My Life, Deleted (13 page)

When Joan told me about the NFL Combine Camp in New Orleans, I knew exactly what she was talking about because I'd been watching live footage of the current camp on HBO and the NFL Network, trying to learn more about my past. As a result I could vividly picture my life as a college draftee.

The scouts had predicted that I would be drafted as early as the second round and no later than the fifth. (I later learned that the sports trade magazines had also published mock draft choices, which predicted that I would go in the fourth round to the Minnesota Vikings.) These were exciting times for us as a couple.

“When I walked around campus, your teammates called me Mrs. Bolzan,” she said proudly.

The draft was scheduled for the first week of May 1984, the same month we were getting married, which meant that we had to prepare for our wedding, on the 26th in Joan's family church in Tinley Park, Illinois, amid complete uncertainty about where we were going to land later that summer.

The two of us spent draft day sitting in our apartment and waiting for the phone to ring.

“Why just the two of us?” I asked.

“Because that's the way you wanted it,” she said. “You wanted to share this experience with just us.”

It turned out to be a heartbreaking day, she said. We watched each round go by on TV, disappointed when the phone rang and it was friends or family calling. With each round I grew increasingly distressed, especially after we got into the sixth and seventh rounds. Finally, in the ninth round, after twelve hours of pacing around and passing the time any way we could, the New England Patriots' front office called to say I'd been selected and that I would be contacted the next day with details.

“We were devastated. All your hard work, everything we were told from the scouts, agents, and coaches. New England was probably the worst place you could have gone,” she said, explaining that several All-Pros, or veteran elite players, who were supposed to retire had chosen not to, and the team had selected two other offensive linemen in the seventh and eleventh rounds, which meant that my chances of actually making the team after training camp were greatly diminished.

Joan sounded like she felt sorry for me as she recounted the events of that day, but all I could think was how fortunate and proud I was to have been chosen at all.

Wow, I was drafted. That's pretty good!

This was the dream of every kid who had ever played football, and looking back now, I was sad for the old Scott, who felt angry rather than lucky, regardless of the false expectations he'd been given. Of course I had no idea how I felt at the time, but I figured that I must've carried that anger into the training camp and had probably hurt my own chances for success there.

After ninety minutes of listening to Joan's stories, I'd reached my saturation level, so she summed up by saying that I was disappointed after getting cut from the Patriots' final roster in the last week of the preseason games, just as we'd predicted. I went on to play for a year in the USFL with the Memphis Showboats, she said, eventually returning to the NFL to play for the Cleveland Browns and ending my career with a foot injury in 1986.

This evening of stories only strengthened my feelings for Joan, knowing that she'd done more than anyone could or should have done for me. I was so thankful and grateful to have her in my life, someone who knew me better than I knew myself and could share these precious moments—both hers and mine—about my lost past. I had to wonder how all this anger and sadness she described had affected our life together, but the bottom line was this: this woman had stuck with me and supported me through the best and worst of times, and by the sound of it, she was in for the long haul even now. If anything, my injury had only sealed my love for her forever.

Chapter 12

T
HE NEWS ABOUT GRANT'S DRUG PROBLEM
had been weighing on me for some time, and the recent conversation with Joan about how we'd met had helped take my mind off it. But even though I was in information-seeking mode, there were some things I didn't want to hear about, such as the ugly lawsuit a business partner had filed against us.

“That was a very difficult time in our life because of the tremendous amount of stress,” Joan said. “It ended up costing us our home and forcing us to file personal bankruptcy.”

I stopped her right there, not knowing—or caring—that she hadn't even gotten to the worst part of her story, which I wouldn't learn for months. “I'm not in the mood to hear this negative talk,” I said. “At this point in my recovery, I just have to concentrate on the good things.”

I didn't want to spend any longer than I had to in the dark recesses of my mind. I also figured that I had plenty of time to hear about the bad parts of our life—later. I knew Joan was just trying to underscore that we'd always been there for each other, no matter what, and always would be. Still, I needed to recharge my batteries with some positive talk.

So Joan switched gears and told me about how I, as a Leo, the king of the jungle, had always tried to protect her and the kids from pain or harm. After losing Taryn, for example, she said we were at the mall when I saw a woman with a newborn approaching and guided Joan in another direction before she could see them pass by.

But she also said that now I was nowhere near as detail oriented as I used to be—remembering the smallest and most obscure facts after reading an article. I not only remembered the color of her shirt on our first date but the designer icon on it too. Now, it seemed, I didn't even notice these little details. I often had to reread articles repeatedly before I could understand them, and even then I wouldn't remember much.

These stark changes in my observational skills gradually prompted Joan to realize that I couldn't have known who she was in the emergency room right after my accident. “It just dawned on me that you really didn't recognize me,” she said.

“No, I didn't,” I confessed.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I didn't want to hurt anybody.”

My secret was finally exposed, but I figured it was better to be honest about it. How else was she going to know what I needed help learning again? Still, we found it curious that the “protector” aspect of my personality had remained intact.

Following up on Dr. Fife's referral, Joan and I went for an exam with Dr. Heather Caples, a neuropsychologist at St. Joseph's, leaving the house an hour early because I was panicking about being late. Joan said I'd always hated to be late, calling it “Mallory time” after my college football coach, who had considered us late if we weren't fifteen minutes early. It helped me to think that my worries had some sort of rationale from the past behind them.

Caples and a female postdoctoral resident came to meet us in the lobby, and they took us back to a room for the testing. When Caples asked about my accident and the battery of tests I'd undergone since, Joan supplied the answers while I tried to calm myself. But as she started to characterize all the important long-term memories I'd forgotten, I could feel the stress rising in my body, like a fountain ready to spew forth with plumes of water.

When she got to Taryn's stillbirth, I began to cry uncontrollably.

“I'm so sorry for your loss, that must have been very painful,” she said, pausing and apparently waiting for my response.

But the words would not come out. I could hear her speaking, but I was paralyzed by my emotions. It felt like an hour that I sat there weeping, even though it was probably only a couple of minutes. After gathering my composure, I told her that it hurt to be unable to recall something so devastating for both of us.

“How can I not remember losing our first-born child?” I asked. Once I choked this out, I was able to proceed with the testing.

After showing me patterns of triangles, circles, and squares, Dr. Caples asked me to draw them from memory in their same positions, had me do something else, then asked me to draw the pattern again. The second time I was able to add some new shapes I hadn't recalled the first time, but in this case my memory wasn't the problem; my hands weren't cooperating as I tried to replicate the images.

In the Boston Naming Test, I looked at line drawings of objects or animals, and had to name each one. I got forty out of sixty correct, failing to recognize some familiar objects such as a rhino or a hammock.

She read me a series of commonly used words, and asked me to recite back as many as I could remember. That was easy enough, and my confidence increased. But I had a tougher time when she talked about something else and then asked me to repeat the words. I felt my confidence sink when I couldn't remember them all. I hated feeling stupid. Caples also had me do a finger-tapping test to gauge my motor skills.

After about two hours of talking and testing, my head was killing me, so I had to take some pain medication, which I was still using every four to six hours. Then, while Dr. Caples talked with Joan in the next room, the resident drilled me with a series of question-and-answer tests for the next forty minutes. Her thick Indian accent made it difficult for me to understand her, so I often had to ask her to repeat things.

At the end of our session, Caples gave us some impressions about my condition, but said she needed to further review the test results before reaching any final conclusions. She said the tests showed that I was below average in my ability to learn and remember new information, I had some difficulty paying attention, and I also had some problems recognizing everyday objects. She noted that my headache and use of painkillers during the testing could account for some of my attention issues and slower speed in answering. The physical and emotional symptoms I'd been experiencing since my fall—such as the headaches, fatigue, and anxiety—were typical after suffering a concussion, she said, but my severe long-term memory loss and failure to recognize objects were not.

“What you're describing doesn't fit your accident,” she said, explaining that such extensive amnesia was usually the result of more serious brain damage than my MRI and other medical tests indicated.

Dr. Caples brought up what Joan had told her earlier, that I'd gone through a bout of grief over Taryn's death thirteen years after the fact, when we were going through our financial upheaval. Caples said that delay could suggest a tendency to repress or suppress emotional trauma. Because I had no history of cognitive problems and because severe retrograde amnesia like mine had been known to occur in cases of an underlying source of psychological distress, she said, I could be suffering from a dissociative disorder, the result of a traumatic incident that had caused my brain to block out my entire past.

“I recommend that you see a psychiatrist or psychologist to rule this out,” she said.

Joan said she found it hard to believe that I'd had any emotional trauma or stressors serious enough to cause such a mental block, emphasizing how strong I'd always been and how I'd always dealt so well with adversity. She said we were both quite used to the ups and downs of working in sales and in the business world for so many years.

Caples brought up the ugly lawsuit filed by our former business partner, which Joan had mentioned, asking if it had been stressful for me.

“No,” Joan said. “He knew that was just a normal part of our business.” She tried to explain that when you're dealing with a business that has millions of dollars in assets and could cause big losses to investors, some of them were going to sue to try to recoup their loss. But the old Scott always felt that taking that gamble was worth the risk. In fact, she said, those high stakes seemed to help me maintain my competitive edge.

This whole conversation was troubling to me, mostly because I could tell how much Caple's comments seemed to upset Joan, whose opinion as a medical professional I trusted. I was also scared of the unknown.

Traumatic incident? What traumatic incident? The only ones I know about are Taryn and the accident itself.

I left the doctor's office even more confused than when I'd gone in, and still didn't understand what dissociative disorder meant, so Joan tried to help me make sense of what Caples was saying: perhaps this was my brain's way of dealing with some tragedy that I'd never really processed.

But what I heard was that, basically, I was a nutcase. “Do you think I'm crazy?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” she said, adding that she completely disagreed with Caples' theory that I might have a dissociative disorder, but conceded we should see a psychologist to rule that out.

Joan had already made an appointment with Claire Kurtz, a clinical psychologist in Mesa, when my memory hadn't returned within thirty days. Joan's disagreement with Dr. Caples' assessment was reassuring, but just to make sure, I called my mom to ask if I'd experienced any trauma that we should know about. I'd seen TV news coverage of the sexual crimes to young boys by Catholic priests, and wondered if I could have been a victim.

“Did anything happen when I was a child? Was I molested?” I asked, explaining the doctor's comments. “Tell me now.”

Since my parents' visit, we had been talking more often by phone and getting closer with each call. So, when my mom insisted there had been no such trauma, I briefly wondered if she and Joan were telling me the truth, but just as quickly decided that I trusted them both and saw no reason for them to lie to me. As I began to research dissociative disorder on the web, I saw other indicators for the disorder such as depression, substance abuse, alcoholism, or a history of mental problems, and I felt better knowing that I'd shown none of these before my accident.

Dr. Caples emailed me her report on the morning of January 29, but it didn't include any new conclusions. She confirmed her earlier suggestion to see a psychologist or psychiatrist to further evaluate me and determine whether I had a dissociative condition, and also to help me cope better with the “significant stress” I'd been experiencing. She also recommended getting speech therapy to develop strategies to help manage my daily activities, and that I continue to have help managing our finances.

As it happened, my appointment with Kurtz, the psychologist, was set for that same day.

We spent two hours discussing my accident, my relationship with Joan, Caples's neuropsych report, and Taryn. Joan did most of the talking about how our baby's death had affected us twenty-one years ago while I cried and had to explain why once again.

Kurtz was easy to talk to and seemed interested in helping us both. I opened up to her about the darkness and isolation, my constant questioning who I was, and my uncertainty about how I would ever get through this.

At the end of the session Kurtz said she didn't think I had a dissociative disorder, but she also couldn't determine any other psychological cause for my amnesia. She suggested that I come back to discuss my depression some more, but I didn't want to.

If I still don't have my memory, what good is it to talk to someone about what I don't know? I need to learn the world first and how to express my thoughts before someone can help me understand my feelings.
I keep hoping that one of these doctors will give me a magic answer, but all I seem to do in their offices is cry and I leave feeling more frustrated and hopeless than I did when I went in.

With our business stalled and no new revenues coming in, we had to let Anita go at the end of January. As Joan and I grew increasingly concerned about our finances—one area of crisis management that she didn't handle very well—I decided it was time to start getting rid of the belongings that seemed excessive given our current lifestyle. These same decisions were being made in households across America, but for different reasons.

I approached this issue pragmatically because it seemed like a black-and-white problem that even I, in my limited state, could solve. Take the Chrysler that was sitting in our driveway, for example. No one had even sat in it since I'd come home from the hospital; why not sell it to bring in some quick cash?

We'd already borrowed money from Joan's parents, who had loaned it to us willingly and without judgment, but this only added to my feelings of inadequacy.

Going through some things on my desk, I discovered an old Hewlett Packard 12c calculator gathering dust. Joan told me I'd had the device for more than twenty years, ever since I'd been a financial planner in Chicago. It was far more complicated than your typical calculator because it could figure out future values, payment schedules, and compound interest.

When I asked her to show me how it worked, she laughed. “The hell if I know how to use that thing,” she said.

“How am I going to learn it if you don't know how?” I asked.

“Look it up on Google.”

Sure enough, I was able to find an instruction manual for the calculator on the web and spent at least three hours learning the basics. But I figured the time was well spent because I was thinking about trading in some of our cars and wanted to calculate what payments we could afford as I replaced them with less expensive vehicles. At least that was the plan.

Needless to say, being able to figure out these technical instructions and apply them to my real-life struggles was the confidence booster I needed.

Ready for the next step in the plan, I started running through our inventory of cars—my BMW, Joan's Porsche, Taylor's Chevy Tahoe, our Ford 150 pickup truck, our Chrysler 300, and Grant's old Honda—and analyzing what was essential for our family.

“Do we really need all these cars?” I asked Joan.

“No, but we use our three here, and we use the Chrysler 300 to go back and forth to the boat in California so we don't put too many miles on our other three. We have the Ford pickup truck just in case we need it.”