Iron Heart: The True Story of How I Came Back From the Dead (10 page)

He tells me it was gut-wrenching. “It was the first time as parents that there was not a thing that we could do for you. You already looked like you were dead.”

When I hear that word, “dead,” I almost don’t want to know what comes next. But he says that they stumbled back to the waiting room, unable to describe what they had seen to the others. They were in a state of shock. Everyone left for the night, but they stayed in the waiting room. My dad was still in his work clothes, with concrete chips in his hair. They couldn’t leave. A little while later, a physician’s assistant by the name of Mary Kate came over to speak with them. She was a serious professional medical person who had seen everything during her career. She said that she needed to ask a few questions about me: my age, existing medical conditions, and so on. She asked them if I was their only child. Yes, they said. Tears rolled out of her eyes. Then she left, and they waited, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, in silence. There was another woman in the waiting room with them. Her husband had fallen off a ladder while he was working on their home and hit his head.

Dad says that around one in the morning, Dr. Daee walked in. He was the lead surgeon when I arrived at the trauma unit by helicopter. It was their first meeting with him. He tried to be positive without going into extreme details. He then left and they continued sitting there, in quiet disbelief, for the rest of the night while watching the door to the trauma ward, fearing that if it opened, they would hear that I had passed away.

My dad stops talking and I try to find some words to respond to everything I’ve just heard, but I can only sit with my hands crossed and head bent in silent reflection. My mom tries to lighten the mood by looking at her watch and saying that it’s almost time for my next session of therapy, where I will relearn basic skills such as tying a shoe, putting on clothes, using the toilet.

My parents wheel me back to the physical therapy room. It’s the first time that they have been in here. I say hello to Gerry, who is working with his therapist.

A new therapist walks over to greet us. Her name is Jamie and she is gorgeous, with blonde hair down to her shoulders. I’m excited to start the session, especially with a beautiful therapist at my side. “I think I’m starting to like this place,” I whisper to my parents.

Jamie sits down in a chair next to a table and reviews my medical file. She then asks about my injuries. I explain that I’m having trouble with my tailbone and my left arm. She tells me to lift my left and right arms on command. She proceeds to measure the strength in my hands with a mechanical gripping device that shows output in watts of power. I feel my blood pressure rising, and not just because of the physical exertion. Jamie’s beauty is overwhelming.

Next up is measuring the strength of my arm muscles. She wraps the same blood pressure contraption around my neck that I used with Karen and places the analyzing device around my fingertip. She gives me a twoand-a-half-pound dumbbell and asks me to do some bicep curls with my right arm. I look at the weight, thinking it should be easy, but as I start to lift it, my arm feels odd and weak. This is a huge blow to my self-esteem because three months earlier, I was able to curl fifty pounds per arm for repetitions; and now here I am barely able to lift this ridiculously small weight. I try to shrug off my frustration with laughter. I guess Jamie won’t be impressed by my weightlifting prowess.

It’s time to test my legs. Jamie wheels me over to two waist-high, parallel-to-the-ground metal poles and helps me out of the wheelchair. As I stand up, I feel dizzy and hold onto the poles for support. Meanwhile, Jamie wraps a belt around my waist for added security. My pulse is racing.

I wait until I’m calmer before I take my first step. I concentrate, then put weight on my right foot as I slide it forward a few inches. With Jamie’s encouragement, I try the same thing with my left foot, moving it forward another few inches. I repeat with my right foot, then left, and so on. I make my way to the middle of the poles—a distance of five feet—and I am winded. My legs ache with fatigue. Jamie tells me to turn around slowly so I can return to the wheelchair. As I rotate to my left, I see for the first time that there is a full-size mirror next to the parallel poles. In its reflection is a skeletal-looking boy. Who can that be? He’s Holocaust survivor-thin. There is no way it’s me. I couldn’t have lost
that
much weight. I slowly raise my hand to confirm my denial, but the hand in the reflection also raises, just like that mirror scene in the Marx Brothers’
Duck Soup.

Suddenly, thousands of tiny bright lights explode in my brain and my legs buckle. I start to fall, but Jamie quickly yanks the restraining belt to hold me up and the poles snag my armpits, where I dangle like a useless puppet without its master. As if from a great distance, I hear Jamie shouting for help. Moments later, I pass out.

When I come to, I realize that I’m still in the physical therapy room. Jamie is talking quietly to me, dabbing my forehead with a moist towel. I have no energy except to wanly return her smile. But deep down, I can’t escape the grotesque image of seeing myself in the mirror. I lean back against the wheelchair’s headrest, letting my head hang loosely as I gaze at the ceiling with my mouth open, making a sick groaning sound. I feel eyes watching me from all around, but I don’t care.

My parents arrive and Jamie walks over to greet them, saying that I did surprisingly well and covered a lot of ground. I wonder if Jamie will tell them that I blacked out. She doesn’t. Nor will I. My parents look happy. Why spoil their mood?

They wheel me out of the physical therapy room and down the light-colored tile hallways. We turn into a small cafeteria area and buy an ice cream cone to celebrate my first day at rehab even though there were mixed results. I keep quiet about who or what I saw in the mirror. We move outside to a secluded place on the center’s grounds and find ourselves by a small pond stocked with koi. This must be a meditation garden where patients and family can seek tranquility, because in this place of wrecked bodies and smashed dreams, that peace is priceless.

Between small bites of chocolate ice cream, I ask my parents who is going to stay with me tonight. My dad says that he will. It’s still midafternoon, so we have time to relax. As we watch the colorful fish swim in lazy looping circles, I ask him to continue talking about those first days in Intensive Care. He looks uncomfortable, but after some hesitation, he begins where he last left off. “In the morning, your mom and I were wide-awake in the waiting room, just waiting and waiting. The ICU door finally opened, but the doctor went over to the woman sitting next to us and he asked her to come with him to the adjoining room. Seconds later, we heard her loud cries of pain. We hoped that we would never have to be taken to the ‘debriefing room.’”

A nurse named Kay then came out to tell them that I had made it through the night but I was still in very critical condition. They still didn’t know the full extent of my injuries. She took them back to Room 19, where once again, I was surrounded by a small swarm of nurses, doctors, machines, feeding tubes, chest tubes, breathing tube, drip bags, a neck brace, canisters filled by drainage tubes. The raw surgical cuts on my chest were oozing bright red specks of blood. Everywhere else on my body were dark purple, almost black bruises and shattered cuts from broken glass. The sight took their breath away. Even though I was unconscious, I started thrashing around. The doctors and nurses tried holding me down while others ran into the room to assist. My parents left the room and watched through the glass window in complete silence. One of the nurses came running out of the room, asking, “What else can we give him? We have given him everything already.” When they looked back in the room, one of the doctor’s feet were off the ground, and I was pulling him onto the bed with my right arm. As I finally calmed down, they were left in sheer terror at what they had just witnessed.

What they witnessed, I can’t recall. Nothing, not the thrashing, not lifting the doctor off the ground with one arm. All of this seems too unbelievable. I wonder what other things Dad saw. I ask him to go on.

Kay told them that if I lived, it would be a roller-coaster ride. So my parents went back to the waiting room where some family and friends had arrived, and once again, they had no words to describe what they had just seen. All they could say was that I was still alive and fighting. My track coach Mr. Covey came and sat with me for quite a while. As things progressively got worse, the nurses said even though I was heavily sedated, the visits were agitating me to the point where they would have to give me more drugs to calm me down. At that point, my parents decided to end the visits. They asked everyone, including the family, to go home. It was a difficult decision to make and they felt bad about it.

“We had no rule book or guidance about how to handle this, or what we were supposed to do,” he says. “We met Dr. James Catevenis and Dr. William Boyce, more great men, the head doctors in Intensive Care. We came at them with questions from every angle hoping to get more information about your status, but it always produced the same response. Dr. Catevenis, looking very serious, would always say, ‘We’ll just have to wait and see.’ Sometimes, when Dr. Boyce would see us in the hospital hallway, he would turn and walk the other way to avoid us. Months later, he told us that he felt so bad for us, and there had been no definite answers about whether you would live or die. At the time, the doctors told us that they wanted to place you in a chemically induced coma to keep your body still. A nurse said that it might seem like they were torturing you with all the things they had to do to try to save you. Later that day, Dr. Daee came out and told us he would have to take you back into surgery because of internal bleeding.”

I ask my dad how long they stayed at the hospital before they finally went home. He tells me that they finally left the hospital on the third day to go home, clean up, change, and rush back to the hospital. It was hard walking into the house. My mom says, “Your cereal bowl was still on the table from the day of the accident. We went to your room. We sat on your bed, crying, never having felt so lonely in our lives. Home was not our happy place anymore. One of us was missing. It was an empty shell. Our lives completely stopped. Nothing existed in our world but you.”

I realize that I should change the subject. “Can we get some more ice cream?” Relieved, my parents wheel me back inside the building to the cafeteria. It’s been a long day. I have enough information for now.

I’
M BACK IN INTENSIVE CARE, STARING AT THE WHITECEILING, LISTENING TO faint beeping noises from the machines surrounding me. Why am I on life support and being pumped full of morphine? I’m in a total panic, and with adrenaline soaring, I pull out my bladder catheter. There’s a plastic tube going into the left side of my chest. I give it a gentle tug, just to see if it’s securely fastened. There’s a slight hesitation; it’s lodged deep within my body. But with more force, I pull it so hard that I hear a “pop” and it breaks loose; then I rip it out completely. Warm liquid spurts out, covering the bed and my hospital gown in blood. I search around for more tubes and find a thin one going into my nose. I wrap my fingers around the feeding tube and yank hard. It takes forever to pull it out. I grab the electrode wires connected to my arms, chest, stomach, and quickly detach them. I’m possessed with superhuman strength. I grab the blood pressure cuff on my left bicep, tearing off the Velcro strap and hurling it across the room. Then I come to the big round tube that goes into my mouth, I try to pull that one out, but there’s an uncomfortable sensation deep within my chest. So I shift focus to the plastic assembly connecting the two tubes through my throat. This is the ventilator and it’s routed to the pathways of my respiratory system. I don’t know if I can get these two tubes out, but I can’t stay in this bed any longer. It’s definitely a huge risk, but I grip the right railing and slide my right foot over the edge. If I can get off the bed and onto the floor, maybe the tubes will break free and I can crawl away. I can’t stay in this room any longer. If I don’t leave now, I don’t think I’ll ever make it out of here alive. I have to escape. Now is my only chance for freedom.

A nurse walks around the corner and sees me climbing out of the bed. She shouts for help. Soon there are several people grabbing me from all sides, but I fight them off, violently punching and kicking. I have the strength of five men. Machines are knocked over, a bag of intravenous fluid splashes on the floor. I’m being stabbed with needles—painkillers, sedatives, morphine—yet they feel like harmless pinpricks. In a fit of rage, I grab the largest man in the room, Dr. Catevenis, with my right arm and try to lift him up in the air.

Finally, my strength starts to ebb from all the drugs. I release the doctor. His feet find the floor. I soon grow numb and listless, resigned to the fact that I will never leave this room. The medication has foiled my plan. I lie back on the bed, glassy-eyed, defeated. The sheets are drenched in blood, sweat, and a tangle of disconnected medical wires and tubes. Nurses hurry to clean up the mess. They insert the tubes back in the side of my chest, and for safe measure they stitch them into my skin. They reattach the electrodes, heart rate monitor, blood pressure cuff, IVs, feeding tube, and catheter. My arms and legs are strapped down tightly over clean sheets.

The ceiling grows blurry. Industrial-strength painkillers are taking me to a faraway place. In the distance, I hear a familiar voice
.

“Brian? Son, are you awake?”

Huh? It takes me a few moments to realize that I just had a bad dream. I’m drenched in sweat. Room 19’s ceiling is in fact the ceiling of my Kernan room. It’s late afternoon, and the sun’s slanted rays fill the room with a soft light. I look over and see my dad sitting up in the bed on the other side of the room. It’s a comforting, reassuring sight.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I groggily nod yes, but as I try to shake off the effects of this naptime nightmare, I’m unsure how much was made up and how much was actually real. Was my memory trying to reconstruct itself from buried fragments? Did I really act that way in Room 19, like a caged beast fighting for its freedom? Will I ever remember what happened during those first few weeks in Intensive Care? Do I even want to go there? Isn’t it wiser to keep the past as far away as possible? Or does this mean that I can expect to have many more nightmares as my subconscious attempts to fill in all the missing elements? I can’t deny the obvious: any recollection from being in the coma is like a jigsaw puzzle with permanently missing pieces. Suddenly, I feel nauseous and vomit over the side of my bed. The acidic liquid burns as it gushes up through my throat and out my mouth. Red liquid puddles on the tile floor. I hope it’s not blood but the remnants from the fruit punch that I drank earlier. My dad hurries to get a towel to clean up the floor. He looks disgusted.

“Come on, Dad, you have to have a stronger stomach than that,” I joke, as he swabs up the vomit. He helps me change into a different shirt.

Several hours of daylight remain, so we decide to go outside. He lifts me out of the bed and helps me into the wheelchair. We’re soon rolling out the door and down the empty hallways. Every room we pass, I look inside. Most of the patients are alone. No friends, no family. They all look lonely. Then I think about Gerry, who lost his entire family.

We exit the building and say hello to the other patients in their wheelchairs. Tony’s wearing a hoodie even in the heat. I give him a highfive greeting.

My dad pushes me along down a new path. We approach a twostory building at the base of a small hill. This is the Traumatic Brain Injury Unit. We peer through the windows. In each room, there are several patients lying next to each other in separate beds. Each vegetative person is hooked up to machines whose digital readouts flash every few seconds. I can faintly hear the machine’s beeps, going on and off like a never-ending orchestra in their closed-off world. These patients’ chests automatically rise and fall from their ventilators. Their eyes are frozen wide-open. I ask my dad if that was how I looked when I was in a coma. He glumly nods yes.

When I was in Intensive Care, it was assumed that I might end up in the Traumatic Brain Injury Unit, which is the medical dumping ground for those who are neither living nor dead; it’s the final resting stop before the cemetery. I can easily see myself lying in one of those beds, my wide-open eyes like blank marbles. I can’t help but wonder if their brains are functional enough to allow any kind of thought, or if they have been too severely damaged. Only during the later stages of my coma was I able to regain a partial sense of my surroundings. I shudder to imagine being indefinitely trapped inside a walled-off cocoon, completely cut off from all human interaction. Yet that’s what many thought would be my fate. The kid in the coma. Me.

I have to get away from here. It’s too much to bear. Just then, a nurse catches us looking into the window, so she closes the blinds to block our view. Rebuked, we move down the path.

As we roll along, I ask Dad what it was like for him and Mom to spend day after day at the hospital, how they coped with the waiting, what they did.

He tells me that every day for two months, they did the same thing: woke up early, got to the hospital. Visiting hours were limited in ICU. They were allowed three one-hour visits daily, at 11:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., and 5:00 p.m., which were not enough. They’d stay all day and leave at eight o’clock. On most nights, they drove home in silence, neither wanting to talk about whether I was going to live. Every night at eleven o’clock and every morning at seven, they got a call from a nurse to give them my status. The hardest part was constantly hearing that “I was in God’s hands.“ My medical updates were always dismal. Things seemed to get worse as time went on. Every day there was something new, something worse.

I was never in a full-body cast for my broken bones. My parents asked the doctors why and were told that it was not a priority because my insides were so massacred. Too much internal injury had to be taken care of first.

My dad pauses and says, “You might not like to hear all this.”

“I need to know. I really do.”

“Here goes . . . ”

The list is endless; severe concussion; serious heart complications due to its having been jolted out of its normal position—it had moved several inches across my chest; my heart sac filled with blood; torn diaphragm; collapsed lungs; spleen removed; lacerated liver; kidney dialysis; bowels and intestines squeezed upward due to the sheer impact of the accident. My father tells me that he learned from one of the policeman at the accident scene that there was less than five inches of space between the car door and the front console; my shattered pelvis was compressed into that small space. The doctors said it was like a water balloon being squeezed, causing my bowels and intestines to shoot up through my body. There wasn’t an organ in my body in the right place, and every one was damaged or bruised. I had broken ribs and a broken clavicle, and possible spine and brain injuries. One day, as the nurses worked on me, the bed covers came off, exposing my naked body. My parents noticed that my testicles were the size of grapefruits and black as coal. This really freaked them out, but they were told that it was a symptom associated with severe blunt-force trauma in men.

I look at my dad, feeling embarrassed. But he continues.

“One surgeon by the name of Dr. Nafisy explained to us that when you were first brought into surgery and Dr. Daee cut open your chest, he had to lift up your heart and move it across your chest. Usually, Dr. Nafisy said, most hearts would have stopped, but yours kept beating.”

These details sweep over me like a tidal wave. I ask him how much blood I lost.

He tells me that by the time I arrived at the trauma unit by helicopter forty-five minutes after the accident, I had already lost about 60 percent of my total blood. I needed thirty-six blood transfusions and thirteen plasma treatments in Intensive Care.

I never knew I was that close to death. But there’s one more thing I want to find out—at least now. “Dad, did my heart ever give out in surgery or any other time?”

He doesn’t say anything for several minutes. I know it must be hard for him. Finally, he says, “To this day, your mom and I still don’t know all the specifics. Some of the nurses told us that your heart stopped seven or eight times during those two months in ICU. We never asked for more details, because frankly we just didn’t want to find out.”