Not Without Hope (18 page)

Adam Best, the
Tornado
’s emergency medical technician, and David Earles, the rescue swimmer, helped guide the man to the executive officer’s bathroom, where he was dried off, stripped of his wet clothing, placed in a pair of Coast Guard coveralls, covered in wool blankets, and given a pair of sandals. The sandals were generally given to migrants plucked out of the water on rafts or small boats. The biggest pair aboard the
Tornado
was a size twelve. This man wore a fifteen.

His temperature was 89.5 degrees, well below the normal 98.6. His breathing was somewhat labored. He complained of being cold and his lips were turning blue. His skin felt cool and clammy. He seemed to be going into the early stages of shock. He also had pain in his legs. He had minor cuts on his legs; the salt water was making them feel worse than they actually were.

Best asked the man standard questions to gauge his alertness. He seemed mostly coherent. He knew his name, Nick Schuyler. He knew where he was and even what month
it was, but he could not remember at the moment who was president of the United States.

“As long as he had been out there, he was in better shape than I thought he would be,” Best, who was twenty-one, said. “He would laugh, and then he would remember what happened and get serious again.”

Michael Briner, the chief boatswain’s mate, asked Nick his name again and confirmed that he had been with NFL players. It was a bad storm. There could have been more than one capsized boat. The Coast Guard wanted to make sure it was on the right case.

The
Tornado
phoned the Coast Guard station in St. Petersburg.

“We got him,” an officer said to Captain Timothy Close, commander of the St. Petersburg station.

They switched to secure communications.

“Who is he?” Captain Close asked.

He wanted Schuyler’s name double-checked. If he was hallucinating and calling out his buddies’ names, there could be a mix-up. The
Tornado
reported that Schuyler had a backpack with his wallet inside, verifying his identification.

Nick wanted water, but Best gave him only sips. He didn’t want to cause him to go into shock. Plus, Nick was already dehydrated, and if he drank too much and threw up, he could become even more dehydrated.

“You’re killing me,” Nick kept saying. “Just give me the water.”

“You gotta take it slow,” Best kept replying.

Nick kept saying his chode hurt.

“Please specify,” Earles, the rescue swimmer, told Nick. “I don’t know what that is.”

His taint, Nick explained. He meant the perineum, the area between his scrotum and anus, which was in extreme pain from sitting on the keel for two days.

O
ne guy asked me, “The others are gone?”

“They’re gone.”

“Do you know where they would have been?”

“No, they’re gone.”

“Where did the boat flip?”

“Seventy miles straight out of Clearwater.”

I had floated almost thirty-five miles.

I was leaning against a wall in the bathroom of the ship. I didn’t want to sit because of my butt, but it was hard to stand because my feet were so sore and my legs were so weak.

When they took my jacket off and my sweatshirt and T-shirt, I could see every single muscle in my stomach. I was shredded. I had deep grooves between the muscles. It looked like I had worked on my abs five hours a day for five weeks. I had zero body fat. I couldn’t grab on to the skin. Shit, not bad, I thought to myself.

They gave me a couple small bottles of water. As soon as it would hit my lips, the guy would grab the bottle. I was pissed.

“What are you doing?”

“You can’t drink too much too fast.”

“I haven’t had any for two days.”

“Too much is not good for you.”

I wanted to push him away and chug it, but he was holding me, and I didn’t have the strength.

I asked for a shower and one guy said, “No. We can’t raise your temperature too fast, it could kill you.”

A guy said they had to get my swim shorts off, but I couldn’t lift my right leg, it was so stiff. I looked down: I was a bloody, scabby mess. My penis looked like I was a newborn. It had wrinkles everywhere, a big red strawberry on the head, all of it from nailing the motor. The inside of my legs were full of bruises, cuts, and scabs, all very raw and soggy-looking. I touched my groin and skin came off. I was embarrassed. I slouched as much as I could and they got me another blanket. They gave me a little water. I wanted more.

When they took my clothes off, I felt even colder than when I was in the water. I was naked and shivering. I started getting feeling back in places I had lost it. Someone asked me again, “The other guys didn’t make it?”

“No,” I said. “They’re gone.”

“How did the boat flip?”

“The anchor got stuck.”

The water they gave me felt like it was a hundred degrees, like bathwater. I wanted ten gallons of cold water, not teeny sips of bathwater. I was excited to be alive, but I had that same guilty feeling. Why weren’t my best friend and Marquis and Corey on this ship with me?

They told me a helicopter was on the way and that I’d be airlifted out in a basket. I was scared. A guy said a couple times in a stern voice, “We need to get his temperature up now. We can’t let it drop anymore.” They kept giving me new, dry blankets.

A guy asked if I was okay. The conversations were short. I could barely stand. From my navel to my lower back, around my butt, it felt like my skin had been ripped off with a knife.

Two guys held me while I put a blue jumpsuit on. It was three
sizes too small, but the biggest they had. I wasn’t complaining, except that I was cold and wanted water.

They walked me outside. I could barely stand on my feet. The sandals they gave me were way too small. My thighs rubbed together, and it felt like the skin was rubbing off.

When the door to the outside opened, I felt a shot of cold air. My teeth were chattering. I could hear the helicopter hovering over the boat. It was getting louder and louder, real rough out. I was colder than I had been on the overturned boat. A guy hugged me and held a blanket around me.

“Hold on a little longer.”

He was screaming and I could barely hear him.

“Another minute,” he said, “we’ll get you in the basket.”

I looked up while they were lowering it, and I thought no way I could fit in that thing. It was about four feet long with a bar looped over the middle, attached to the cable from the chopper. Water was spraying up into the air, and I was so cold that I could barely stand it. They held up my feet and I flopped into the basket and hit my butt—it hurt so bad. There were a million things I wanted to say or scream, but I held it in.

“You’ll be all right!” a guy yelled. “Don’t move—just hold on!”

Then I was being hoisted up, and people on the boat were staring at me, waving and giving me the thumbs-up. I gave the thumbs-up with my right hand.

I had been on the ship for an hour. When I got up to the helicopter it was windy and even louder. I was so cold. I thought I was going to die from freezing. The chopper guys grabbed me and pulled me inside, still in the basket, slouched over. I wished I was the only one who went into this situation. It would be a good story to tell later, but one out of four is not a good score for anything.

Kevin Lajeunesse, Coast Guard petty officer second class, had been on a shoreline search with his helicopter crew for twenty or thirty minutes. They received a message that the cutter
Tornado
had found one of the missing boaters. The helicopter headed thirty-five miles west of St. Petersburg. A C-130 cargo plane was in the area, looking for survivors and had spotted a couple of things of interest. The helicopter made a low flyover and saw no signs of movement. It then headed for the
Tornado.

“They were like, ‘This guy needs medical attention,’” Lajeunesse said. ‘ “Can you guys hoist him and bring him to Tampa General?’”

Lajeunesse hoisted the man into the chopper and asked him if he was Will Bleakley. He had known from friends that Will was one of the missing boaters.

The man shook his head no.

“How are you doing?” Lajeunesse asked him. “What happened?”

The man said that hypothermia had set in. Corey
Smith had taken off his life jacket. He was traumatized. His eyes weren’t right. He sank like a rock. Will had possibly seen a light on the horizon.

The Coast Guard took the man’s vital signs. His temperature was rising, but 93 was still low. His skin was scabbed up and covered with dry salt. He looked beaten up and tired. Lajeunesse gave him water. He gulped it down. He was still covered in a thick wool blanket. Lajeunesse directed excess heat that bled off the engine—bleed air, it was called—at the man’s head and feet.

I
n the chopper they asked me the same questions that they did on the ship: How many others? Where are they? Where could they be? Where did you dock out of? How far did you go out?

They gave me three big bottles of water. I was so weak, I didn’t want to lift the bottle. I tipped my head back and let the water fall in my mouth.

“Are you sure your friends didn’t make it?” someone asked.

“I’m sure,” I said.

They asked me if the other guys were wearing life jackets. I said they did but that they had slipped them off.

We were on our way to Tampa General Hospital. I asked if my family and girlfriend had been notified.

“They’ll be there.”

I had headphones on and it was loud and staticky from time to time. About twenty or thirty minutes after we left the cutter, we landed at the hospital. I grabbed the basket and tried to push myself to my feet. One of the Coast Guard guys helped to lift me up. I saw a couple of guys running out with a stretcher. I was warmer than on the boat, but I was still very cold. I tried to turn myself to one side to keep the pressure off my butt. It was killing me.

All of a sudden I saw reporters and microphones and cameras. I felt like an actor going into a building and everyone is attacking him. It was confusing. One of the reporters yelled, “Where are the others?” Somebody else asked, “How are you feeling?” The rest was just one voice on top of another. Next thing I knew, I was in the ER. They cut my jumpsuit off, threw IVs in both my arms, checked my pulse, and hooked me up to a heart monitor. I could hear machines beeping. I was out of it. I was so cold and exhausted. All I wanted to do was drink water, warm up, and go to bed.

I asked where my family was. They were in the waiting room. I had to see them right away.

As the sun came up on this Monday morning, Kristen Schuyler grabbed one of her brother’s sweatshirts and put it on. At least she would have a part of Nick wrapped around her. Her mother, Marcia, did the same thing. Marcia Schuyler also put on a pair of Nick’s socks as she sat in the living room of his house, in his favorite recliner, crying, praying, flipping through the channels, still clenching her fists and saying, “Come on, Nick, you can do it.”

Early in the morning, Marcia said to her daughter, “Kris, we’re in trouble.”

“Mom, don’t say that,” Kristen replied.

Marcia called the Coast Guard and was told that the waves were receding in the Gulf. Boats would be arriving at the search site. At least that was good news.

Paula Oliveira walked into the living room, saw the worry on the faces of Nick’s mother and sister, who had not gone to sleep, and said, “Oh, my God, what’s wrong? Did you guys hear something?”

“No,” Kristen said, “we haven’t heard anything. That’s the point.”

For a long time, Kristen went outside and sat in the driver’s side of Nick’s Jeep, staring at a guardian angel that was attached to the visor. She had bought it for her brother, hoping it would protect him on the road.

The house began filling with Nick’s friends, people going in and out. Paula took her three dogs for a walk. The pets seemed to be crowding around her in the house, as if they sensed that something was wrong in Nick’s absence. Paula took them down the street and prayed as she went along. She came home feeling more encouraged.

“All right, I’m going to go shower,” Paula said to the dozen friends who sat around the living room and the kitchen. “When Nick comes home today, I’m going to have to look clean and good.”

Everyone laughed, if nervously.

A couple of hours later, Paula took the dogs for another walk. Her mother went with her. Marcia Schuyler cried off and on. She knew that Nick would keep fighting. She remembered how he had played basketball in high school with a broken nose. He had taken off his bloody jersey and put a clean one on and had gone right back in the game until he became dizzy and the coach had to pull him out. He had played that same game with a severely sprained ankle, refusing to get an X-ray. He was not the kind to give up. But he was in the Gulf and he had been gone for two days. Kristen sat with Marcia and held her hand and told her that everything was going to be okay. But Marcia was nearly hysterical.

“They have to find him today,” she told Kristen. “If they don’t find him today, they won’t find him.”

“Mom, don’t say that,” Kristen said. “They’ll find him.”

Marcia took a shower and went back to the television in Nick’s living room, changing channels, terrified.

“You gotta stop watching this,” Ben Busbee, one of Nick’s friends and a tight end on the USF football team, told her.

Kristen spoke with Nate Milstead, another of Nick’s friends, the cop from Akron. “You know your brother,” he reassured her. “He’s out there, he’s fighting.”

Kristen’s boyfriend was with her, along with one of her best friends from college. They needed some fresh air and went for a walk, taking their cell phones along. Kristen tried to get her mother to come along, but Marcia said no, she didn’t want to leave the house. There might be some news.

“Okay,” Kristen said, trying again to reassure her mother. “Watch, you’ll get a call when we’re all outside.”

It was still cool around noon, but the sun was out and the wind had subsided. Kristen had kept sending out mass text messages, asking for prayers for her brother, trying to sound upbeat, but she had been irked by some of the replies. “Why did they go out there?” some asked. It might have been a legitimate question, but now was not the time. Some of the questions were just ignorant: “Where are they?” If she knew where Nick and his friends were, she wouldn’t be asking for prayers that they be found.

Five minutes after she left Nick’s house, she got another message: “They just found a guy. Maybe that could be your brother.”

Kristen’s knees went weak. The message wasn’t from someone whom she considered a reliable source. The person wasn’t even in Tampa. But Kristen started running, crying, her legs giving out, trying to get back to the house as fast as she could.

As she ran, her father called.

“They found somebody,” Stu Schuyler said. “It’s Nick, they found Nick.”

“Are you sure?” Kristen asked.

“It has to be,” he said.

Kristen kept running. She got to the house and saw Paula outside.

“They found somebody,” Kristen said.

Paula knew already. She told Kristen not to go inside. Her mother was a mess. She was falling apart.

Marcia Schuyler had learned of a rescue from Scott Miller, a friend of Nick’s and Will’s. He had rushed into the living room and said, “They found somebody, turn on Channel 9.”

Marcia tried to change the channel, but she was a wreck and couldn’t push the buttons on the remote control. Ben Busbee helped her and she saw a news crawl that said one person had been found alive, sitting on the boat.

“It’s gotta be Nick!” she screamed, hopeful and crying.

Paula had been next door and had rushed over when she heard the scream. Busbee was holding Marcia up on the sofa. It seemed as if everyone had seen a ghost.

“What, what?” Paula yelled.

They told her that one person had been found alive. He was hanging on to the boat.

“No one lose hope,” Paula said. “Everybody pray.”

Paula called the Coast Guard station in St. Petersburg. Was it true? Was one man found?

Yes, it was true.

“Alive?”

“Yes.”

Paula asked if the man had a tattoo on his back,
a Chinese symbol that meant “sky.” That was Nick’s nickname.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” the man at the Coast Guard station said.

They hung up. There was still no confirmed identity.

Marcia sat in the living room, crying, saying over and over, “It’s gotta be Nick. If it’s anybody, it would be Nick.”

She felt bad for Scott Miller, who was a childhood friend of Will Bleakley’s, but Nick was her son and she couldn’t give up hope. Kristen hoped it was Nick, too, but one out of four had been found, the television said. There was only a 25 percent chance it would be her brother.

At the St. Petersburg Coast Guard station, Captain Timothy Close received a phone call from Stu Schuyler.

“I heard on the news you found somebody,” Stu said. “Is it Nick?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“He’s told us several times who he is, and we’re going to believe him,” Captain Close said.

Nick was on a Coast Guard cutter and would be airlifted to Tampa General Hospital. Stu Schuyler was at home in Tarpon Springs. His sister was with him. He hung up the phone and ran outside yelling. She chased after him.

“Is it good or bad?” his sister asked.

“Good,” Stu said. “They found him.”

Captain Close then phoned Marcia Schuyler and introduced himself. She got off the couch and walked through the kitchen to the deck of Nick’s house.

“Did you find my son?” Marcia asked.

“Yes, ma’am, we did,” he replied.

“It’s Nick? Are you sure it’s Nick?”

Marcia screamed, “They found Nick,” then she passed out and dropped her cell phone.

“Hello? Hello?” Captain Close said on the other end.

Marcia awakened with a towel on her forehead. Kristen Schuyler called Captain Close back. Marcia got on the phone.

“I know he knows his name,” she told Captain Close. “You have to make sure.”

She feared that the survivor might be Will. He might be delirious and uttering Nick’s name instead of his own. She couldn’t bear to show up at the hospital or the Coast Guard station to greet Nick and walk in to find that it was Will. She felt guilty and selfish for thinking that way, but she was a mother who was desperate to find her son.

“We found your son,” Captain Close assured her. “It’s Nick.”

Paula called the Coast Guard again, just to confirm it for herself. Yes, it was Nick. Everyone was hugging and crying and later Paula noticed that Scott Miller had gone outside. He had gone to high school with Will. One of Scott’s friends, Nick, had been found, but Will had not been. Scott sat on his pickup, alone, his head down.

Marcia, Paula, and Kristen were driven to Tampa General Hospital, where they met with Stu. On the way, Stu got a call from a friend in Ohio, Bill Lally, who had been the best man at his wedding to Marcia. Bill was watching videotaped footage of the rescue. “I’m watching your son being lifted into a chopper as we speak,” Bill said. “He looks fine.”

“Are you sure it’s Nick?” Stu asked.

“I’ve met Nick,” Bill said. “I know what he looks like. It’s Nick.”

At the hospital, Stu rushed in so quickly that it felt as if he knocked the emergency room doors off their tracks. Marcia asked to see her son, the missing boater who had been found. Frantically, she decided to look for the helipad and began running down a hallway. A security guard stopped her.

“They just found my son,” she said. “I need to get to him.”

Just wait here a minute, the security guard said. He would find out where they had taken Nick. A few minutes later, a nurse appeared and said, “Come with me.”

Marcia walked down a hallway into a room in Urgent Care and saw Nick lying on a bed, hooked up to intravenous tubes. It seemed as if a couple of doctors were on each side of him. It felt surreal to her. She was standing there, looking at her son, but she wasn’t there at the same time.

She stood and watched for a minute or two, then began to make her way to Nick’s side. She touched his hand. It felt cold. She bent down and kissed him and said, “God, Nick, you scared the hell out of me.”

“I know, I know,” he said.

He put his hand on top of his mother’s. Marcia had tried to be strong, but now she was sobbing. Nick patted her hand, comforting her, as if to say, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Marcia stood on his left side. Nick had his head turned. He opened his eyes and said, “Do you know what kept me going the whole time?”

Does he know who I am? Marcia wondered. Is he delirious? Does he think I’m Paula and he’s about to say something I shouldn’t hear?

“I wasn’t going to let you go to my funeral,” Nick said. “I knew it would kill you, Mom.”

Marcia was crying and shaking. “I’m so proud of you,” she told Nick. “I’m so glad you didn’t give up.”

She tried to hug her son, but someone in the room suggested she leave, saying it was urgent that they take care of Nick. On a tray, Marcia saw the cross that Nick had worn around his neck. She took it as she walked out.

Later, Marcia returned to see Nick, along with Paula, Kristen, and Stu. This time Nick was giving a statement to the Coast Guard and to an investigator from the Florida Wildlife and Fisheries Commission. His eyes were mostly closed. When he opened them, Paula noticed, they rolled back in his head. His lips were crusted with salt. She could hear the dryness in his voice.

“Hi, babe,” she said. Nick grabbed her hand and told her he loved her. She wasn’t crying, but she was nervous, both because of the officials in the room and because Nick’s eyes would sometimes roll back.

“Kisses,” Nick said, and Paula gave him a kiss.

They talked for a few minutes. He asked about the dogs. As Paula was leaving the room, Nick said, “Babe, come here.”

“Closer,” he said.

“I’m gonna marry you,” Nick told Paula.

As she left the room, he waggled his right index finger. It was part of a goofy ritual that he performed when he was trying to be funny.

“Feeling pretty good,” Nick said.

Kristen noticed that Nick had been bleeding. Struggling to keep his eyes open, he asked, “Who’s in here?” Kristen said, “Hi, Nick,” and kissed him. His skin was salty and his toes felt icy. He seemed thin, pale, dehydrated, and he struggled to talk. When investigators asked him about the other guys on the boat, he shook his head, saying they were all gone.

A few moments after Paula and Kristen left the room, there was a report on television, an unconfirmed report, that a second fisherman had been found, Marquis Cooper. For a moment, Kristen doubted her brother. Maybe he was hallucinating.

“Nick, they found Marquis,” Kristen later told him.

“No, they didn’t,” he said.

“Nick, it’s on the news.”

“Kris, no,” Nick said. “He died in my arms. They’re not going to find him.”

When Nick arrived at Tampa General, his body temperature had risen to 95 degrees. He seemed a bit confused, but otherwise “was not in that bad a condition,” according to Dr. Mark Rumbak, the critical care specialist who examined him. There was some concern about damage to the muscles in his legs from the cold and from banging against the boat. His blood platelet count was also low.

“The whole of his lower limbs was one big bruise,” Dr. Rumbak said. He had the hospital’s vascular experts check to make sure that swelling in Nick’s legs had not compromised the blood supply. As was common with
patients in intensive care, Nicks’ legs were fitted with a cufflike compression device to stimulate blood flow and to prevent clots from forming.

Nick’s body temperature when found had been variously measured at 88.8 to 89.5 degrees. This is known as moderate hypothermia. Sometimes doctors purposely lower to this temperature the bodies of patients suffering from stroke, acute liver failure, cardiac arrest, or acute brain injury. It was a therapeutic measure that decreased the body’s metabolism, reducing the need for oxygen.

Nick probably could have lived another six to twelve hours in the Gulf, Dr. Rumbak said. He was not quite at the point where he was nearing death. And because his temperature had risen steadily as he changed out of his wet clothes on the cutter
Tornado
and wrapped himself in wool blankets, there was no need to inject him with warm fluids at the hospital. His platelet count would rise to normal levels and the bruises would heal on his legs. Still, one issue defied any exact medical explanation: How had Nick survived when the others had not?

“I have no idea,” Dr. Rumbak said. “These people were all very fit. They were basically the same age and the same size. I don’t think most people would have survived this. I think it is a miracle in a way.”