I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (5 page)

Back at the hospital, in the intensive care unit, nurses made hourly entries on my progress:

A cinematic version of my story might have me open my eyes, wince at the pain of the morning sun, and survey my surroundings in blank wonder. In fact, I appear to have spent my first twenty-four hours in the hospital much like most ICU patients do, in a blur of wakefulness and sleep. In those first waking moments, as I surveyed myself and my surroundings, no one—least of all me—knows what thoughts entered my mind, if any. Most likely, I didn’t know who I was, or where I was, or why I was there. I probably didn’t recognize my own arms and legs, or the television hanging
from the wall, or the window, or the door. Everything would have been unfamiliar.

So many questions occurred to me as I read through all of these entries in my medical records. How can someone be
alert
and
lethargic
at the same time? Did I know what
menstruating
was? Did I even notice? How exactly was I verbalizing? What
appropriate
questions did I ask? Did I know enough to grasp that I was even supposed to know who I was, and where I was, and what the names of the items in my room were, and what purpose they served? I was, in all probability, as bewildered as a newborn.

That morning was Monday, May 23. When Jim arrived at the hospital, he spoke to the duty nurse and learned that I had survived the night. “The worst had passed, for me, at that moment,” he recalls. “My prayers had been answered. However, I had no idea what was coming.”

But another nurse gently prepared him: “Your wife doesn’t know her name.” Jim walked into my room, where the lights had been dimmed to ease the pain in my head. He greeted me. He says he knew right away that I didn’t recognize him. I looked at him, but I did not reward him, or anyone else, with so much as a flash of recognition. But at that moment Jim was preoccupied by the simple fact that I was alive.

“I guess I was so relieved that you were breathing and opening your eyes that it didn’t hit me until later that something was profoundly wrong,” he recalls. “It hadn’t sunk in yet, the extent to which you weren’t really there. I didn’t even think about it. You woke up. So to me it wasn’t like there had been any loss.”

Dr. Wheeler, the ace neurosurgeon, had left a report. It said I had stabilized; there was no need for surgery. Jim called his parents again, and mine: “The worst has passed. She’s still here.” I am still
not at all convinced that anybody had a clue how bad the worst had been. Or would be.

The formal diagnosis from Dr. Wheeler states that I suffered a “minor closed-head injury” and a “possible cerebral concussion,” neither of which sounded very bad. Dr. Wheeler gives a similarly muted account of the injury: “When the patient was first struck on the head, [she] was not immediately knocked out, but became drowsy, nauseated, and she complained of a funny feeling in her arms and her leg felt heavy,” he wrote. “The patient continues to complain of tingling in her left hand and weakness on her left side, [and] headache.” The hospital records “grossly understated the impact on your life,” Jim recalls, “because they couldn’t see it.”

A computed tomography (CT) scan of my brain that day showed swelling over the “right frontal area” and “some gas in the soft tissue,” suggesting “a laceration of the frontal area of the scalp.” Notes from Dr. Wheeler’s physical examination describe me as “awake, lethargic.” Dr. Wheeler attempted to give me an MRI to get a better look at my brain. But I was “unable to tolerate” the test, owing to “headache and noise.” It apparently sounded to me like someone was pounding on a metal trash can inside my head.

The next three weeks brought “endless assessment,” Jim recalls, a parade of occupational therapists, speech therapists, and cognitive therapists and neurologists, measuring my vital signs, my motor skills and reflexes, my diminished arm and leg strength, my ability to sit up without falling back over. A social worker was assigned as my care coordinator and she met regularly with other members of my care “team” to assess my progress and to develop a course of therapy.

“The right side of your face and the left side of your body were paralyzed to the point where you couldn’t eat properly or sit in a chair,” Jim recalls. “You couldn’t feed yourself. You couldn’t hold a spoon. Not that you even understood what a spoon was.”

Jim says that I seemed overly sensitive to everything around me. Light, noise, movement—everything hurt. And I became upset every time I saw anybody enter my room. It was frustrating to the point of physical pain for me to try to tell a story again and again to each new nurse or therapist, when I had such a limited vocabulary and no real memory of what had happened.

Jim recalls spending most of the first week in the hospital. He felt profoundly protective of me and tried his damnedest to keep things around me quiet and calm. Jim asked if the hospital could have the same people assigned to my care every day. But every day, new nurses would arrive. They would turn all the lights up, and I would wince in pain.

“The frustrating thing was having to explain to every caregiver the whole story again and again,” Jim recalls. “There was this presumption, looking at you, that you’d be able to do X, Y, and Z. And you simply couldn’t. And then the doctors would get frustrated, the nurses would get frustrated, the therapists would get frustrated. You didn’t understand.”

Jim also vividly recalls the exact moment he realized the depth of my injury. At some point a nurse or therapist came with what looked like a toddler’s board book that included nothing but colors and shapes. She sat with me and tested me: “Su, this is a red square. Turn the page. Su, what was on the previous page?” And I responded, “I don’t know.” Jim and the woman shared a look. “And that’s the point when I realized just how whacked things were,” Jim says.

My mother arrived on the evening of Tuesday, May 24. Jim met her at the airport. “We went out to supper,” she recalls. “And then he took me to the garage to show me the fan that had fallen on your head. He said, ‘This is what hit her.’ And I said, ‘Lord have mercy.’ ” Mom says she stayed until the weekend, mostly babysitting the boys so Jim could spend time at the hospital. She doesn’t remember much of that visit. She recalls that “you had no idea who I was” when she first visited me in the hospital. But she also remembers the two of us carrying on conversations at my bedside. “I think what went through my mind when I saw you was, ‘Well, Su has had this terrible accident, but she always bounces back from everything, and she’s going to be okay.’ ”

May 25 was Jim’s and my wedding anniversary. Barb, my eldest sister, customarily called me on that day. But this time, when she tried to call, “there was something wrong with the phone. The call wouldn’t go through,” Barb recalls. She kept trying, and then she tried again on the twenty-sixth. “And my mother answered the phone,” Barb recalls. “And that was odd, because my parents and Jim didn’t get along. They hadn’t approved of the marriage. I probably said something like, ‘Why are you there? Where’s Su?’ And she said that you were in the hospital.” Mom told Barb there had been an accident, and that I had been in a coma and in the ICU.

“I was shocked and freaked out,” Barb recalls. “And I remember thinking, ‘Why had nobody told me in the first place?’ ” That night, Barb made a note in her journal:
Why??? Dear God, Please be with Su
.

Barb asked her boss for time off from work. They sat together in her office and prayed for me. Then, on Saturday, May 28, she and her husband, Scott, awoke at dawn and drove 850 miles from
Urbana, Illinois, to Fort Worth. That evening, Jim took them to see me.

“We walked into the room, and it was you, but you showed no signs of recognition of us,” she recalls. “I will never, ever forget you looking at me and not knowing who I was. It was horrible. I said, ‘I’m your sister, Barb.’ And you said, ‘Oh, okay,’ like we were new people to you.”

The boys were making noise, and Barb says that I seemed overtaxed, as if “you didn’t know how to deal with all of this input.” The nurse brought in a meal tray, placed it in front of me, and left. Barb remembers that I, with my weakened left side, couldn’t peel the Saran Wrap off of the containers by myself.

“You looked perfectly fine,” Barb recalls. “You had about an inch-long cut on your forehead, and that’s the only thing that looked different about you. It was just a little red stripe. There wasn’t even a bandage. There was nothing, except for the vacant look in your eyes.” My speech was slow. What I said was pretty low level. Very simple. Barb says I seemed to think that I
should
know who Jim and the kids were, but there wasn’t that connection. There was nothing. “It was all very superficial and all very ‘now’ kind of talk, because there wasn’t anything else. We were never in your room for more than an hour. We could tell that us being there, especially the boys being there . . . we could tell that that was just too overwhelming.”

Barb recalls Jim’s being hard on the hospital staff: “He’s the kind of person who, if he feels like something’s not going the way it should, he’ll make his voice heard in an aggressive sort of way. I think there were times in the hospital when he expected things to go differently, and he made it very clear that he expected things to be different.”

Jim’s
biggest complaint with the hospital staff was over the times I fell or slipped out of my chair. “You were always a very headstrong person. It’s hard to know how many of your falls were just you taking risks,” Barb says. “But I think Jim immediately blamed the staff for everything that wasn’t perfect about your care.”

Meanwhile, in the hospital, the extent of the damage my brain had suffered was becoming clearer day by day, as my hospital records show:

Before dawn, a nurse notes that I am “awake, responding well to orientation questions, much less lethargic, initiating conversation quite well.” Later in the morning, another nurse notes that I am complaining of double vision and a headache that “never goes away.”

A new neurologist, Dr. Guillermo Antonio Guzman, arrives and examines me. He writes, “I think with
positive
physical therapy/occupational therapy/speech input and support, she will improve over time. I’ve told her control of life cannot be complete but that she will have to [resume] activity anyway.” He instructs someone to “try and get an objective idea” of my diminished strength on my left side. “Be positive; express doubts to me,” he writes. He notes that I complain of a “constant, throbbing headache” as well as photophobia, nausea, and dizziness that comes whenever I sit up or swing my feet over the side of the bed. He also notes, “Memory short/long-term poor, but improving.” Dr. Guzman recommends that I be assigned “memory exercises.”

A rehabilitation doctor, Dr. Wilson Garcia, visits me. “Standing and sitting balance are poor,” he notes. “She does not walk. She needs assistance with her ABCs.” On the brighter side, I start to “control bladder and bowels.”

An occupational therapist, Andrea Clark, assesses my ADL skills, or “activities of daily living”: I “refused to sit up” because of dizziness and headaches. I require “a minimal assist” to eat, but I am able to brush my teeth unaided. I show short- and long-term memory problems in dealing with the world around me, and I have difficulty counting by twos. A neurological test finds me “unable to differentiate hot and cold, sharp from dull” on my left arm and leg.

Dr. Garcia notes, “Patient is more alert today. She is talking more and smiling. She is progressing well,” although “she is not walking yet.”