Gabby

by Gabrielle Giffords

  This experience taught me a lot about myself and the process of recovery. One thing that stuck with me was that if you are religious about rehab and if you follow a prescribed course of treatment, you can recover completely, despite the odds or the conventional wisdom that might leave you thinking otherwise.

  Throughout my medical odyssey, Gabby was incredibly supportive. She had faith that I’d fought off the cancer and would get completely back to normal. “But no matter what happens,” she told me, “I’m in this with you for the long haul.” It wasn’t immediate, but I did make it back to 100 percent.

  Now it was my turn to be there for Gabby. In the wake of her injury, without hesitation, I said those same words to her. “I’m in this with you for the long haul.”

  I’d even kid with Gabby about my cancer scare. As a result of her injury, she had to get regular shots of Botox in her arms and legs to help with spasticity and to deaden her nerves. It was no fun getting the shots, and from time to time she’d complain about them.

  “Listen, Gabby,” I said to her one day. “Your shots are easy. Do you remember where I had to give myself shots?”

  She remembered and laughed. She grimaced through the next needle with little protest.

  There was another time, three months after Gabby was shot, when I found myself thinking again about our wedding vows. As always, I was trying to determine what Gabby understood and what she recalled about her life. So I asked her a few questions.

  “Hey, sweetie, do you remember our wedding?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you remember your wedding dress?” I was probing.

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of dress was it?” I asked, and she paused for a long time. No answer.

  “Did you buy it?”

  “Nooooo,” she said. “Borrowed.”

  “Yes! That’s right. And what kind of dress was it?”

  She couldn’t answer, so I gave her a hint. “Ver . . . Ver . . .”

  “Vera Wang,” she said. She got that right, too.

  “So, Gabby, do you remember what happened that day?”

  “Married,” she said.

  “Yes, we got married. But there was something magical that happened as we were getting married. Do you remember what it was?”

  She thought for just a few seconds and then she smiled. “Rain,” she said.

  I was so thrilled to see that she remembered and could say it.

  That night we got married, we were under the chuppah, which was all lit up, and we were about to begin saying our vows. Just then, as we looked into each other’s eyes, the lightest sprinkle started to fall from the sky. It lasted only the length of our vows, about forty-five seconds, before it stopped.

  It really was magical. As I gazed at Gabby, thinking how gorgeous and happy she looked, the air was sparkling from the lights and the misty raindrops. And then the rain passed and we were husband and wife.

  Some cultures consider rain at a wedding to be good luck or an indication of fertility. The Italians even have a saying: “Sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata.” A wet bride is a lucky bride.

  “Rain,” Gabby said again, and I could see she was thinking back to that happy moment.

  I reached for her hand, and as always, she found her way to my wedding ring, which she slipped off easily, onto her waiting fingers.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Ace of Spades

  In the spring of 2011, I was simultaneously the commander of space shuttle Endeavour and the assistant chief of encouragement at Gabby’s bedside. During the workday, her mom, Gloria, was on duty as chief encourager and cheerleader while I was at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, training for my upcoming mission.

  Doctors at TIRR, the rehab hospital, told us that our optimism and encouragement could make a great difference in Gabby’s recovery, and they suggested specific, meaningful things we could do.

  For instance, we were told to encourage her not to forget about the right side of her body. Because she was shot on the left side of her head, it was the mobility on her right side that was severely compromised. That’s just how the wiring in the brain works. There was another issue, too: A bullet passing through a brain is just the beginning of the injury process. That wiring in the brain suffers even more damage in the days that follow.

  After Gabby was shot, brain tissue bruised by the bullet continued to swell for days, killing additional cells in the left side of her brain. That likely caused more impairment to the right side of her body. (Gabby was lucky that the bullet did not cross the geometric center line which splits the brain’s left and right hemispheres. That likely would have been fatal, because both sides of her brain would have swelled.)

  A lot of traumatic-brain-injury patients ignore the side of their body opposite their brain injury. Gabby understood this impulse and fought it, making efforts every day to move her right leg and to try to move her right arm. Our job was to urge her on.

  “Hey, Gabby,” I’d say when we were both just sitting around. “Try to move your right hand.”

  She’d give me a look of weariness, and issue a sigh that suggested, “OK, but don’t expect too much. We’ve tried this before, and we know how it turns out.”

  Still, she’d make a gallant attempt. She’d stare at her hand for a little while, as if she was using telepathy to will it to move. She could sometimes get it to twitch slightly, but it usually just remained still.

  “Come on, Gabby, try to move it,” I’d say again.

  And that’s when she’d do exactly what I asked. She’d use her good left hand to grasp her floppy right hand. She’d pick it up from her wheelchair armrest and place it on her lap. Then she’d smile at me playfully, as if to say, “You asked me to move my right hand. Well, I did. Now stop bothering me!”

  She still had her sense of humor.

  In those months, Gabby and I followed pretty much the same daily routine. Because my house in League City is far from the downtown hospital, I was staying at the home of our friends Tilman and Paige Fertitta, in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood. I’d wake up each day at 6:00 a.m., and by 6:30 I’d be at the Starbucks in the Highland Village Shopping Center, picking up a cup of coffee for Gabby. I knew just what she wanted: a nonfat grande latte with two raw sugars and cinnamon powder on top.

  Early on, the baristas recognized me, and they’d nod politely. After they realized I was buying coffee each day for Gabby, they began decorating her cups with different messages. They’d write “Have a great day, Gabby” or they’d use colored markers to draw simple illustrations—a rising sun or a smiley face.

  Gabby was touched by their efforts, and she enjoyed each day’s new message or design. After I told this to Jim Bradley, the manager at Star-bucks, he decided to expand the creative process. Another regular customer was a second-grade teacher, and Jim wondered if her students might pitch in by designing cups. The kids loved the idea and got to work.

  After that, Gabby was always glad to see me each morning, but she seemed more interested in the colorful Starbucks cup in my hand, designed with butterflies, rainbows, stars, flowers, a cactus here or there, and my favorites, rockets, space shuttles, and astronauts. Gabby not only loved the illustrations, but as a visitor from Arizona, she appreciated the welcoming embrace of the children of Houston.

  I’d hang out with Gabby for forty-five minutes or so as she ate breakfast, then I’d give her a kiss goodbye, wish her well in therapy, and drive thirty-five minutes south to NASA. Once at work, my days were spent training in the space shuttle mission simulator with my crew, as we tried to master every detail and potential hazard that awaited us in space.

  After a long day at NASA, I was usually pretty weary when I arrived back at TIRR each evening. Gabby’s parents, who were logging fourteen-hour days with her, would fill me in on the day’s successes and setbacks, the meals and the visitors. Then they’d take off for a while to give Gabby and me some private time together. The nurse would leave the room, too.

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sp; Some nights I’d climb into bed with Gabby before she fell asleep, and we’d talk.

  Well, mostly, I’d talk. Back then, it took her an enormous amount of effort to try to articulate anything close to a complex thought, so she was usually pretty quiet. But she listened.

  To fit together in the bed, we’d both lie on our sides, and I always made sure I was on her right side. That way, I could get her to focus more on the right side of her body.

  One night in mid-April, we were in her bed together, face-to-face, just inches apart. We were both pretty tired, and we were just relaxing, not saying anything. Then I realized that Gabby was looking closely at something on my face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Hair,” she said.

  She reached over and started to mess with an extra-long hair in my right eyebrow. Gabby had developed a keen eye for detail since her injury—she’d notice the spot on a doctor’s tie or the scuff on his shoes. Now she had zoned in on my eyebrow.

  The next word out of her mouth was “scissors.” She leaned toward her nightstand in search of a pair.

  YIKES!

  “Gabby, hold on!” I said. “Let’s think about this. You’re newly left-handed, your vision is damaged, you’re not wearing your glasses, I’m about to launch into space, and you want me to let you come at my eye with a pair of scissors? Are you crazy?”

  She and I laughed and laughed and laughed. The bed was shaking from our laughter. It was a nice moment.

  Astronauts do a lot of joking around, and we have a shared appreciation of gallows humor. That’s because we know the odds of our chosen occupation. A visually impaired spouse coming at us with a pair of scissors is among the least of our worries.

  In my fifteen years at NASA, I found that behind the jokes there was a sobering reality that we didn’t often address. We loved our jobs, we knew we were helping mankind increase its knowledge of the universe, and we were proud when our efforts inspired children to dream. But we also knew that the achievements of the space program came with human costs—and always will.

  There were 135 space shuttle missions. Two of them resulted in the deaths of all crew members. Fourteen astronauts in total. Of the five orbiters built in the history of the shuttle program, two were destroyed during missions—Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003.

  In the astronaut office at NASA, we knew the statistics. Each mission had a “demonstrated risk” of 1 in 67.5, meaning that was the probability we wouldn’t make it back alive. Our “calculated risk”—the likelihood of a catastrophic failure on any given mission—was thought to be 1 in 57 for each mission, according to NASA data crunchers. I flew a total of four shuttle missions, which suggests that I had somewhere between a 1-in-14 and a 1-in-17 likelihood of not surviving my NASA career.

  To understand the risks of space travel, I’d sometimes ask friends who aren’t astronauts to consider a deck of cards. “Imagine that I offered you a million dollars if you pick any of the fifty-two cards except the ace of spades,” I’d say. “A million dollars just like that. But the deal would be: If you pick the ace of spades, you’d lose your life. Would you take that risk—one out of fifty-two?”

  Some would. Most wouldn’t. Even for a million dollars.

  Then I’d ask: “Would you take those same odds for a ride in the space shuttle?”

  Not many people said yes. But that’s the unspoken deal astronauts choose to take.

  Our families knew the statistics, too, of course. By tradition, the day before liftoff, we’d be permitted to step out of quarantine and say goodbye to our spouses and children. The hugs were long. The mood would be joyous but stressful. Tears were common. There was a poignancy even in mundane directives: “Don’t forget to put out the garbage cans.” All of us were aware that fourteen of our comrades went through this same goodbye ritual, the hugs and the kisses, but didn’t make it home.

  Gabby used to tell me that she never slept well when I was in space. She felt nervous and, for a take-charge person, uncomfortably helpless. She’d be glued to NASA TV in the middle of the night. During my 2008 mission, she talked about her worries in an interview on CNN. “I wake up every couple hours,” she said. “I check e-mail. Check the news. Make sure everything is going OK. You never really relax until you see the vehicle touch down, the parachute deploy, and it fully rolls to a stop.”

  I’d sometimes talk to Gabby about my experiences on February 1, 2003, the day Columbia disintegrated during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The disaster happened because a piece of foam insulation not much bigger than the size of a pizza box had broken off from the shuttle’s external tank when it launched sixteen days earlier. This piece of debris had struck the left wing, damaging the vehicle’s thermal protection system, which we call TPS. The TPS was designed to protect the shuttle from the intense heat that results during reentry.

  Columbia’s crew members had been aware that they were having serious problems. As the orbiter sped across New Mexico and then Texas, the crew was confronted with failures that we often see in the simulator. In this case, however, the failures were real and Columbia was quickly coming apart.

  The last audio transmission came just before 8 a.m. central time, about sixteen minutes before the planned touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Columbia’s commander, Rick Husband, said “Roger” and then was abruptly cut off. About five seconds later, Columbia was out of control. Hot plasma had entered the wing and was melting the vehicle’s structure from the inside out. Over the next forty-two seconds, the crew fought desperately to salvage a rapidly deteriorating situation. At about 180,000 feet and Mach 15, the crew cabin began to break up. More than 84,000 pieces of debris would fall over east Texas.

  Within seconds of hearing that we had lost communication with Columbia, and more ominously, that we had also lost tracking, I was in my car rushing to the NASA office. I joined another astronaut, Mike Good, in our contingency action center, where we started going through the mishap checklist. Over the next thirty minutes, nearly everyone in the astronaut office arrived to help.

  We had never planned for the possibility that this sort of accident would happen within a two-hour drive of where we were sitting in Houston. It’s a big planet. The likelihood of the space shuttle crashing this close to home was minuscule. I said to Andy Thomas, then the deputy chief astronaut, “We never planned for this, but I think we need to get someone there right now.”

  “OK,” he said. “You go.”

  I immediately called Harris County’s Constable Bill Bailey. He was a great option if you needed something done fast. There isn’t a law-enforcement official in the state of Texas who looks more the part than Bill Bailey. Big hat, big boots, big belt buckle, BIG man. I said, “Bill, this is Mark Kelly. I need a helicopter right now.”

  No explanation was required. He just said, “I’ll call you right back.” Within minutes Bill had a car on the way to the Johnson Space Center to bring me to a waiting U.S. Coast Guard helicopter. A short time later I was on my way to the debris field.

  We headed for Hemphill, Texas, population 1,100, because we’d gotten word that the crew compartment may have landed near there. (In the early going, the media speculated about whether any of the crew members could have survived. We knew better.)

  Three of the seven crew members started with me and my brother in our astronaut class back in 1996; they were our friends. I tried, not always successfully, to set aside my emotions as I helped look for their remains. The area was very remote, and the debris was spread widely. An FBI agent and I had to take dirt roads and then go off into the woods. We recovered the remains of Laurel Clark, my very good friend and a U.S. Navy flight surgeon, on one of those dirt roads in Hemphill. She was the coworker whom our wedding-ring bearer would later be named after. Another search party found the remains of Columbia’s pilot, Willie McCool, in a wooded area not far away. I immediately went to the scene to help with the identification and to make sure things were handled appropriately.

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sp; On the second day, the FBI agent and I recovered the body of Dave Brown, a Navy captain who had been conducting science experiments on the mission. I spent two hours in the woods, sitting next to Dave’s body, while the owner of the property cut back trees to get a larger vehicle to our location. I’d wished Dave well before the mission. Now, sixteen days later, all I could do for him was to make sure that his remains could be returned to his family. Most astronauts write a letter to their families to be opened only if they don’t return from their missions. I sat with Dave’s body, thinking about whether he’d written a letter, and what it might have said.

  Like the Challenger accident seventeen years earlier, the loss of Columbia came in the wake of signs that were ignored. This wasn’t just a random accident. NASA certainly could have done a better job of addressing the long-term problem of foam liberating from the external tank. While the space shuttle is an incredibly complex machine that can fail in thousands of catastrophic ways, it sometimes tries to tell you ahead of time what’s coming. I think this was one of those times. We had seen foam problems again and again on successive launches and done little about it. Poor decision-making contributed to both tragedies, Challenger and Columbia.

  From all my conversations with her, Gabby knew how I felt about the failings within NASA. I learned there that a well-meaning team of people can sometimes make horrible decisions that no single individual would make. Groupthink, and an unwillingness to disagree with the bosses, was too often a problem at NASA. It may be oversimplifying to say it this way, but in my years as an astronaut, I learned that none of us is as dumb as all of us. That phrase is now clearly posted in the room at NASA used by the Mission Management Team. (When Gabby was injured, and a large medical team needed to be assembled to treat her, it was very helpful to me to keep this mantra in mind.)