My Life, Deleted (2 page)

“He keeps insisting that you work for the hospital,” the nurse told Joan. “In fact, he was quite adamant about it.”

Joan turned toward me, looking puzzled, and said, “I've worked with you for the last two and a half years.”

She knew I had a head injury, so she wasn't all that worried, but I was more puzzled than she was. I felt lost and alone. I didn't have a clue what this woman was talking about. If she'd worked for me for two years, why didn't I know her?

But Joan was clueless as well. “Well, at least he didn't forget me!” she exclaimed.

I let her think what she needed to. She would find out soon enough.

Ultimately, it took me six weeks to get up the nerve to tell her that I'd had no recollection of her as I lay in that hospital bed. She was the woman I'd fallen in love with, married, and fathered three children with, and yet I had forgotten everything there was to know about her and our life together.

But one question was nagging me even more: Who the hell was 
I
?

Chapter 2

I
LISTENED
while the nurse asked Joan a slew of questions about my medical history, trying to determine, apparently, whether I might have gotten dizzy and fallen or if I had, in fact, slipped and fallen, as I'd told the paramedics. I listened closely, hoping to discover some telling facts about myself. This variable made a difference, I later learned, in terms of my possible diagnoses and treatment.

Although they had me on a nothing-by-mouth diet because I'd been vomiting, Joan mentioned that I'd had weight-loss surgery, with a band inserted around my stomach, so, among my other dietary restrictions, I couldn't eat much more than a cup of food at a time. I couldn't remember this, of course, but I'd already lost more than fifty pounds since I'd topped out at three hundred and seventy.

Once the nurse left, I told Joan the few snippets of what I could remember leading up to and right after the accident, then promptly forgot them.

“I remember taking one step into the bathroom and my feet flying over my head,” I told her. After I fell and hit my head, I said, “I just could not get up; I kept slipping.”

She was listening to me, but I still felt a need to persuade her I was telling the truth. “Look,” I said, extending my palms toward her. “There's something oily on my hands.”

But I could see that she was not convinced, and I could understand why. “Honey, there's nothing on you,” she said, running her fingers over my palms. “They must have cleaned you up.”

I may be confused,
I thought,
but in this case I know what I am talking about.
My mind was whirling as I tried to absorb and retain new information, so it seemed extremely important to communicate to Joan the few details that I could remember about my accident before they too left me. I distinctly remembered that the floor had been slippery from whatever greasy substance had been spilled there, and after I'd managed to get up, I had seen and felt it all over my hands and arms. I also remembered flashes of rubbing my hands in the ambulance, trying to determine what the slimy substance was and how to get it off me. I needed her to believe me, but my thoughts didn't settle in the most logical order. It was also frustrating to try to express myself now that there was no oil on my hands. How could I prove this to her from my hospital bed? I pulled back the blanket to see if there were oily spots on my pants and shoes, only to find that I wasn't wearing them anymore. All I had on was one of those flimsy patterned gowns that ties in the back. Where were my clothes?

I struggled to come up with some other way to prove my story. “Get my pants,” I insisted. “Let me show you.”

Joan reached under the bed, where she found a plastic bag that contained the black polo shirt and olive-green pants I'd been wearing. Once she acknowledged the oily, dark blotches, I was finally able to relax a little. Then I moved on to the other important part of the story.

“There were two men, the security guard from the front desk and a custodian in the bathroom, who were helping me and getting me paper towels to hold on my bleeding head,” I said.

I told her what I'd said to the guard and relayed his direction to the custodian to clean up the mess on the floor. With all that out of the way, I was done talking for the most part. My head was killing me. The nurse kept asking how much pain I was in, and I kept saying “ten” because that seemed fitting. But she apparently figured it had to hurt a little bit less after the morphine she'd already given me, so when she suggested, “An eight?” I said, “Okay.”

Feeling the need to protect myself from further harm or any conflict, I mostly tried to agree with what she and Joan said—anything so as not to raise more red flags than necessary over my condition. I also figured it would be best to let Joan take over and be my voice. Let her figure things out for me.

Joan was nice, but she kept asking me questions when really all I wanted to do was close my eyes and sleep.

“Are you feeling okay?” she kept asking. “Are you feeling sick?”

“Pain,” was all I could manage. “It hurts.”

They'd given me something for the nausea, but I was still throwing up and feeling dizzy. It also didn't help that I couldn't answer most of Joan's questions, which only made me more frustrated, embarrassed, and scared because I didn't understand
why
I didn't know the answers. I did my best to focus, to pay close attention, to listen and learn, making new connections with words and concepts whenever I could. Even so, Joan was starting to realize that my condition was worse than she'd thought.

I heard her tell the nurse and doctor that she used to work there and at another hospital as an ER nurse. That helped explain how she knew so much, such as when to put cool cloths on my head, which felt good. So did her touch.

As I nodded off, the memories of my fall and these early conversations with Joan soon faded into a blur of the emergency room chaos.

When the results of my blood work and CT scan came back normal, Dr. Douglas Smith figured I had a bad concussion and he was ready to send me home. Wherever that was.

Joan, however, seemed very uncomfortable with the idea of my being released in this state; she sensed that something else was wrong.

“He's always had a very high pain threshold,” she told the doctor. “It's unusual for him to complain of so much pain.”

She was also troubled, she told him, by the gaps in my memory, which didn't seem to be improving.

I was apprehensive myself. No matter what the tests said, I felt anything but normal. And I had no idea what “home” was other than it meant leaving this place where people were taking care of me and giving me medicine for my pain. I was still in too much agony to move, and I was scared of doing anything to hurt myself further.

Dr. Smith didn't seem all that concerned about my headaches, saying they were a normal symptom of a head injury like mine. They were taking steps to discharge me when around 10:00
A.M.
I noticed a dark area beginning to form in the bottom of my right eye, like a black pie-shaped wedge between four and eight o'clock in my field of vision. As if the pain and memory loss weren't enough to deal with, was I now losing my sight too? I tried not to let Joan see the panic that was building inside.

“What's going on with my eye?” I said. “Part of my eye is dark. I can't see.”

Joan looked even more scared than I was.

“I'll draw it for you,” I said.

She grabbed the cardboard tissue box next to the bed and handed me a pen out of her purse. I turned the box upside down and drew a circle as if my field of vision was a clock with the dark hours shaded in.

She immediately motioned for a nurse, who sent the doctor over. Joan had become the interpreter of my new, small world, like a mother watching over a baby, only she wasn't aware of her role and I didn't want her to be. I watched for her reaction to determine how I was supposed to feel and to interpret the mumbo jumbo the doctors and nurses were saying. I quietly collected every piece of information I could and held them close, as if they were the bytes I needed to rebuild the master file that held my moments, knowledge, and identity—all deleted in the fall. But for now, I needed these people to keep helping me because I didn't have the faintest idea how to use those bytes to survive on my own.

I watched Joan's face as the doctor shone a penlight into my eye. She looked worried, and now the doctor seemed concerned too, which only made me feel more uneasy. Telling us he was going to call a specialist for a consultation, he left the room but returned a short time later to inform us that the doctor was busy.

“We're going to keep him and have the neuro-ophthalmologist evaluate him upstairs on the floor,” Dr. Smith told Joan.

I looked at her for a translation, so she explained. “He'll be able to look in your eye and figure out what's wrong.”

It seemed like forever while we waited for them to transport me to my private room. Joan kept checking with the nurses about the room status and let them know when I needed more pain medication, which was once an hour. After I complained that the morphine wasn't doing the trick, they threw in some Tylenol.

Around noon an ER nurse said my room was ready, and we waited for a tech to wheel me into the elevator and up to room 636. There I was relieved to find that my new bed was much more comfortable—larger, softer, with controls that allowed me to raise and lower the top half of my body. This was a big improvement because, while lying flat, the pain in my head was unbearable.

It was a smaller room than my corner of the ER, but it had a great box with moving pictures mounted on the wall next to the window. Joan controlled the gadget that changed the picture box for me, which I soon learned were called a remote and flat-screen TV. I gradually started to learn my previous programming likes and dislikes because she stopped when she got to one of my favorites, such as the Fox News Channel,
King of Queens,
and
Everybody Loves Raymond.

Once I was settled in, Dr. Johnny Walker, an upbeat doctor in his midforties, came in and introduced himself as the primary care doctor who would be coordinating my treatment. “He seems to have suffered a severe concussion, but everything should start coming back to him in the next few days,” he said, directing his comments to Joan and me as I watched both of their faces. “The neurologist and neuro-ophthalmologist are on their way to see him.”

Walker asked me the same questions I'd heard before, and little by little I was learning some of the right answers. I didn't want to look stupid, so I listened most closely to things I knew I'd be asked again.

“What is your name?” Walker asked.

By now I knew that one, so I told him.

“Who is the president?”

“Bush,” I said.

“Well, that's close. Barack Obama just won the election.”

I didn't really understand what that meant or what a president was, but I mentally chalked up the correct answer. At least now I knew what to say next time.

“What is your birth date?”

“February 23, 1960,” I said, repeating the same answer I'd been giving.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joan mouthing to the nurse, “That's my birthday.” Catching that, I internally noted that I was still wrong and that I needed to figure out the right answer, my own birthday. But at that point I didn't realize that I'd gotten her birth year wrong as well.

Walker had me do a series of tests that he and the other doctors kept repeating—pushing my hands against his, squeezing his fingers, and pushing my feet against his hands.

“For now, just focus on resting and getting rid of the pain,” he said.

Right before he left for rounds, he told us he'd Googled me and noted that I'd played in the NFL. Baffled by the terms
Google
and
NFL,
I just played along.

“You're a tough guy,” he told me. “You'll do fine.”

I understood the gist of what he was saying and wanted to believe him, but somehow I still wasn't convinced.

After he left I asked Joan about the terms he'd used. “What's the NFL?”

“The National Football League,” she said. “You played professional football.”

That still meant nothing to me, any more than Joan's explanation about Google being a search site on the Internet, because I didn't know what those words meant either. So I just filed them away to figure out later.

I got some answers that evening when I came across the NFL playoffs as I was flipping through the TV channels.

“Oh, there's football,” Joan said.

“I played that? Get out of here,” I said, skeptical that I could have done something shown on TV.

“Did I play on television?”

“Yes,” she said, which also left me amazed.

Oddly enough, I still knew certain football terms and rules such as
offside,
penalty,
and
holding;
I also understood what a touchdown was and what was happening on the field. But I had no recollection of playing, how many players were on a team, or any players' names.

The neurologist, Dr. Richard Goodell, showed up about an hour after Walker left. He checked out my eyes and threw a bunch of medical terms at us that went right over my head, but luckily Joan understood them. Although he couldn't see a hemorrhage in the retina or vitreous, he said that was likely the cause of what he called my “posttraumatic visual defect.” Less likely, he said, was that the fall had caused a trauma to my occipital lobe, the part of the brain that controls what you see. After he left Joan tried to explain what he said, but her explanation still left me mostly in the dark. Now that I was in a private room, the nurses hooked me up to a morphine pump, which helped bring the pain down to a slightly more manageable level. And there, on the wall, was a chart showing the pain scale—with a happy face at zero and a progression of crankier expressions from one through nine, with a crying face at ten—which helped me keep things straight. It was frustrating to need the drug, but I felt that if I could get the pain to stay at a five or six rather than sliding back up to an eight or nine between doses, my mind would clear a bit and I'd be able to understand more of what was going on around me.

Joan had been continuing to ask me questions between doctor visits and was slowly seeing just how little I knew, which prompted her to challenge Goodell's prognosis.

“But he has these large memory gaps,” she said. “He doesn't know our business, where we live, or any details about our twenty-four years together.”

And she didn't even know the half of it. Nonetheless, Goodell didn't alter his prognosis, saying the neuro-ophthalmologist would be by shortly. All business, he was the kind of doctor who got annoyed when Joan's cell phone rang while he was talking, and he left us with the same reassurance as the other doctors: I had a bad concussion, and my memory should come back within a couple of weeks. The headaches could last as long as two years, he said, but their intensity should lessen. I didn't understand the difference between two weeks, two years, and twenty-four years, but based on Joan's comment, it sounded like we'd known each other for a long time.