by Gary Kinder
“You want to try walking for me, Cortney?” said one tentatively.
She moved around behind him, while the other nurse supported him from the front. But Cortney wouldn’t lift his foot. He just teetered in the grasp of the nurses. The nurse behind him placed her knee against the backside of his knee and lifted his foot gently for him. The foot came up and dangled like that of a wooden puppet on a string, and when the nurse lowered her knee, Cortney’s foot flopped to the floor as though the string had been cut in two.
“Cortney, that’s wonderful!” said the nurses. “Let us see you do it again.”
They praised him and encouraged him, and though Cortney seemed to be concentrating on lifting his other foot, it didn’t move. Again, the nurse behind him coaxed his foot off the floor with her knee, and again it flopped forward when she pulled her knee away. Cortney’s face was blank, but while the nurses were again praising him, by himself he lifted the first foot far enough off the tile floor to let it slide forward an inch or two. He was still swaying between the two nurses as they held onto him, but that single, meek step was one of the few purposeful movements he had made since the murders more than five weeks before.
The nurses had waited a long time to see their energies result in even the slightest progress for Cortney. After weeks had passed and Cortney had been kept alive but still remained in coma, it had been difficult for them to maintain their morale. Now, when Cortney’s father was notified and came immediately to the hospital, one of the nurses in her excitement ran up and hugged him.
As Byron listened to the nurses describe Cortney’s first meager step, he remembered the strong and coordinated teen-ager his son had once been. It was painful for him now to think of Cortney struggling so pitifully to shuffle one foot forward a few inches. But Byron would have been thrilled just to know that Cortney had again been out of bed. He had waited weeks to see his son even wiggle a toe, and he wasn’t concerned now how he looked moving on his feet.
The next day Cortney walked again, this time for Dr. Rees, as the doctor was making his midmorning rounds. Rees had heard reports of Cortney’s ambulation the day before, but he was skeptical as to how much of the effort was Cortney’s and how much was the nurses’. When he arrived, another nurse was lifting Cortney from the bed to the wheelchair.
“Will you walk for Dr. Rees, Cortney?” she said. “Let’s show Dr. Rees how you can walk.”
With another nurse supporting Cortney from the front, she got behind him as the other nurse had done and was about to lift his foot with her knee when Cortney lifted his own foot and shuffled it forward a few inches. Then, after hesitating a moment and rocking back and forth, Cortney dragged his other foot forward.
Rees was incredulous. “I think one of the greatest things I have ever seen was when Cortney got up and walked with support at St. Benedict’s. I can’t remember what day that was, but I just couldn’t believe it.”
Since plucking the cards from his uncle’s hand, Cortney had begun to perform simple deeds that required at least a minor degree of hand-eye coordination. One afternoon he held up bright plastic toys shaped like tiny animals and examined them briefly in a vague, disinterested way. Later, he took a safety razor into his hand and with a nurse holding a mirror in front of him made short scraping motions at his face. He held the razor loosely and his hand shook, but when the nurse said, “Oh, Cortney, you forgot one over here,” he seemed to comprehend and tried in his weak way to run the razor over the spot he had apparently missed.
Through the last week of May and into the first week of June, Cortney’s condition improved daily. He gained ten pounds on his new gastrostomy feedings, and orally he had started taking small amounts of baby food. On sunny days the nurses would prop him on the edge of his bed, then assist him in shuffling to his wheelchair to be wheeled out onto the sun porch. His head drooped as he walked, and sometimes he had to be reminded to drag his right foot forward, but he had now progressed to taking eight steps without first being prompted by a nurse’s knee.
Jackie Gelinas, the night nurse in charge of the ICU, had been involved with Cortney’s care nearly every day for the past six weeks and had watched him evolve from his prolonged, deathlike coma into a state of sporadic awareness. But the more progress he had made, walking, holding a razor, drinking from a cup, the more hostile he had become.
The morning of June 5 Jackie had watched Cortney suddenly punch his father, then pound him again and again and again, while his father held him cradled in his arms.
“Go ahead, Cortney,” Byron said, “hit me if you want.”
All that day and into the early hours of the next, Cortney continued to be restless. He tore the covers off his bed and hit at the people who were sitting with him, until his hand had to be restrained again. Then when a nurse taped his trache, forcing him to breathe through his mouth and nose, he gagged and tensed his body, trying to cough the trache out of his throat. Finally, the nurse assigned to him for the night shift complained to Jackie that he had become so hostile she could do nothing with him. Jackie said that she would take him as her patient for the rest of the night.
Jackie let Cortney moan for a while, before walking into his room and shutting the door behind her. While Cortney coughed and hyperventilated, she quietly checked his pulse and blood pressure, and after she had recorded his vital signs on the chart, she sat down on the edge of his bed and looked at him. He glared back at her with one eye, the other staring off to the side.
“Now, Cortney,” Jackie said softly, “there’s nothing wrong with you, you can breathe as well as I can. I’m not taking the tape off.”
Cortney strained his hand toward her, but he could raise it only a few inches from his bed before he reached the end of the strap anchoring his wrist to the bed rail.
“Do whatever you want,” said Jackie. “You can even holler and yell if you want to. Go ahead, holler and yell.”
When she said this, as she remembered later, “His eyes got just wild, the pupils just so big, like, ‘Lady, I’d kill you if I could get out of here!’”
Then Cortney moaned loudly and at once seemed startled that any noise at all had come out. Jackie continued talking to him, and he became more and more agitated as he heard her say it was all right to scream. Each time he opened his mouth it seemed as if he couldn’t believe the sound of his own voice.
“You can even talk, can’t you?” Jackie goaded him. “There’s nothing in the world that’s keeping you from talking.”
Four other nurses in the ICU were tending their patients or scanning the monitors at the nurses’ desk, when they heard a hoarse outcry coming from Cortney’s room. Before they could run in, they heard more yelling, and when they had crowded into the doorway, they saw Jackie sitting on the edge of the bed, a loud sort of animal growl still rising from Cortney’s raw throat. At the end of the tether, his left fist shook at the nurses now gathered in the room behind Jackie.
“What are you doing to him?” one of them asked her.
Jackie kept her eyes on Cortney, who looked angry and confused.
“Do you want us to leave the room?” she said to him.
Cortney was flailing the air with his fist, as if he wanted to strike out at someone but didn’t know how or even whom to strike. Then he said, “Yes!”
The word came out slowly and Cortney’s voice after all those weeks of silence was like a croak, but it was clear what he had said. The nurses had thought they would never hear him speak. They had been astounded when Cortney, after so long in coma, had merely begun to open an eye or squeeze their hand when they asked him to. When he said “Yes!” that morning, even Jackie got tears in her eyes.
“Well now,” she said, “what I think we’re going to do is we’re going to get up and walk out to the nurses’ desk. Do you want me to call your dad?”
“Yes,” said Cortney again.
The nurses untied Cortney’s hands and, being careful to hold onto the left one, stood him at the side of his bed, where Jackie duck
ed under his arm to support him. With another nurse on the other side of him, she helped him shuffle slowly into the main room of the ICU and put him into a wheelchair. Then two of the nurses ran down the hall to tell the nurses at the third-floor desk that Cortney had spoken his first word.
It was not yet six o’clock, but Jackie doubted that Cortney’s father would mind her calling at that early hour.
“Dr. Naisbitt usually called every morning to find out how Cortney was doing. But this particular morning I called him first, and you could just hear him fill up. You know? You could just tell that he was starting to cry.”
“I’ll be up as soon as I can get there,” he said.
When his father arrived a short while later, Cortney was back in bed but still awake. Jackie escorted Byron into Cortney’s room and Cortney looked at his father, but even after his father had hugged him and brushed the hair from his forehead, Cortney said nothing. His fist was still working at the end of the restraint.
Jackie said: “Cortney? Talk to your dad. Say ‘Hi’ to him.”
Byron had thought he might never hear his son speak again, but at that moment Cortney parted his lips and slowly said, “Hi.”
“You can do better than that for your dad,” said Jackie. “Can you say ‘Dad’?”
His father was watching him closely, holding onto his hand and rubbing his arm when Cortney again opened his mouth. This time, at Jackie’s urging, he began stuttering, “Dad.”
Byron was sitting on the left side of Cortney’s bed and Jackie on the right. Though Byron turned away from her quickly and looked out the window, Jackie could see his eyes filling with tears.
“Maybe I better leave you two alone,” she said.
For a while after she had left, whenever Jackie looked up from the nurses’ desk, she could still see Byron through the glass front of Cortney’s room holding on to his son’s hand, sometimes talking to him and sometimes just staring out the far window.
“GODDAMN!”
The day after Cortney spoke his first words his trache tube was removed and his speech improved rapidly. From his initial single-word responses, he progressed to speaking crude sentences. Often he would parrot the nurses as he heard them talk in his room. If a nurse said, “Cortney, move your foot to the right,” Cortney would stammer, “Move my foot to the right.” Or if a nurse said, “You look good today, Cort,” Cortney would say, “I look good today.”
Though Cortney was still receiving regular feedings through his gastrostomy tube, he was also taking increasingly larger amounts of food orally: small bites of scrambled egg and fruit, even shredded wheat and bacon. He swallowed the solid foods more readily than liquids, still allowing liquids to dribble out the side of his mouth unless he was handed the glass to hold and tilt for himself. Holding the glass in his own hand, Cortney was drinking root beer floats, juice, and milk shakes through a straw.
On the eighth of June, Cortney was transferred from ICU 1 to ICU 7, a cubicle in the northwest corner of Intensive Care that looked out over the hospital entrance, the parking lot, and the city beyond. Several times a day the nurses would clamp Cortney’s gastrostomy tube and hold his IVs head high while he shuffled from the edge of his bed to his wheelchair, his hospital gown open in back and dangling around his skinny thighs. With Cortney sitting in the wheelchair, the nurses would then position him by the window where he could see the cars driving by the hospital.
“Let’s look for your dad,” they would often say.
Though the vision in his good left eye was blurred, Cortney learned to recognize his father’s car, and when he saw it pulling into the hospital parking lot, he would point and say, “Dad.”
But despite his increasing awareness Cortney was still frequently irrational, his moods fluctuating without warning throughout the day. One nurse recorded that Cortney “was talking more, writing numbers on blackboard, answering addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems readily.” A few hours later another nurse wrote that Cortney “becomes very wild at times, hitting and kicking. Has a wild look in his eyes.”
When the psychiatrist, Dr. Iverson, examined Cortney again that first week of June, he made the following notation on Cortney’s chart:
Sensorium is clearing—he is quite aware of what is going on—many of his mood changes are quite voluntary and appropriate… . When he gets upset he needs personal interaction and acceptance of any feeling that comes out. These feelings should not be repressed or shut off. This expression is therapeutic and necessary.
Two days later, at noon, a nurse assisted Cortney in ambulating on the ward, then tried to feed him his lunch. Cortney had helped to feed himself at breakfast that day, but now he refused to eat anything. He appeared tired and listless and hardly responded to the nurse. Then suddenly, as the nurse spoke to him and held the spoon at his mouth, Cortney sat up in bed, his body rigid, and stared at the wall with a vacant look in his eyes. The nurse asked him what was wrong. She snapped her fingers in front of his face. But Cortney stayed locked in that upright posture for twenty seconds, staring straight ahead, the nurse still talking to him, still trying to get him to respond. Then, just as suddenly as he had sat up, Cortney said the word “Yes” and lay back on the pillow.
Iverson was certain that after seven weeks most of Cortney’s memories of the murder scene had been locked deep in his mind by amnesia. But openings would remain. Something the nurse had said, or perhaps the way she had held the spoon at his mouth, somehow had hit one of these openings, and for a few moments that day Cortney had remembered.
* * *
During the second week of June, Cortney became increasingly combative, swinging at the nurses even though his hands were still tied to the bed rails. He mumbled and screamed “Goddamn!” sometimes for hours without stopping, one “Goddamn” linked to another until the word became a meaningless slur. He was so hostile that the nurses administering ointment to his rash or changing his sheets had to be careful not to approach him from his left side. Many of them had bruises on their bodies from when they had got too close or had come toward Cortney from the wrong side and he had hit them. One night he got hold of a nurse’s arm and twisted it behind her back until tears came to her eyes and other nurses had to pry her loose.
When the rest of the hospital was quiet during the late night and early morning hours, Cortney’s screams often could be heard echoing from the ICU down the halls of the third floor.
“He had a lot of nightmares at night,” remembered John Smith, the respiratory technician who seven weeks earlier had worked to break up the bloody edema spilling from Cortney’s lungs. John was still working the night shift in June when he began getting regular calls from the ICU nurses.
“I remember them calling me up to come in and wrestle him down, because he would be flailing his arms like, ‘God damn it, God damn it!’ You know, just flailing, just… almost like he was wrestling a shadow but without any real direction. He was just flailing around and hitting the bed, ‘cause I remember I even had to figure like, How am I going to get in there without getting clobbered?
“We had to wrestle him down and tie him, and this was practically every night. You could hear him all over the floor, I mean booming. They’d call me, say, ‘Come upstairs immediately!’ and I could hear him the minute I got to the third floor. I could hear him screaming. That was when he was in ICU Seven having all those nightmares and everything. All I ever heard was ‘Goddamn! Goddamn! God—’ just over and over, running right together, you know, no pause. And he never opened his eyes. He always had his eyes tightly closed and his fists clinched. That’s about the time I got worried we had created a monster. We were all wondering what we had done. See, I was really upset with Hauser for not going harder on him the night they were brought in. Course I was in school, I was gung ho, I was out to save everybody that came through the emergency room doors. But now I was kinda having second thoughts, like maybe I had been thinking a little too idealistically. I thought he was just going to be bananas for the re
st of his life.”
Upon entering his room the nurses often would find Cortney turning in his bed, pulling at his hospital gown, and swearing. If they asked him what was wrong, he would complain that his stomach hurt. Nearly every time a nurse touched him he tried to strike her or twist her arm or bend back her fingers. When he couldn’t reach the IVs in his arms because of the restraints binding his wrists, he cried for the nurses to remove the needles. During occasional intervals Cortney was quiet and cooperative and spoke in appropriate, full sentences. Mostly he swore, screaming, “Goddamn!” so loudly sometimes it could be heard all over the third floor of the hospital, and sometimes muttering it over and over so softly and soothingly one nurse described it as almost a lullaby.
Much of Cortney’s hostility seemed to arise from frustration: he was helpless. He had little control over his bladder or bowels, and frequently he was incontinent of urine or stools in bed. When this happened, he got angry and tearful and appeared to be embarrassed. If the nurses tried to help him or change his sheets, he would become hostile, as if he didn’t want anyone to know what he had done.
On the seventeenth of June, eight weeks after the murders, Cortney was transferred out of ICU to a private room on the surgical ward down the hall. There, his combativeness grew worse. He hit the nurses and the doctors, knocked over food trays, screamed at visitors, and pulled out the lines feeding into his body as fast as the doctors could put them back in. He fought the lab technicians so hard they could not draw blood samples, and the X-ray department was lucky to get even blurred pictures of his abdomen and chest. He hit Claire, he hit his brothers, he hit his father. He jerked on the gastrostomy tube rising out of his stomach, and often three or four nurses had to hold him down for his feedings through the tube. Several times a day the nurses could hear him lying in his bed, begging for a pain shot.
