance, he can remember climbing into his powder-blue Chevy Malibu in our driveway. But he doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital. He always says that he arrived before the ambulance, ruining his car’s transmission in the process.

My records show that I was registered into Harris Methodist Southwest Hospital at 6:30
P.M.
, a Caucasian female, age twenty-two, of Presbyterian faith. The diagnosis, in capital letters: “CEILING FAN FELL ON HEAD.” The bottom of the page bears my husband’s hurried signature: James R. Meck.

Jim thinks he phoned his parents, and then my parents, calling collect. Remember this was the 1980s, and there were no cell phones. My mom recalls the conversation this way: “Jim said that you had had an accident. And I said, ‘What now?’ I had to ask him that because you were always such a rambunctious daredevil.” (I have since heard stories of my childhood escapades—tumbling off trampolines, plummeting headlong out of trees, and careening
down steep hills in wagons.) Mom continues: “And I just remember Jim saying, ‘I need your help, it’s really serious this time.’ ”

There is a moment from that evening when Jim recalls sitting alone in the waiting room. Waiting. He watched the sunset out the window and gazed across the newly developed area of suburban Fort Worth. “My mind was racing, trying to think of anything and everything that could be done,” he remembers. “This was before the Internet. All I had was what was between my ears.” And as he sat there thinking, it struck him how alone he and I were. My parents and younger brother were in Houston, four or five hours away. His family was in Georgia. “There was this profound sense of dread and loneliness, or aloneness,” he recalls. “There wasn’t anything to do, and yet there was a huge motivation to
do
something.”

Because there was nothing else to do, and Jim was tired of sitting, he pestered the duty nurse every few minutes. Finally, a physician emerged. He told Jim that I was stable but comatose, and partly paralyzed on my left side. Fluid was pressing against the inside of my skull, but if doctors attempted surgery to relieve the pressure, there was a good chance the pressure would cause my brain to burst. Not a happy thought. The doctor explained that the brain floats in fluid, and a sac holds it in place, sort of like a parachute. The impact of the fan, he said, had set off a chain of events: The front of my brain had struck the front of my skull, and then it had bounced back, and the back of my brain had struck the back of my skull. The doctor continued, “Imagine if you ever put Jell-O in a fridge, and you take it out and you shake it, and there’s cracks in it. That’s what happened to your wife’s brain.”

Then he told Jim that there was nothing more he could do, which Jim didn’t appreciate. “I’m a systems engineer. We systems guys fix stuff. There are always things you do, and if one thing doesn’t
work, you do the next thing.” It was just inconceivable to Jim, and frankly, he found it irresponsible that they would do nothing. It seemed like a cop-out. It was as though they were only worried about covering their asses rather than doing something in order to help me. Jim got hot. He lost his temper and became verbally abusive. He says he can remember distinctly challenging the doctor and nurses, screaming at everyone: “What do you mean you can’t do anything? What is your medical degree worth? Because right now you’re doing nothing.” He doesn’t remember what else he said. “To their credit, they didn’t have me arrested. And in retrospect, it’s the only reason you are still alive, because they did nothing.”

A decision was made to move me from Harris Methodist Southwest to Harris Methodist, a sister facility in downtown Fort Worth with a comprehensive neurological intensive care unit. I often wonder if Jim’s ranting and raving had anything to do with why I was moved. But Jim recalls “having a feeling in the back of my head that they were overwhelmed” at Harris Methodist Southwest, and they couldn’t handle my situation. Regardless, the people working in that emergency room were probably glad to see me transferred. And Jim along with me.

The discharge papers from the first hospital listed my condition as poor, and to Jim’s eye, I looked like I was getting worse. I was more pale and fragile-looking. The transfer was a delicate maneuver. At the downtown hospital, another very calm, very senior nurse asked Jim to recount what had happened. When the narrative got to Patrick, and to the fact that it was his little body that had struck the fan, the nurse suddenly grew alarmed. Patrick had, after all, been in the same accident as I had. “Where is Patrick now?” she asked.
“Who checked him out?” No one had. She said, “We’ll get the rest of this information later. Go now and get your son.” Jim drove home to get Patrick from the Knotes’ house. When he arrived back at the hospital, Patrick was rushed to the pediatric ER for a battery of tests. He had a small scrape on his cheek, but thankfully nothing worse.

Jim was told that one of the hospital’s top neurosurgeons was coming on duty at midnight. This doctor was said to be brilliant, but antisocial, even kind of reclusive. “He asks for the night shift,” one doctor told Jim, “because he doesn’t like talking to people. Don’t expect a lot of bedside manner. But trust me, he’s as good as we have for making this kind of neurological call.”

At 11
P.M.
, a nurse at Harris Methodist examined me. Her notes state that I did not lose consciousness immediately upon being hit on the head, but passed out shortly thereafter. A subsequent note states that I lost consciousness “approximately three minutes post-injury” and remained out “for about five minutes.” Another note from that night states, “Patient is easily aroused but drowsy,” and is “oriented to space and time.” Yet another note says: “Patient’s left arm feels ‘funny,’ her left leg feels ‘heavy,’ and her head hurts ‘inside.’”

At 11:20
P.M.
, the famed antisocial neurosurgeon swept in like a character from a sentimental tearjerker disease-of-the-week movie. Dr. Joe Ellis Wheeler was middle-aged and portly, with pasty skin, salt-and-pepper hair, piercing blue eyes, and a pleasant Texas drawl. He examined me. Then he called Jim into his office.

Jim recalls “a wall of leather-bound books. A great intelligence was there. He sounded like someone who had an absolute command of his field. Here was somebody I implicitly trusted.”

Dr. Wheeler told Jim that I had suffered a closed-head injury,
affecting not my skull but the soft tissue inside. X-rays showed no fractured skull, no compressed vertebrae. Jim asked him what could be done. Dr. Wheeler said, “The fluid is what’s killing your wife. If we opened her skull, because of the pressure inside, the result would just be catastrophic. The best thing we can do is just withdraw all treatments, the fluids, the IV, so the tissues can naturally reabsorb the fluids in her head. We need to give her body a chance to absorb the trauma.” Jim remembers Dr. Wheeler saying this, too: “I’ll be honest with you: most people with this level of internal injury do not survive.”

Dr. Wheeler is retired now, and he recalls little of me or my hospital stay: “I saw so many people with horrible injuries, it’s hard to remember.” Dr. Wheeler says my husband’s account sounds plausible but exaggerated. “I would never have advised stopping all treatment,” he says. “I would advise slowing fluids down, because in an injured brain, fluids can make it swell.” Dr. Wheeler also says it was never his habit to tell loved ones that a patient might not survive. When asked, he’d say, “God never tells me whether people are going to live or die.” I am convinced that whatever decisions were made that night by either Dr. Wheeler or God, those decisions saved my life and I will always be grateful.

Jim made another round of collect calls to his family and mine. He told them, “They’ve convinced me that the best course of action is to do nothing. We’ll have to wait it out.” He recalls saying, too, that I “had a chance of recovering, but it’s only a chance. I wasn’t trying to sugarcoat anything. I thought you were dying. There was desperation on the other end of the phone, once we got past ‘Can we come? Can we be there?’ Because there was no physical way to get from A to B. Everybody was going to check what flights there were in the morning, but there was nothing that
could be done right then,” Jim says. “And you might not be there in the morning.”

My mom doesn’t recall any such dire language from Jim: “He didn’t say, ‘This is so serious the whole family should gather around right now.’ ” Although, Mom being Mom, she may have just heard those words and gone into a kind of motherly denial. I know that may sound harsh, but my mom tends to occasionally understand things to be the way she wants them to be rather than the way they actually are. In any event, no one was close enough to climb into a car and drive to the hospital at that late hour.

Patrick had fallen back asleep and a couple of nurses offered to keep him at their station. They also kept bringing Jim things—coffee, and little cups of ice cream—and coaxing him to leave: “Mr. Meck, we’ll let you know.” Jim stayed. “I was concerned that you would die, and I wouldn’t be there.”

Another nurse filled out a personal data form on me at 1:15
A.M.
, probably with Jim’s help. The form lists each of my previous hospitalizations. Though I was only twenty-two, there weren’t enough lines on the form to list them all: major knee surgery, 1981; elective abortion, 1984; ovarian cysts, 1984; miscarriage, 1985; childbirth by cesarean section, 1986 and 1987; hand injury, 1987. Jim signed some more papers, permitting the doctors to remove the intravenous tubes from my veins. He says Dr. Wheeler told him, “You should get your sons and say good-bye.” So he did.

By this time it was very late. During the drive back to the hospital, both Benjamin and Patrick fell fast asleep. Jim parked the car, and carried the boys to my hospital room in the ICU. It was quiet. The doctors had turned everything off. I lay on the hospital bed, pale and still, my head bandaged. The rhythmic beat of a heart monitor and my breathing were the only sounds in the room. “You
were sweaty, hair stringing down over your face, bandages on your head, blotchy, kind of waxy,” Jim recalls. “It was like you weren’t you. It was like you had already gone.” And in a way I had.

Jim pondered what to do, and he made a decision. “It was so late and I couldn’t wake up Benjamin or Patrick,” he recalls. “And I couldn’t say good-bye. I was all ready to because of what the doctor had told me. But I had these angelic guys in my arms, and I decided, ‘I’m not going to wake you, and I’m not going to say good-bye.’ ” Jim hugged his sons, and then leaned each sleepy baby over to press their lips against my cheek. “And then I kissed you, and we left.”

On the drive home, Jim recalls, “The anger and the frustration had burned themselves out. So I guess at this point I was just tired and resigned and there was just a tremendous feeling of loss.” He doesn’t recall thinking, “ ‘How did this happen to me, how did this happen to us?’ Instead there was just grief and a defeated feeling.” Jim vividly does remember making a plea, repeating it over and over in his head: “If there’s any way that Su can get through this, I’ll do anything.” It wasn’t a prayer to God exactly, Jim says, instead it was just “a promise I was making,” maybe just a promise to himself. Little did he realize precisely what he was asking. There is a saying: Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

Jim remembers parking his sick car in the driveway and walking into the house. The kitchen was just as the paramedics had left it, the fan still dangling from the ceiling, the blood still pooled on the floor. He put the boys to bed, and then he picked up the bandages and wrappings and discarded IVs. He searched around and finally found a bucket and a sponge and set about cleaning the pooled blood from the kitchen floor. He remembers that, with every sweep of the sponge, the circle of blood seemed to grow larger. “It
was like a metaphor for the idea that nothing I did seemed to make a difference,” he recalls. After cleaning up the kitchen as best as he could, he removed his red-stained jeans and polo shirt and took a long, hot shower, washing my blood from his hands and arms and knees. Then he fell into bed.