Nancy wrote on a dry-erase board: Scotland, Ireland, Holland, England. “Which doesn’t belong?” she asked Gabby.
“Holland,” Gabby said, correctly.
Then Nancy wrote: “Cake, cookies, bread, pie.”
Gabby looked at the words. Nancy expected her to choose bread as the item that didn’t belong, since the other three words referred to desserts. But Gabby picked “cookies” instead. When we told her that “bread” was the correct answer, Gabby pointed to the “s” in cookies and then erased it. That was impressive, too. Gabby noticed that “cake,” “pie,” and “bread” were singular nouns. “Cookies” was a plural noun. It showed a high level of thinking.
“Gabby is paying better attention to everything than we are,” Nancy said.
She and Gabby also worked with money. She gave Gabby four twenties, eight fives, and three ones. Gabby put all the money in order of value and arranged the bills with all the faces in the same direction. Gabby had a difficult time making change for a twenty-dollar bill. But when it came time to give me back the bills I’d lent them from my wallet, Gabby knew exactly how much needed to be returned to me.
Nancy pulled no punches in her time with Gabby. She wanted to determine Gabby’s emotional and psychological state, and so she asked a question no one had asked since January 8. “Given all that has happened since the shooting,” Nancy said, “the tough times you’ve had, all the pain and sadness, are you glad you survived?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Gabby said. Nancy was struck by her lack of hesitation.
Nancy’s question was surprising. We might assume that shooting victims who are in a vegetative state may wish they had died. But Gabby? She was so highly functional. Why would Nancy ask that?
“A lot of stroke patients with aphasia are highly depressed,” Nancy explained, “and they haven’t been through as much as Gabby has. You could imagine Gabby being very depressed, because she was at the top of her game—a young congresswoman, a new marriage. If you consider how much she had going for her, and how it all stopped so abruptly, it’s not hard to imagine someone in that situation feeling suicidal, or losing the will to live.”
Nancy was impressed by Gabby on other fronts: her optimism, her performance, her stamina, her memory. “If you don’t have memory, therapy is so much harder,” Nancy said, “because you can’t build on anything. Gabby’s memory is great.”
Nancy said she was ready for a more intensive aphasia therapy program to supplement her three to five hours a day of outpatient work at TIRR. On Nancy’s recommendation, I started interviewing speech language pathologists to work with Gabby every afternoon for two to three more hours. We also planned a fall visit to Nancy’s office in Asheville, North Carolina, so Nancy and her colleagues could work with Gabby intensely for twelve days.
When Nancy was leaving my house, I asked her: “So what do you think? Will Gabby eventually be able to return to Congress?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I think Gabby will be able to do whatever she wants, and I think she has good judgment. Whether she should return to Congress, whether she should run again, when the time comes, she’ll know.”
Nancy said that Gabby would certainly have difficulties in future debates; her remarks will come more slowly. She might not have the easy glibness that politicians often rely on. But quick retorts aren’t the essence of public service. Could Gabby return to work and be an effective lawmaker? “Absolutely,” Nancy said.
“But for now,” she advised, “like a lot of people with health problems, she needs to take things one day at a time. Give her each day, one at a time.”
In the history of our country, Gabby appears to be the only female elected official to be wounded in an assassination attempt. She endured this horrific injury on the job, while serving her constituents. From the day she was shot, I believed that she deserved time to recover before she decided whether she was capable of returning to her seat.
As her health and abilities improved, Gabby often articulated that she wanted to get back to work. At times in July, she seemed to be just a breath away from full sentences, and just a step away from being ready to resume her duties. Her urge to return, and these steady improvements, only cemented my feeling that she should be given the time she needed to heal. Thousands of Americans are injured on the job each year, and their positions are held for them while they recover. So it was with Gabby.
Gabby’s doctors repeatedly told us that those with traumatic brain injuries often continue to make large strides for a year to eighteen months after they are hurt. Beyond that, they said, Gabby would continue to improve throughout her lifetime.
Considering the doctors’ input, and Gabby’s resolve, I believed she deserved a year or longer to make her decision. So far, it had been just over six months. How much more progress would she make? Maybe a lot. Maybe she’d get almost all the way back. Doctors said it was unlikely that she’d ever use her right hand again to, say, play the piano, but she never did play the piano anyway. As she improved, she might be able to use it for some tasks. And she’d definitely keep making leaps forward in her language skills. So the signs were encouraging.
Against my better judgment, I’d occasionally read the anonymous comments at the bottom of stories about Gabby on media websites. Many people wished Gabby well and rooted her on. It was nice to read those postings. But from the start, there were some people calling for Gabby’s immediate resignation. They said she wasn’t able to represent her constituents in Washington, so she should step down. They ignored how hard her staffers were working to deal with every issue brought to them.
Some of those calling for Gabby’s resignation had online names I recognized from the roughest rhetoric of past campaigns. It’s ironic. They were the same people who disagreed with Gabby’s votes and decisions while she was in office. You’d think they’d be happy if she missed votes, since they wouldn’t like how she voted anyway.
Both Gabby and I understood why her inability to work would be a matter of public discussion. If she knew for sure she wouldn’t progress well enough to do her job, she would step down. But we just didn’t know yet.
So what was our timetable?
In May of 2012, by state law, Gabby would need to file for reelection. Certainly, a decision would need to be made by then, which would be sixteen months after the shooting. It was possible Gabby would be able to decide earlier. But that was the time frame we were looking at.
As I saw how hard Gabby was working to get back to her job, how hard her staff was working, I didn’t think it was fair to anyone—including all the people who had elected Gabby to that seat, and wanted her to represent them—to rush the decision.
As I told Gabby, “The time will come when you’ll know what the right decision is. It’ll be clear to you. Until then, you just keep getting better.”
People who had recovered well from brain injuries often wrote to Gabby, or offered to visit so they could give her pep talks. A cellist with the Houston Symphony suffered a traumatic brain injury in a 2009 motorcycle accident, but was able to return to the orchestra after eleven months. He said he’d be happy to give us a private concert to inspire us. We thanked him, and said that maybe some night up the road, we’d be honored to take him up on his kind offer.
We also heard from Mike Segal, a social worker in Houston who counsels brain-injury patients. He offered to come over and tell Gabby his story.
On February 18, 1981, when Mike was a nineteen-year-old premed student at the University of Texas at Austin, he spent the evening studying organic chemistry with his girlfriend. As he drove her back to her dorm, he saw he was low on gas, so he pulled into a convenience store parking lot.
Mike entered the store to pay for the gas, and walked into a robbery in progress. The store clerk, hiding in the restroom, heard the three robbers say they planned to “waste all witnesses.” They took Mike, the only customer, into the store’s cooler, told him to get down on his knees, and shot him, execution-style, in the back of his h
ead. They assumed they’d left him dead.
Mike was not expected to survive, and if he did, doctors said he’d never walk or talk again. For months, he couldn’t speak at all. He couldn’t move the right side of his body. (Like Gabby, he was shot in the left side of his head.) He considered killing himself, but couldn’t figure out a way to do it.
Through a tremendous amount of hard, painful therapy, and the faith of family and friends, Mike was able to reclaim himself. His parents had to reteach him the alphabet. They helped him learn to count. Eighteen months later, he returned to college. He graduated with honors, and went on to get a master’s degree in social work. He married his girlfriend and they had a child. Some disabilities still remain—he has breathing issues, he can’t move his right arm much, he speaks a bit more slowly—but Mike’s cognitive comeback is remarkable and complete. He wanted Gabby to see him. Thirty years down the road, at age forty-nine, he was thriving.
Mike told Gabby that he doesn’t think about the three men who tried to kill him, two of whom are now out of prison. He doesn’t think about the fact that he used to be able to do five hundred things well, and now he’s down to two hundred. He thinks about all the things he can do. “I’ve come to see that everyone in life has obstacles,” he said. “I believe that’s the definition of being human. These are our obstacles, Gabby, and we just have to deal with them.”
He talked about how his father, a rabbi, had pushed him to work hard in therapy, and how he resented his father’s efforts. Now, of course, he’s grateful. He told us, “My dad had this corny saying, but it was true: ‘Mile by mile, it’s a trial; yard by yard, it’s hard; but inch by inch, it’s a cinch.’”
Gabby knew that even the inches are no cinch, but she listened very intently as Mike spoke. She had been a little down in the days before he arrived, and his visit lifted her out of her funk. “I can’t help people with their broken bones,” he told Gabby, “but I can help them with their broken spirit.”
Mike had a nice way about him. He told Gabby how well she was doing compared with where he was six months into his recovery. Gabby could see how far he had come. “My parents were praying I’d say a few words,” he said. “Now they pray I’ll shut up!”
He and Gabby laughed together over that line, which he had surely used before.
Mike stayed about an hour and Gabby hugged him before he left. They were two people, left for dead, who were both very much alive. He gave her a T-shirt. Written on the front: “Got hope?” On the back it said: “I do.”
After Mike’s visit, Gabby was in physical therapy and had a breakthrough. Her therapist placed two tennis balls on the table in front of her. She asked Gabby to pick up one tennis ball with her strong left hand and the other with her floppy right hand. Gabby firmly grasped the ball in her left hand. Her grip on the ball in her right hand was weak, but she was able to wrap her fingers around it.
“OK,” her therapist said. “As you slowly lift your left hand, I want you to try to make the exact same movements with your right hand.” Gabby’s brain was able to give clear signals to her left hand. The hope was that if she could move both hands simultaneously, the left guiding the right, Gabby might be able to retrain her brain.
Gabby concentrated, lifting her left and right hands in tandem. She actually willed her right hand to lift that tennis ball. One inch. Two inches. Three inches. She lifted the ball four inches into the air. It was a triumph.
When she and her nurse Kristy came home that afternoon, Gabby was grinning, eager to tell me. I was very proud of her. I had a real sense of the future: There’d be better days ahead for that limp noodle of an arm.
It was great to see Gabby’s progress on other fronts, too. She was asking more questions: “What time is it?” “Where is my brace?”
I thought it would be helpful if, when she wanted to know something, she began by saying: “Mark, I have a question.” Or: “Kristy, I have a question.”
She started saying that line regularly, and it helped her thought processes. Though her questions didn’t always begin with the words “what,” “who,” or “when,” they were definitely questions: “Having for dinner?” “Go for a walk?”
Meanwhile, I was constantly impressed by Gabby’s work ethic in rehab. She had a singular focus. She knew that success in therapy was her ticket back into the world.
One day, Kristy was telling Gabby about the items on her bucket list—the things she still needed to get to in her life. “I want to play the piano again,” Kristy said. “I want to visit South America. I want to go on an African safari.”
Then Kristy turned to Gabby. “So how about you?” she asked. “What’s on your bucket list?”
Gabby could have mentioned that having a child had been at the top of her bucket list. After all, two frozen embryos of ours remained in storage at the Walter Reed Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. It was still possible for us to have a child together, though given Gabby’s injuries, we’d probably need to go through a surrogate.
But Gabby knew she had to put such dreams aside. Kristy asked her again: “What’s on your bucket list, Gabby?”
Gabby had just one answer: “Get better.”
As the hot Houston summer continued, I noticed Gabby paying even closer attention to the news. She was more and more engaged in all the issues that had driven her work as a public servant. She was also more in tune with tragedies in the news.
On July 22, when a political extremist in Norway killed seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers, it was natural for all of us to think about the gunman in Tucson. I couldn’t help myself. I had to say something. “There’s a special place in hell for those two dudes,” I said.
“Yes,” Gabby said. “Yes.”
We didn’t talk about the Tucson gunman too much, though Gabby did look at a photo of him online. She stared at his smirking face, but had no comment. She was aware of the questions about his mental stability, his fitness to stand trial. Given her advocacy throughout her career for mental-health care, she understood that these were issues that needed to be sorted through. Still, she didn’t see a need to contain her own personal feelings about this man, which were understandably visceral.
“What would you like to see happen to him?” I asked her.
“Rot,” she said.
I found it interesting that this woman, with a limited ability to communicate, could sum things up in just one syllable.
As Gabby’s life settled into a predictable pattern of weekday therapy and more-relaxed weekends at home, she was better able to get back to one of her favorite roles, that of the concerned wife.
One day she said to me, “Brief. Brief.”
I thought she was talking about a briefcase or a pair of underwear. Maybe I was telling her stories that were too long.
“Brief,” she said again.
Then it hit me. She wanted me to work on my “debrief” for a meeting I was scheduled to have at NASA, debriefing my managers on the particulars of STS-134.
I did as Gabby said, prepared well for the meeting, and afterward, I couldn’t wait to get home to tell her about it. She was a good listener.
I told her how there were ten of us, seven men and three women, gathered in the conference room—my crew, the people from flight-crew operations, several of our managers. We talked about the mission in detail, the successes and the challenges. I thanked my managers for their support when Gabby was injured. But I also wanted to bring up the matter of a recent e-mail I’d received from another manager about astronaut evaluations of my crew.
The e-mail asked me to say something negative about each member of my crew. “They were calling it constructive feedback,” I told Gabby, “but to me, it’s like they want to make sure they have some negative evidence they can point to if they want to deny someone a flight assignment or a specific position or role. I didn’t like it, and I told them I refused to do it. I said, ‘I don’t think you manage people well through negativism. They’re in space, they’re risking the
ir lives, and it’s a tough job. I’d rather focus on what’s positive.’”
“Yes,” Gabby said, nodding her head. That sounded right to her.
I continued to vent. I told Gabby that during sixteen days in space, we hadn’t received one single positive or supportive e-mail from our office. This was my fourth space shuttle flight, and I’d never before seen stinginess with praise. We had completed all of our objectives. We didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. The flight directors and the space shuttle and station program offices were extremely happy with our performance. But from our management? Nothing. How hard was it to type “good job” and press “send”?
“I pointed all of this out at the meeting,” I said to Gabby. Then I told her what happened next. One of our managers stood up and said, “I’ve been here thirty years, and in thirty years I’ve never seen anything like this! There are four thousand people being laid off around here, and you guys are worried about constructive criticism and no positive feedback? You guys are a bunch of pussies!”
Gabby’s eyes widened as I spoke. “Oh no, oh no!” she said.
“He was pretty upset, but I was really surprised that he chose that word,” I told her. “We’d had this very challenging mission that was one hundred percent successful. We just risked our lives serving our country, and he was calling us ‘pussies’ in front of three women, one of whom was his boss.” I’d been dealing with Gabby having a difficult time finding the right word. Apparently this boss of mine had the same problem.
“Terrible,” Gabby said.
“So I figured I’d better smooth things over. I said to them, ‘Well, I didn’t expect things to go this way. I was just trying to make the point that the culture within the astronaut office had become rather negative over the last several years.’”
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