by Paige Wetzel
But then I did an inventory of the takeaways. Even though nothing about that experience was about me or for me, it shaped me into a wife who cherished the bad times because they built me up. I learned how to love when there was no time or energy to be loved in return. When I saw Josh accomplishing his goals, I took them as my own victories because I stayed busy behind the scenes, trying to set Josh up for success. I also had my first child! There is no personal victory for a woman like delivering a baby. I endured a lot of pain right in front of my husband, and I know he left with an all-new respect for what moms go through. And, my friends, wow. You see, being at Walter Reed is like being on an island especially made for amputees. Everyone helps everyone. If an amputee needs a push up the hill, a mom, kid, military officer, or hospital staff gives them a push. In fact, people will call you out for walking by someone struggling like that. We watched one another’s children, we brought each other food, we helped each other fill out paperwork, we took responsibility for one another. No matter where our lives take us, Walter Reed Medical Center was the only place any of us will ever be where everyone there was just like us. When I lived there, I longed for the civilian world—a place where I could actually do things like sign my kids up for sports or have a permanent residence. I never thought about the fact that wherever we ended up, Josh was probably going to be the only amputee anyone knew. The time in my life when I felt most out of place might actually have been the time we spent in the place that understood us the most.
The night of January 26, we loaded a U-Haul trailer, went out to eat with our friends, and hardly slept in anticipation of our freedom date the following morning. The next morning, Harper and I hopped into my car, while Josh climbed into his truck with the U-Haul trailer attached, all of us smiling, giggling, and high-fiving. We left Walter Reed Medical Center at 4:00 a.m. and headed south, never to return.
We left a snow-fallen Washington, DC, and stopped at a halfway point to spend the night near Charlotte, North Carolina, where Jenn, Drew, and baby Easton Mullee had moved after Drew retired. It was a beautiful seventy-three degrees and sunny the entire day. We were in shorts and letting the kids play outside the entire day, which was very bizarre for January. When we came inside, the Weather Channel showed significant winter weather on its way to the Southeast. As a typical Southerner heading south, I didn’t believe winter weather could move south of us, as we were clearly enjoying a summer day, so we loaded up the next morning and headed to Auburn, expecting a clear and sunny drive.
The farther we drove, the more obvious it became that it was getting colder. Pretty much all of North Georgia was under cloud cover, and we saw more snow flurries the closer we got to Atlanta. Josh and I had driven in plenty of snow in Tacoma and in DC, so Harper and I continued to follow the U-Haul behind his truck. We cautiously made it through Atlanta on I-85 south, but as we continued, road conditions were changing rapidly. The cars around us were slowing down significantly. As we slowed, I could see drivers in front of me tap their brakes, but their tires would continue to spin without gripping the ground. A dry patch of road would be their saving grace, and the car would continue to coast down the highway. Then, cars began appearing in ditches. Not wrecked, but after losing grip on the road, they found their stop in the grass. First there were two or three cars, then in another half mile there would be six or seven. These cars were populating the areas around the short bridges built over ditches and small creeks. I became white knuckled and afraid to look out my window at the people who had crashed. I was just staring at the back of the U-Haul trailer in front of me, praying that we would stay on course.
We crossed a bridge that had a small drop-off at the end. Suddenly, the U-Haul dipped with the edge of the bridge, and with the downward momentum, it began to fishtail out of control in front of me. The truck with my husband inside and the U-Haul zoomed off the left side of the interstate into the median. Josh spun around one, two, three times, the trailer leaning more and more each rotation. As he entered the fourth spin, I screamed, “Please Jesus, no!” as every tire on the left side of the truck and the U-Haul were suspended off the ground. After what seemed like hours but was only seconds, the truck and trailer slammed back down on the ground with a violent bounce. The incident definitely caused the biggest scene out of any of the sidelined vehicles we’d come across so far. At some point I had safely pulled my own car over. I got out and sprinted to Josh’s truck, leaving baby Harper in the car. The left back tire of the truck had been completely ripped off the wheel. I opened his door to find him buckled in and (thank God) unharmed. Everything else was all over the cab of the truck: the sunflower seeds he’d been chewing, the bags that had been in the back seat, and all his paperwork. Oddly enough, Josh was actually angry. He was so upset that he had wrecked his car, which is not how I saw it. I was just so thankful that he was okay and Harper was not with him. We hugged in the muddy snow and said a quick prayer thanking God for no bodily harm. Now everyone in the median was asking the same question: How are we going to get home? People began walking and abandoning their cars. It was an apocalyptic sight for farmland Georgia. We called a tow truck and waited for a good forty-five minutes before they got there. They slowly towed our truck to a tire shop in the middle of nowhere that looked like they probably worked on tires during the day and made white lightning at night. However, the people were super nice and very accommodating to us as we waited. They fixed Josh’s tire and sent us on our way to Auburn.
It took us an hour and a half to drive twenty-five miles. We eventually made it to our little condo just outside of Auburn, where, much to our surprise, there were about twenty people from the community waiting to help us unload our things. Despite the weather, Kate Larkin, the new friend we’d made on our tour of Auburn, had enlisted help for us to get our things out of the U-Haul. These people unloaded our washer and dryer and hooked it up, put things in cabinets, got the baby stuff out and ready to use, and put our furniture together in about half an hour. We thanked everyone, ordered pizza, put Harper in bed, and just sat on our couch thinking about our new life. We are civilians now. We live here now. We are done with being stationed, assigned, and attached to posts. Harper has a hometown!
PART FOUR
HAPPILY OUT OF CONTROL
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A TEST
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.
—Philippians 3:12
PAIGE
Josh and I had just entered our fourth year of marriage when we left the hospital and moved to Alabama. Even though we had overcome so many obstacles, we still had not marked some basic milestones of a couple in their mid-twenties. I had never had a full-time job since we’d been married. Harper was now five months old but had never been around another baby. Josh was receiving a retirement check from one job but didn’t qualify for entry-level jobs. In an attempt to join the mainstream, I immediately started looking for work. I had heard about a need to fill a maternity leave spot at Opelika High School teaching freshman biology and AP genetics. I hardly knew anything about those subjects, but I knew how to study, so I interviewed and accepted the six-week position while still working on my master’s courses. We got waitlisted for Harper to start daycare, so she would stay home with Josh until he began classes at Auburn in the fall. Josh, Harper, and Harper’s newest roommate, our dog Cooper, did nothing but play all day, which was obvious the minute I walked in the door. I would come home after work to find toys everywhere, pillow forts, and snacks strewn about—all for a kid who couldn’t even crawl yet.
I was so thankful for the time I spent teaching. It was nice to get reacquainted with a learning environment designed for high school kids. However, the school year ended, and it was time to look for yet something else. Thank goodness I had kept in contact with Rick Nold, my former college volleyball coach at Jacksonville and now head coach at Auburn. I reached out to him and asked if I coul
d help out with summer volleyball camps as part of my master’s internship. He agreed, and I started coming in to help plan for the summer 2014 camps. Every day, I was trying to find a new way to throw my resume out there, thinking it would be really cool to get into coaching volleyball again. As I was sitting in Rick’s office, his phone rang. It was the athletics director at Point University in West Point, Georgia, in need of a head volleyball coach as soon as possible (wow to God’s timing). Point was about thirty-five minutes from our condo. I went on an interview and was offered the job on the spot. I think a full-time head coaching position is about as good as it gets as far as an internship! I finally had an opportunity to run a program the way I wanted to. I wanted to create a learning environment where leadership birthed from mistakes, girls gave their all in the weight room, and personal development came from hard work demonstrated on the court.
My first season as head coach at Point University was also Josh’s first semester at Auburn University. I was amazed at how much he willingly studied. He got up early to review for tests and worked on assignments as soon as he got them. I was really proud of the initiative he displayed but also slightly annoyed to learn he was good at school now. Was this the same guy who flunked out of college all those years ago and joined the Army? Josh was making good grades and immediately took an interest in being part of Auburn Athletics. He got involved with the communications department within Auburn Athletics and became a student sports information director for Auburn women’s tennis, a job that would require reporting stats, announcing, writing game recaps, and traveling with the team. Working in different towns, Josh going to school, and parenting together was really tough, but Josh and I kept our noses to the grindstone with eyes on Josh’s graduation date. This was everything we couldn’t have in the hospital, so we willingly went above and beyond for our respective jobs.
As we came up on the first anniversary of being released from Walter Reed, I felt this unspoken competition taking place between me and Josh. I think we both felt a strong need to show the world we could succeed, but we did it by subtly trumping each other’s responsibilities. I don’t know what made us feel like we weren’t succeeding before, but I guess we wanted proof of it in either monetary gains or wins on a scoreboard for our respective teams. Josh was forever proud of doing things as if his injury did not slow him down. I was going to finally show the world I was more than a sidelined Army wife. Both of our mindsets were crafted from a belief that we were completely healed from Walter Reed and that chapter of our lives was closed. After all, we had completed hours of marriage counseling, one-on-one therapy, physical therapy, classes, and briefings on how to take care of our own affairs. We had no option but to charge ahead with life. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but the slow tilting of this axis made me feel like I had to protect my dreams, my goals, and my visions. I did not even realizing that I had started saying “my” instead of “our.”
I was proving myself with my success in the volleyball world. After a year at Point University, I was offered another head coaching job in the summer of 2015 and started the first ever volleyball program at Auburn University at Montgomery, a satellite campus of Auburn University with NCAA Division II sports. Josh was now helping with football and basketball at Auburn, and we had finally been selected to attend a Homes for Our Troops conference in Massachusetts, where we would make plans to build a mortgage-free home in Auburn! It seemed like we had new and exciting updates at every family gathering. Exhausted, distanced, and overstimulated, neither one of us was going to be the one to volunteer to slow down. How could we? Look at our accomplishments! So, we kept our feet on the gas and eyes on our careers.
After months of commuting fifty miles to work, football games, recruiting, basketball games, and coaching, Josh and I became roommates looking after a child and a dog. We never spoke to each other. All three of us wouldn’t be in the same house until about 7:00 p.m., and we usually ended our day by sitting on the couch with our eyes closed while Harper sat in one of our laps and watched Mickey Mouse cartoons. Thank God for Harper’s personality. She allowed for a lot of second-rate parenting from both of us for a long, long time. Eating dinner together was awkward, like, “Hello, stranger! How’s your life been?” Then the conversation shifted to the same thing: work.
JOSH
Once I started at Auburn, I poured everything into my schoolwork. Auburn consumed my life, and I was happy for it to. I had failed at the whole college thing once, and I was determined not to do it again. Having gone to war and back since the last time I was in a classroom, I felt like I had so much to prove. I needed everyone’s approval—Paige’s, the Army’s, society’s, even my own—to show them that if life was one big test, I was acing it. I would succeed, and I was going to show everyone that not having legs was never going to slow me down.
On paper, it looked like Paige and I were still accomplishing our goals. I was going to graduate from college, I had a great intern position set up, and Paige had a good job, but things were just weird at home. I had never felt so indifferent toward her. It just didn’t bother me that we didn’t talk that much or spend intentional time together. I still knew her as the amazing wife who had gotten me through the biggest crisis I had ever faced, but there just seemed to be this unspoken mutual agreement that any relationship maintenance would have to take place when we weren’t so busy. Then, the competitive sessions began. It was like our mission was to win a contest of who had the most difficult day. We weren’t nice to each other. Ever. Communication in our home was very matter of fact: “Did you take the trash out?” “Did you get more diapers from the store?” “Did you clean the car?” And even though I hated the tension and the drama, I always answered with attitude. Even if I had completed everything possible to do around the house that day, Paige’s response was never appreciative; instead she would find something not done, or even worse, I imagined her saying to herself, Good! It’s about time he pulled his weight around here. To deflect, I would throw attitude back at Paige by avoiding her at all costs. Our marriage was not a relationship; it was just the means to get things accomplished throughout the day, and we were on different planets about how those things should be done. Poor communication (both talking and listening) helped us build assumptions about each other, like “You’re lazy” or “You just don’t care.” Our imaginations ran wild. We fought constantly. Every fight was fueled by some made-up belief. We could never come to a resolution because each of us had already made up our mind on where the other person was falling short, therefore making it all the other’s fault. The arguments often led to one of us sleeping in another room and committing to the silent treatment for two or three days. Someone would eventually break the silence, and we would talk. The talking was not productive, however. We agreed that we hated fighting, but Paige believed that someone had to take blame for it. I would raise the white flag and say, “Yes, this is all my fault. I’m a bad husband and a bad person, so I will take the blame.” Each time, Paige would respond with variations on “You’re not a bad person, but thank you for admitting this is all your fault.” Paige stayed in a position of dominance; I stayed in a position of guilt. The anxiety built and the cycle continued.
PAIGE
Being in a position of dominance was a lie that I continued to believe was working. I justified my opinions by telling myself that Josh would eventually come around to my way of thinking. However, I was only fooling myself. Not only was I not winning him over, but every bit of control I had was false. The more I tried to ignore the truth, the more anxiety built inside me. Aside from the draining logistics, the competition at home, and parenting Harper, commuting to a job an hour away was wearing on me every day. Meanwhile, Josh was nearing graduation but still piling on the work to build his resume for a full-time job after graduation. I stood in my kitchen staring at our family calendar and realized we had not had a weekend off in almost three months. I was on the edge of a precipice that had no bottom in sight.
I had two p
anic attacks in February 2016. The first time, Josh was next to me in bed, and I don’t remember if we were awake or if we were mid-conversation, but all of a sudden I was sweating and gasping for air. Even in that moment I kept telling Josh I was fine, and I truly didn’t think something bad was happening. I just thought I needed to catch my breath. It was more than that. I felt almost a swelling in my neck, like my air was being choked off. I kept thinking that if I could just get one deep breath it would stop, but my breathing remained rapid and shallow, like I had just run a three-hundred-yard sprint. When I finally caught my breath, my head was pounding and my eyes were watering. I blew it off and fell asleep. It wasn’t until the next day I asked myself, Why would you need to catch your breath while lying in bed? I was in denial about it being a panic attack. Then, I had another one. I was in my bathroom at home and had just read an email from my boss regarding funding. Basically, a donor had decided to go another direction with some funding that would have paid for my first-year needs. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I suddenly felt very jittery and began sweating and breathing rapidly again. I sat on the floor and mentally scolded myself. What on earth is wrong with you? Get it together! By the time it passed, I was soaked in sweat. I had to jump in the shower and get ready for work all over again.
Several weeks passed, and I just felt anxious and exhausted. At first, I worried that depression was rearing its ugly head again. But this time, I felt really out of whack physically. I didn’t have much energy and longed for the next opportunity to sit down. After a while, I was convinced that my self-negligence had developed into some kind of sickness. If there is anything my time at Walter Reed taught me it’s to wisely (read: do not google symptoms and make cocktails of medications to get rid of sickness) try to treat yourself by charting your symptoms like a nurse would do if you were in the hospital. There’s nothing worse than spending your day getting a doctor’s appointment and waiting for hours just to get prescribed extra-strength Tylenol. So, I documented everything. I charted my temperature, wrote down my ailments during anxiety attacks, and tracked the regular ongoing issues: fatigue, random nausea, headaches, and so on. I had about a week’s worth of documented issues and racked my brain on what else a doctor might ask.