I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia

by Su Meck

  Jim recalls “a wall of leather-bound books. A great intelligence was there. He sounded like someone who had an absolute command of his field. Here was somebody I implicitly trusted.”

  Dr. Wheeler told Jim that I had suffered a closed-head injury, affecting not my skull but the soft tissue inside. X-rays showed no fractured skull, no compressed vertebrae. Jim asked him what could be done. Dr. Wheeler said, “The fluid is what’s killing your wife. If we opened her skull, because of the pressure inside, the result would just be catastrophic. The best thing we can do is just withdraw all treatments, the fluids, the IV, so the tissues can naturally reabsorb the fluids in her head. We need to give her body a chance to absorb the trauma.” Jim remembers Dr. Wheeler saying this, too: “I’ll be honest with you: most people with this level of internal injury do not survive.”

  Dr. Wheeler is retired now, and he recalls little of me or my hospital stay: “I saw so many people with horrible injuries, it’s hard to remember.” Dr. Wheeler says my husband’s account sounds plausible but exaggerated. “I would never have advised stopping all treatment,” he says. “I would advise slowing fluids down, because in an injured brain, fluids can make it swell.” Dr. Wheeler also says it was never his habit to tell loved ones that a patient might not survive. When asked, he’d say, “God never tells me whether people are going to live or die.” I am convinced that whatever decisions were made that night by either Dr. Wheeler or God, those decisions saved my life and I will always be grateful.

  Jim made another round of collect calls to his family and mine. He told them, “They’ve convinced me that the best course of action is to do nothing. We’ll have to wait it out.” He recalls saying, too, that I “had a chance of recovering, but it’s only a chance. I wasn’t trying to sugarcoat anything. I thought you were dying. There was desperation on the other end of the phone, once we got past ‘Can we come? Can we be there?’ Because there was no physical way to get from A to B. Everybody was going to check what flights there were in the morning, but there was nothing that could be done right then,” Jim says. “And you might not be there in the morning.”

  My mom doesn’t recall any such dire language from Jim: “He didn’t say, ‘This is so serious the whole family should gather around right now.’ ” Although, Mom being Mom, she may have just heard those words and gone into a kind of motherly denial. I know that may sound harsh, but my mom tends to occasionally understand things to be the way she wants them to be rather than the way they actually are. In any event, no one was close enough to climb into a car and drive to the hospital at that late hour.

  Patrick had fallen back asleep and a couple of nurses offered to keep him at their station. They also kept bringing Jim things—coffee, and little cups of ice cream—and coaxing him to leave: “Mr. Meck, we’ll let you know.” Jim stayed. “I was concerned that you would die, and I wouldn’t be there.”

  Another nurse filled out a personal data form on me at 1:15 A.M., probably with Jim’s help. The form lists each of my previous hospitalizations. Though I was only twenty-two, there weren’t enough lines on the form to list them all: major knee surgery, 1981; elective abortion, 1984; ovarian cysts, 1984; miscarriage, 1985; childbirth by cesarean section, 1986 and 1987; hand injury, 1987. Jim signed some more papers, permitting the doctors to remove the intravenous tubes from my veins. He says Dr. Wheeler told him, “You should get your sons and say good-bye.” So he did.

  By this time it was very late. During the drive back to the hospital, both Benjamin and Patrick fell fast asleep. Jim parked the car, and carried the boys to my hospital room in the ICU. It was quiet. The doctors had turned everything off. I lay on the hospital bed, pale and still, my head bandaged. The rhythmic beat of a heart monitor and my breathing were the only sounds in the room. “You were sweaty, hair stringing down over your face, bandages on your head, blotchy, kind of waxy,” Jim recalls. “It was like you weren’t you. It was like you had already gone.” And in a way I had.

  Jim pondered what to do, and he made a decision. “It was so late and I couldn’t wake up Benjamin or Patrick,” he recalls. “And I couldn’t say good-bye. I was all ready to because of what the doctor had told me. But I had these angelic guys in my arms, and I decided, ‘I’m not going to wake you, and I’m not going to say good-bye.’ ” Jim hugged his sons, and then leaned each sleepy baby over to press their lips against my cheek. “And then I kissed you, and we left.”

  On the drive home, Jim recalls, “The anger and the frustration had burned themselves out. So I guess at this point I was just tired and resigned and there was just a tremendous feeling of loss.” He doesn’t recall thinking, “ ‘How did this happen to me, how did this happen to us?’ Instead there was just grief and a defeated feeling.” Jim vividly does remember making a plea, repeating it over and over in his head: “If there’s any way that Su can get through this, I’ll do anything.” It wasn’t a prayer to God exactly, Jim says, instead it was just “a promise I was making,” maybe just a promise to himself. Little did he realize precisely what he was asking. There is a saying: Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

  Jim remembers parking his sick car in the driveway and walking into the house. The kitchen was just as the paramedics had left it, the fan still dangling from the ceiling, the blood still pooled on the floor. He put the boys to bed, and then he picked up the bandages and wrappings and discarded IVs. He searched around and finally found a bucket and a sponge and set about cleaning the pooled blood from the kitchen floor. He remembers that, with every sweep of the sponge, the circle of blood seemed to grow larger. “It was like a metaphor for the idea that nothing I did seemed to make a difference,” he recalls. After cleaning up the kitchen as best as he could, he removed his red-stained jeans and polo shirt and took a long, hot shower, washing my blood from his hands and arms and knees. Then he fell into bed.

  Back at the hospital, in the intensive care unit, nurses made hourly entries on my progress:

  1:15

  Alert but lethargic, and poorly responding to orientation questions.

  2:00

  Severe headache. Wiggles both legs on command.

  3:30

  Darvocet for headache.

  4:30

  Patient has started menstruating. Pupils unequal. Verbalizing more freely and asking appropriate questions.

  5:30

  More photophobic than earlier. Hand grip still very weak.

  A cinematic version of my story might have me open my eyes, wince at the pain of the morning sun, and survey my surroundings in blank wonder. In fact, I appear to have spent my first twenty-four hours in the hospital much like most ICU patients do, in a blur of wakefulness and sleep. In those first waking moments, as I surveyed myself and my surroundings, no one—least of all me—knows what thoughts entered my mind, if any. Most likely, I didn’t know who I was, or where I was, or why I was there. I probably didn’t recognize my own arms and legs, or the television hanging from the wall, or the window, or the door. Everything would have been unfamiliar.

  So many questions occurred to me as I read through all of these entries in my medical records. How can someone be alert and lethargic at the same time? Did I know what menstruating was? Did I even notice? How exactly was I verbalizing? What appropriate questions did I ask? Did I know enough to grasp that I was even supposed to know who I was, and where I was, and what the names of the items in my room were, and what purpose they served? I was, in all probability, as bewildered as a newborn.

  That morning was Monday, May 23. When Jim arrived at the hospital, he spoke to the duty nurse and learned that I had survived the night. “The worst had passed, for me, at that moment,” he recalls. “My prayers had been answered. However, I had no idea what was coming.”

  But another nurse gently prepared him: “Your wife doesn’t know her name.” Jim walked into my room, where the lights had been dimmed to ease the pain in my head. He greeted me. He says he knew right away that I didn’t
recognize him. I looked at him, but I did not reward him, or anyone else, with so much as a flash of recognition. But at that moment Jim was preoccupied by the simple fact that I was alive.

  “I guess I was so relieved that you were breathing and opening your eyes that it didn’t hit me until later that something was profoundly wrong,” he recalls. “It hadn’t sunk in yet, the extent to which you weren’t really there. I didn’t even think about it. You woke up. So to me it wasn’t like there had been any loss.”

  Dr. Wheeler, the ace neurosurgeon, had left a report. It said I had stabilized; there was no need for surgery. Jim called his parents again, and mine: “The worst has passed. She’s still here.” I am still not at all convinced that anybody had a clue how bad the worst had been. Or would be.

  The formal diagnosis from Dr. Wheeler states that I suffered a “minor closed-head injury” and a “possible cerebral concussion,” neither of which sounded very bad. Dr. Wheeler gives a similarly muted account of the injury: “When the patient was first struck on the head, [she] was not immediately knocked out, but became drowsy, nauseated, and she complained of a funny feeling in her arms and her leg felt heavy,” he wrote. “The patient continues to complain of tingling in her left hand and weakness on her left side, [and] headache.” The hospital records “grossly understated the impact on your life,” Jim recalls, “because they couldn’t see it.”

  A computed tomography (CT) scan of my brain that day showed swelling over the “right frontal area” and “some gas in the soft tissue,” suggesting “a laceration of the frontal area of the scalp.” Notes from Dr. Wheeler’s physical examination describe me as “awake, lethargic.” Dr. Wheeler attempted to give me an MRI to get a better look at my brain. But I was “unable to tolerate” the test, owing to “headache and noise.” It apparently sounded to me like someone was pounding on a metal trash can inside my head.

  The next three weeks brought “endless assessment,” Jim recalls, a parade of occupational therapists, speech therapists, and cognitive therapists and neurologists, measuring my vital signs, my motor skills and reflexes, my diminished arm and leg strength, my ability to sit up without falling back over. A social worker was assigned as my care coordinator and she met regularly with other members of my care “team” to assess my progress and to develop a course of therapy.

  “The right side of your face and the left side of your body were paralyzed to the point where you couldn’t eat properly or sit in a chair,” Jim recalls. “You couldn’t feed yourself. You couldn’t hold a spoon. Not that you even understood what a spoon was.”

  Jim says that I seemed overly sensitive to everything around me. Light, noise, movement—everything hurt. And I became upset every time I saw anybody enter my room. It was frustrating to the point of physical pain for me to try to tell a story again and again to each new nurse or therapist, when I had such a limited vocabulary and no real memory of what had happened.

  Jim recalls spending most of the first week in the hospital. He felt profoundly protective of me and tried his damnedest to keep things around me quiet and calm. Jim asked if the hospital could have the same people assigned to my care every day. But every day, new nurses would arrive. They would turn all the lights up, and I would wince in pain.

  “The frustrating thing was having to explain to every caregiver the whole story again and again,” Jim recalls. “There was this presumption, looking at you, that you’d be able to do X, Y, and Z. And you simply couldn’t. And then the doctors would get frustrated, the nurses would get frustrated, the therapists would get frustrated. You didn’t understand.”

  Jim also vividly recalls the exact moment he realized the depth of my injury. At some point a nurse or therapist came with what looked like a toddler’s board book that included nothing but colors and shapes. She sat with me and tested me: “Su, this is a red square. Turn the page. Su, what was on the previous page?” And I responded, “I don’t know.” Jim and the woman shared a look. “And that’s the point when I realized just how whacked things were,” Jim says.

  My mother arrived on the evening of Tuesday, May 24. Jim met her at the airport. “We went out to supper,” she recalls. “And then he took me to the garage to show me the fan that had fallen on your head. He said, ‘This is what hit her.’ And I said, ‘Lord have mercy.’ ” Mom says she stayed until the weekend, mostly babysitting the boys so Jim could spend time at the hospital. She doesn’t remember much of that visit. She recalls that “you had no idea who I was” when she first visited me in the hospital. But she also remembers the two of us carrying on conversations at my bedside. “I think what went through my mind when I saw you was, ‘Well, Su has had this terrible accident, but she always bounces back from everything, and she’s going to be okay.’ ”

  May 25 was Jim’s and my wedding anniversary. Barb, my eldest sister, customarily called me on that day. But this time, when she tried to call, “there was something wrong with the phone. The call wouldn’t go through,” Barb recalls. She kept trying, and then she tried again on the twenty-sixth. “And my mother answered the phone,” Barb recalls. “And that was odd, because my parents and Jim didn’t get along. They hadn’t approved of the marriage. I probably said something like, ‘Why are you there? Where’s Su?’ And she said that you were in the hospital.” Mom told Barb there had been an accident, and that I had been in a coma and in the ICU.

  “I was shocked and freaked out,” Barb recalls. “And I remember thinking, ‘Why had nobody told me in the first place?’ ” That night, Barb made a note in her journal: Why??? Dear God, Please be with Su.

  Barb asked her boss for time off from work. They sat together in her office and prayed for me. Then, on Saturday, May 28, she and her husband, Scott, awoke at dawn and drove 850 miles from Urbana, Illinois, to Fort Worth. That evening, Jim took them to see me.

  “We walked into the room, and it was you, but you showed no signs of recognition of us,” she recalls. “I will never, ever forget you looking at me and not knowing who I was. It was horrible. I said, ‘I’m your sister, Barb.’ And you said, ‘Oh, okay,’ like we were new people to you.”

  The boys were making noise, and Barb says that I seemed overtaxed, as if “you didn’t know how to deal with all of this input.” The nurse brought in a meal tray, placed it in front of me, and left. Barb remembers that I, with my weakened left side, couldn’t peel the Saran Wrap off of the containers by myself.

  “You looked perfectly fine,” Barb recalls. “You had about an inch-long cut on your forehead, and that’s the only thing that looked different about you. It was just a little red stripe. There wasn’t even a bandage. There was nothing, except for the vacant look in your eyes.” My speech was slow. What I said was pretty low level. Very simple. Barb says I seemed to think that I should know who Jim and the kids were, but there wasn’t that connection. There was nothing. “It was all very superficial and all very ‘now’ kind of talk, because there wasn’t anything else. We were never in your room for more than an hour. We could tell that us being there, especially the boys being there . . . we could tell that that was just too overwhelming.”

  Barb recalls Jim’s being hard on the hospital staff: “He’s the kind of person who, if he feels like something’s not going the way it should, he’ll make his voice heard in an aggressive sort of way. I think there were times in the hospital when he expected things to go differently, and he made it very clear that he expected things to be different.”

  Jim’s biggest complaint with the hospital staff was over the times I fell or slipped out of my chair. “You were always a very headstrong person. It’s hard to know how many of your falls were just you taking risks,” Barb says. “But I think Jim immediately blamed the staff for everything that wasn’t perfect about your care.”

  Meanwhile, in the hospital, the extent of the damage my brain had suffered was becoming clearer day by day, as my hospital records show:

  Tuesday, May 24

  Before dawn, a nurse not
es that I am “awake, responding well to orientation questions, much less lethargic, initiating conversation quite well.” Later in the morning, another nurse notes that I am complaining of double vision and a headache that “never goes away.”

  A new neurologist, Dr. Guillermo Antonio Guzman, arrives and examines me. He writes, “I think with positive physical therapy/occupational therapy/speech input and support, she will improve over time. I’ve told her control of life cannot be complete but that she will have to [resume] activity anyway.” He instructs someone to “try and get an objective idea” of my diminished strength on my left side. “Be positive; express doubts to me,” he writes. He notes that I complain of a “constant, throbbing headache” as well as photophobia, nausea, and dizziness that comes whenever I sit up or swing my feet over the side of the bed. He also notes, “Memory short/long-term poor, but improving.” Dr. Guzman recommends that I be assigned “memory exercises.”

  Wednesday, May 25

  A rehabilitation doctor, Dr. Wilson Garcia, visits me. “Standing and sitting balance are poor,” he notes. “She does not walk. She needs assistance with her ABCs.” On the brighter side, I start to “control bladder and bowels.”

  An occupational therapist, Andrea Clark, assesses my ADL skills, or “activities of daily living”: I “refused to sit up” because of dizziness and headaches. I require “a minimal assist” to eat, but I am able to brush my teeth unaided. I show short- and long-term memory problems in dealing with the world around me, and I have difficulty counting by twos. A neurological test finds me “unable to differentiate hot and cold, sharp from dull” on my left arm and leg.

  Thursday, May 26

  Dr. Garcia notes, “Patient is more alert today. She is talking more and smiling. She is progressing well,” although “she is not walking yet.”