My Life, Deleted (3 page)

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.