Second Impact

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Second Impact Page 13

by David Klass


  “Yeah, but Coach is probably gonna rest him. He hasn’t let Danny put pads on or run drills all week.”

  “That’s good,” Carla noted, sounding glad.

  “So what’s going on with you?” I asked. “I miss your blogs.”

  “That’s a little hard to believe,” she muttered.

  I didn’t want to argue, but I had to say: “That’s not fair.”

  “Why isn’t it fair?” she asked, and if I were allowed to say that her eyes flashed, believe me they did then.

  “It’s not fair because I disagreed with you but I didn’t call the thought police or even complain to the principal. I just told you what I thought you ought to do. So now you act like no one’s allowed to disagree with you or else they’re evil.”

  We had both stopped walking and we were facing each other. Carla said the last thing I would ever have expected her to say. “You know what, Jerry, you’re right. You had a legitimate point to make and you made it, and I think you’re wrong, but it was a fair argument. And I guess I’m just kind of sensitive because the other people on your side didn’t fight fair. But I shouldn’t take it out on you.” She stuck out her right hand, and before I knew what I was doing, I took it and shook it.

  “Okay,” Carla said. “Good luck on Friday, Jerry. Kick some Jaguar butt. Bye.”

  “Bye,” I repeated. “Hope to see you at the game. Ricks will be tough, but I’ll give it my best shot.” But she had turned her back and was already two steps away.

  View 4 reader comments:

  Posted by user JaguarsSuck at 10:13 p.m.

  GOOOOO TIGERS

  Posted by user DanTheMANLookingFineAllTheTime at 10:13 p.m.

  Excuse me buddy, looks good MOST OF THE TIME? Don’t know what you’re talking about. Pretty sure that must have been a typo.

  Posted by user CrustyAlum at 10:19 p.m.

  This is a truly climactic moment for our community and town. I would like for us all to take a moment to reflect on this momentous occasion as well as the great football history it brings to the fore for all of us. These days, with our iPhoneVideoMobileBeeper contraptions, it seems everyone is far too likely to walk right past crucial historical sites like the Kendall football stadium where so many state championship flags fly proudly without even noticing the piece of our nation’s history they are able to bear witness to.

  Posted by user @CrustyAlum at 10:22 p.m.

  Ah yes, the iPhoneVideoMobileBeeper generation. Give it up, man. Go climb back into your coffin and take a nap for the rest of eternity, dude.

  Comment deleted by user Ms_Edison at 10:25 p.m.

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Field trip

  * * *

  Hi Jerry,

  Sorry I was sort of crabby after the pep rally. I hear you don’t have practice tomorrow, and I wondered whether you wanted to go with me into Manhattan on a kind of field trip—for a story I was writing, back when I was allowed to write stories. Might be a change of pace.

  Let me know,

  Carla

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: Field trip

  * * *

  Hi Carla,

  I admit I’m intrigued, and ordinarily I’d be up for it, but maybe not the day before a championship game. Please ask me again and I’ll come.

  Jerry

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: Re: Field trip

  * * *

  Jerry,

  Sure, I understand, it was probably a bad idea. I just thought maybe you’d be looking for distractions. But you should do whatever you think will set you up to grind Jamesville into the dirt!

  All best,

  Carla

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Changed my mind

  * * *

  Hey, Carla, I thought about your offer and I guess I’ve changed my mind. The truth is, I won’t be able to accomplish much tomorrow after the team meeting. I’ll be too charged up. I’ll probably just come home and bounce off the walls till my parents get home from work, and then I’ll annoy the hell out of them till bedtime. So, if you still want me as company, I’ll come. I have to admit, I’m a bit curious about your field trip.

  I have two conditions. First, I need to be home by 9 p.m. so I can get a good night’s sleep. Second, this trip stays just between the two of us. No one at our school can know about it. Coach might not love me going to New York the afternoon before the biggest game of the year. If you can agree to those two conditions, count me in. Oh, yeah, do I need to bring a notebook or dress up in any special way?

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: TBI: The blog entry no one else will ever see

  * * *

  Hey, Jerry, thanks for changing your mind and coming with me this afternoon. I told you we could make it back in time for you to get plenty of sleep for tomorrow’s game.

  I don’t know what you made of the whole thing, but I thought it was fascinating and also pretty terrifying, and I wanted to write it all down while it was still fresh in my head. Here’s the blog I’ll never be able to post, for your eyes only:

  Good morning, Kendall High. This is the silenced voice of your once and future sportswriter, temporarily on hiatus for bad behavior. (Boy, Jerry, it’s hard to get used to this. It’s really hard to get used to the idea that I’m not writing for anyone else to read. I guess I’m spoiled. I’ve been in the habit of thinking I could write down what I saw and what I heard and pass it by one teacher for editing and corrections, and then up it goes for the world to read. A small world, I admit, but still.)

  (Last time I wrote, I let myself remember it was private, just one dedicated reader, and you saw what happened. By the end of the blog, I was feeling sorry for myself and sobbing onto my keyboard. Bad idea.

  Instead, this is going to be written as if it could really be posted. Here’s the blog that Carla would have written, if Carla still had a blog. Okay?)

  I invited Jerry Downing to come with me on a visit I had arranged to a rehabilitation unit in Manhattan that specializes in traumatic brain injury, which everyone in the field calls TBI. I had arranged the visit through a doctor my orthopedic surgeon knows. I was planning to include it in the last installment of the story I was writing about sports injuries, which I thought would be about rehab in general. I was going to call it “The Long Road Back,” or something like that, and talk about my knee and the way Jerry Downing’s mother can always get me to do a little more than I think I can do. Then I was going to ask, “What if it isn’t about muscles or tendons or ligaments? What if it’s about brain cells? What does that mean?” and try to answer these questions from this visit.

  So Dr. Abbot got in touch with someone named Dr. Klapper, and Dr. Klapper said I should contact someone named Pauline O’Donnell, who turned out to be the unit coordinator.

  I called Pauline O’Donnell—she said to call her Pauline, but I didn’t quite feel comfortable about that, but then I also didn’t feel right calling her Ms. O’Donnell—that morning and asked if I could bring another journalist from my high school paper along. She said fine, so Jerry and I took the NJ Transit bus through the Lincoln Tunnel to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I had been a little worried that things would be tense between us, because we’ve had some major arguments recently, but we actually managed to have a very civil conversation about what had been going on. We agreed that for the purposes of this trip, we wouldn’t tell anyone about any of the controversy. We wouldn’t talk about how the story might not get written, or about how I had gotten into trouble with the principal, or about Danny. In fact, we decided, we wouldn’t even mention the name of our school or our school paper, unless we absolutely had to, just to keep things separate. No one needed to connect our visit to Kendall i
n any way. If we were asked where we came from, Jerry said, we could just say, oh, this little town in New Jersey, no one’s ever heard of it. And we laughed.

  I think we both felt good, maybe for different reasons, about getting out of Kendall—that little town in New Jersey—and leaving all our usual complications behind us. We talked very easily about trips to the city, trips with our parents, him getting taken to see the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue every year when he was a little kid, me occasionally going with my mother to visit her office and eat a fancy business lunch. And then there’s that moment when you see the Manhattan skyline out the bus window, and you know you’re going under the river and into the big city, and we kind of grinned at one another, because neither one of us is really used to going into New York on our own, and it seemed kind of exciting. So into the tunnel and under the river we went, and then we took a taxi to the hospital, because it turns out that Jerry, just like me, is not supposed to take the subway in New York. I wonder whether all parents, in the end, read the same handbook.

  Pauline O’Donnell turned out to be kind of grandmotherly, so then I really couldn’t call her Pauline, even though every single other person we saw certainly did. We found her in a crowded office on the eighth floor of the hospital. There were three pairs of crutches leaning against the wall, and I almost tripped over a leg brace when I walked in. Pauline O’Donnell had short, curly white hair and bright red harlequin frame glasses, and she was sitting at what looked like a somewhat out-of-date computer, with one of those boxy screens, typing faster than the speed of light.

  “Watch out for the prostheses!” she sang out as we walked in, without looking away from her screen, typed another thousand or so words, and then looked straight at me and smiled.

  “You must be Carla!” she said enthusiastically, and stood up, dived forward over her desk, scooped up the leg brace, shifted it to her left hand, reached out with her right, grabbed mine and shook it, and then reached past me for Jerry’s.

  The thing about New York, I guess, is that there isn’t that much space on the ground, so they build vertically. Everything seemed so crowded, compared to the hospital where my dad works. The offices were tiny and full of boxes and equipment and folders. The gym where she took us was cramped and dark compared to the gym where Jerry’s mother puts me through my paces. To me, the hallways seemed kind of dim, and the rooms all had a slightly dingy quality. I’m sorry if that makes me sound like some kind of spoiled suburban princess, and I know it is supposed to be an absolutely first-class rehab facility, because Dr. Abbot told me so, but all I’m saying is, there didn’t seem to be quite enough space, enough room to breathe.

  Pauline O’Donnell went charging along the hallway, and we hurried behind her. I was carrying a brand-new reporter’s notebook, and I had also turned on my tape recorder, because she said it was okay. I wasn’t exactly sure where we were going. I could see we were passing patients’ rooms, and I wondered where she was taking us. All three of us went bursting into the gym, where there were several therapists working with patients (all the therapists immediately said, “Hi, Pauline!”).

  “This whole unit is traumatic brain injury,” she said proudly—and loudly. And for a minute I felt embarrassed, like she shouldn’t have been saying in front of these patients that they had brain injuries. And I felt like we really didn’t belong in there, like she was putting these people on display and that wasn’t fair. I flipped open my notebook just so I could look at that instead of at the lady nearest me, who was taking very slow shuffling steps along the wall, holding on to a ballet barre.

  But Pauline O’Donnell just kept talking in that same loud voice. “There are other kinds of brain injuries, of course. People can have injury after strokes, or after heart attacks, but our unit focuses on those with TBI, and because of that, we can offer medical support for the concomitant injuries sustained in the course of the specific traumas and rehabilitation services beyond those usually needed by stroke victims!”

  I know that’s what she said, since I have it on tape, and I got most of it down in my notebook as well, but she could obviously see that both Jerry and I looked a little blank, so she explained. “Our patients have had their heads hurt in a variety of different ways,” she said. “Car crashes, motorcycle accidents, accidents on construction sites.” She lowered her voice and said, so that only we could hear, “More than fifty percent of these injuries involve alcohol, you know. And that isn’t just our statistic—that’s nationwide.” She shook her head. I looked up from my notebook and met Jerry’s eyes; I knew he was thinking about his car accident, and I sort of hoped that this might show him that however bad that had been, it could have been worse—no one had been brain damaged.

  Pauline O’Donnell had gone back to sounding like a kind of tour guide, talking loudly and clearly, like one of those people who take school groups around museums on class trips. “Because all of these injuries happened traumatically, we have to think about the whole patient here,” she said. “It’s more than just their heads—they often have injuries involving their arms and legs, their necks, even their kidneys or their stomachs. We’re set up here to deal with all that and at the same time work on the brain injuries.”

  I could see that Jerry looked a little relieved.

  “So these aren’t people who got hurt playing sports?” he asked.

  “No,” said a man’s voice, and we looked around. A youngish man in a white coat with buzz-cut blond hair had joined us. He had a stethoscope looped around his neck and a bright pink tie that somehow reminded me of Pauline O’Donnell’s eyeglass frames; I wondered whether there was some wear-bright-colors rule here on the eighth floor.

  “This is Dr. Klapper,” said Pauline O’Donnell.

  “Hi, Pauline,” he said.

  “And this must be Jenny Abbot’s patient,” he said, “coming to check us out.”

  “That would be me,” I said. “She operated on my knee.”

  “You’re lucky,” Dr. Klapper said. “Well, I mean, clearly the luckiest would be not to need surgery on your knee. But if you do need it, Jenny is the best of the best.”

  I introduced Jerry, and I could see Dr. Klapper look him over, kind of sizing him up. “Football?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Jerry said. “Quarterback.”

  “And you’re a journalist?”

  “I don’t know if I’d say that, sir,” Jerry said. Then there was a pause, and he looked back at the doctor, then cleared his throat and said, “Um, wrestling?”

  “Very good,” Dr. Klapper said. “All-Ivy my junior year. But that’s a while ago.”

  “Wow,” Jerry said. “I’m really impressed.”

  “But I sure was no writer,” Dr. Klapper said. “I think it’s pretty impressive to be quarterbacking your team and covering the news.”

  “Carla here is the real journalist. But she’s had me writing up our season for the school paper, and it’s been quite an experience. And I do like to write.”

  “And he’s good,” I said, and then the two of them, Dr. Klapper and Pauline O’Donnell, looked from me to Jerry and back again, and I was suddenly kind of embarrassed. “So we’ve been working on this story,” I said. Then I stopped myself. I had been about to say, “This story for the Kendall Kourier.” Habit dies hard, I guess; that’s just how I’m used to introducing myself. I would make a lousy secret agent. “Dr. Abbot probably told you,” I went on, “I’ve been doing this series of stories about sports injuries. And I wanted to see what rehab really involves for people with traumatic brain injuries.”

  “That makes sense,” Dr. Klapper said. “I heard this young man asking about people with sports-related TBI, and the truth is, from time to time we’ve had someone here on the unit who got hurt that way. Right now we have a college hockey player, really bad story. I’ll tell you about that. And last year we had a college football player who had big-time neck injuries, head injuries, and a bunch of cracked ribs. But since this is inpatient, most of the people here
sustained their injuries in other ways, as Pauline was telling you. But the important thing is that you’ll be seeing relatively young healthy people who hurt their heads in a variety of different kinds of impacts—and the kinds of problems they have and the kinds of work we do to help them get back function. Those are very similar to the work that we do with anyone who has traumatic brain injury. People coming back after bad concussions, people who want to return to school or return to work—that’s what we deal with here. Of course, first of all, they just want to return home.”

  He turned to Pauline O’Donnell. “I’ll take them around,” he said.

  “Just bring them back to my office when you’re through,” she said, and hurried off.

  Dr. Klapper gestured us toward a corner of the gym where a therapist was working with a patient. “Excuse me, sir,” Jerry said, and the doctor turned to look at him.

  “Is it okay for us to be here like this?” Jerry asked. “Should we ask if it’s okay? Should we introduce ourselves? I mean, I know a lot of these people are kind of weak and all.”

  I was so glad he said that, because I knew exactly what he meant. I felt sort of bad, standing there in that gym, with someone giving me the guided tour. I remembered what Jerry had said about how I shouldn’t have barged into Danny’s hospital room, and it suddenly made more sense to me.

  “It’s fine,” Dr. Klapper said. “You’re with me. We have all kinds of students and visitors coming through. The patients understand that it’s because we’re a teaching facility and because we’re a state-of-the-art therapeutic institution—people want to learn from us. Don’t worry, I’ll explain to the patients who you are.”

  He led us over to a corner of the gym where a tall, thin Asian woman was working with a bald-headed man who looked like he was maybe in his thirties. He was standing up, swaying just a little bit from side to side, dressed in scrub pants and a hospital johnny. There was a walker in front of him, like old people use, but he wasn’t holding it. His arms looked very thick and muscular, like someone who worked out a lot, and I could see that there were tattoos on both forearms; the one nearer me looked like a snake, but I couldn’t make out what the other was.

 

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