Miles To Go Before I Sleep (12 page)

He smiled and bent down to hug me.

I passed out again.

My condition was a big relief to Scott. I wasn't drooling out of one side of my mouth or in some kind of hallucinogenic fog. And I wasn't blind, as the doctors expected me to be. I seemed basically normal and alert.

I can deal with this
, Scott thought to himself. He wouldn't have to kill the hijacker after all.

Scott's face was blurry when I looked up at him. But there was more to it; pieces of my visual field were also missing. I could only see straight ahead and to the right. Up, down, and to the left were blank. I figured the vision problem would clear up when my parents sent a new pair of contact lenses to replace those I'd lost in the hijacking. I rested and waited to hear from the doctors about the extent of my brain damage.

Over the next few days, several doctors came in to check on my progress. It took a while for them to get to me. The small hospital was overwhelmed with the magnitude of the tragedy they were suddenly dealing with. In addition to treating people who survived the storming of the plane, they had to perform autopsies on those who died of smoke inhalation, burns, and bullet wounds caused by the commando assault.

Eventually, Dr. Zrinzo, the surgeon who operated on me in Malta came in to explain my situation. He said there was an obvious entry wound in the right side of my head, about one-quarter inch in diameter, and the impact had blown a hole in my skull five inches wide. By some miracle he couldn't explain, however, the bullet that broke through my skull hadn't penetrated my brain. Instead, it had lodged in the skull and pushed skull fragments into my brain. During surgery, Dr. Zrinzo and the other doctors had cleaned out the wound and removed the bullet, along with skull fragments and brain tissue. Doctors grafted skin tissue from my right thigh to cover the gap in my head.

They really didn't know what to expect when I woke up. The bullet destroyed much of the tissue in my brain that controls vision, and doctors thought I might wake up blind. If the bullet had moved a half inch either way in my head, I would have been paralyzed, Dr. Zrinzo said. In the hospital, they gave me a series of eye tests that confirmed what the doctors already suspected: I'd lost my left peripheral vision, my peripheral vision up, and my peripheral vision down in both eyes. If I wanted to see anything in those three places, the doctor said I'd have to look to my left, look up, and look down.

I also suffered from extremely painful headaches, like migraines, anytime I shifted positions. A neurologist explained that a layer of protective gel inside our heads normally provides a soft cushion, or buffer, between the brain and the skull. In my case, the fluid had drained out the bullet hole in my head. That meant that whenever I moved, my brain pressed directly against my skull, causing the shooting pain.

As I gained the strength to sit up in bed and walk around, I had problems with my hearing. I was shot by my right ear and the surrounding brain tissue was swollen. Any loud sound, such as the closing of a door or the flushing of a toilet, was extremely painful. I felt a sharp, throbbing ache in both ears. When I flushed the toilet, I had to quickly put my hands over my ears and run out the door—or ask someone to flush for me. I couldn't stand the noise. I had suffered a concussion to the middle ear, Dr. Zrinzo explained. For about a year, I often had to ask people to speak softly because loud voices hurt too.

I had other hearing difficulties. Doctors discovered that I'd lost some of my ability to hear high-pitched frequencies. Since speaking voices and most other sounds are transmitted at lower frequencies, it wasn't a major problem.

Speaking was hard for me too. My jaw smashed hard against the tarmac when I was thrown from the plane. The force of the impact flowed from my head down into my neck. As a result, my jaw was partially locked. I could open it enough to eat, but not all the way. At first, I mostly drank liquids in the hospital.

I had torn ligaments in my neck from falling onto the tarmac and some black and blue marks, but no fractured arms or legs.

The full impact of all these injuries on my life was yet to be known. I felt lucky to be alive, but what kind of life would it be?

Scott handled all the telephone communications with my parents while I was still pretty out of it. He kept them informed of what was going on and what the doctors were telling him. My mom wanted to know how she and my dad could get to Malta. They both wanted to be by my side, but I didn't want them to come. I was too tired and didn't feel like having a lot of people around me. I didn't want to see the hurt in their eyes. I needed some space—peace and quiet—to sort out what had happened. The doctors felt the same way.

As a special education teacher, I knew something was seriously wrong with my sight, hearing, and memory. In the hospital, I had to ask Scott, the doctors, and the nurses to speak slowly, one word at a time—and to repeat themselves—when they spoke to me. If someone said, “Go mow the lawn,” I heard, “Go row the tawn.” I'd think,
Why would you want me to go row the tawn?

I remember one nurse saying, “Go brush your teeth.”

I heard, “Go trush your teeth.” I didn't get it. What did that mean?

“Say it again,” I said, “one word at a time.”

She said, “Go.”

I processed “go”—what does “go” mean?

“Brush.”

What does “brush” mean?

“Your.”

I tried to remember what “your” was.

“Teeth.”

What's “teeth”?

For crying out loud, this was hard!

Like many people who have had head injuries, strokes, or learning disabilities, I had memory problems and problems understanding simple spoken and written words. My long-term memory was just fine. I recalled my childhood, education, friends, places I'd been, books I'd read, every detail of the hijacking. But my short-term memory, the ability to hold on to things that are happening right now, like this sentence, wasn't working.

Nurses and other aides in the hospital were very kind to me. They did everything they could to make me feel comfortable. Toward the end of my five-day stay in Malta, I was able to start eating some solid foods.

One time, they asked what I wanted to eat. Since I felt like I'd missed out on Thanksgiving Dinner, I asked for some turkey and dressing.

“We don't celebrate Thanksgiving,” the nurse said in broken English. “Can you think of anything else you'd like?”

Hmm
, I thought,
what's like turkey and dressing?

“Do you have any chicken and mashed potatoes?”

Her eyes lit up. “Yes! We can get you that.”

For lunch that day, the nurse brought in a plate of chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy. I was so excited. I smiled and laughed. “Thank you,” I said. “This is really great!”

Seeing how much I appreciated the meal, that it brought a smile to my face, the nurses brought me chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner. They started serving me chicken and mashed potatoes around the clock—at every meal except breakfast. They'd come in and say, in broken English, “We got you chicken and mashed potatoes!” And their faces would just light up.

“Honey, you've got to say something,” Scott said.

I didn't have the heart to tell them that I ate other foods too. “I'll just eat chicken and mashed potatoes,” I said.

This went on for about three days.

Before leaving the hospital in Malta and being transferred to a U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, I had to tell officials my story of what happened on the plane. I didn't know why they needed it—they had reports from Patrick Baker and other passengers, but the Maltese police wouldn't release me until they had mine as well. They wrote down everything I said.

Shortly after, they wheeled me out of the hospital. It was great to see the pretty blue sky again. Malta looked like a beautiful country. I wished that I'd been able to enjoy it under different circumstances. Scott and the U.S. ambassador to Malta, Gary Matthews, looked on as medical attendants hoisted me into the plane.

On the flight to Germany, Scott and I were the sole passengers on a USAF C-9 “Nightingale” transport plane, normally used to evacuate wartime casualties. I lay flat on a bed dangling from the ceiling in the cargo bay. I was so tired from the hijacking and the surgery that I slept much of the flight.

At one point, the copilot came back to visit with me. She looked so young, and I asked her when she started flying.

“I've been doing it a long time, ever since I was a little girl,” she said. “My father flew. Would you like to come up to the front?”

She led me to the cockpit and let me sit down in her seat and look out. When I started feeling weak, she helped me get back to my bed in the back.

We were en route to the second General Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, but a snowstorm forced the pilot to divert us to Rhein-Main Air Force Base in Frankfurt and the ninety-seventh General Hospital (the one that Captain Tesstrake and the TWA hostages flew into exactly five months earlier), where we stayed overnight.

The next morning, we continued on to Landstuhl, where I was admitted on the neurosurgery service.

The U.S. military took good care of us in Germany. They put Scott up in a barracks-style hotel on the base, near the hospital. After living in constant worry for nearly a week, and not sleeping for more than a few minutes at a time, Scott could finally slow down enough to feel. The doctors had assured us that I was going to be okay. Scott and I had talked long enough so that he felt happy and confident that I wasn't going to be a vegetable.

He sat on a chair in his room, closed his eyes, and cried. After crying, Scott fell fast asleep. His body had released all the tension and worry.

The next morning when he came to the hospital, I could see that something in his eyes had changed. “What is it honey? What's wrong? Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Everything's going to be okay,” he said. “I had a good cry last night, that's all.”