I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia

by Su Meck

  My Conestoga High School senior portrait that was used in the freshman Look Book at Ohio Wesleyan University in fall 1983.

  I loved rock-and-roll music, mostly from the 1960s and 70s, as well as all the great current 1980s stuff. I still have all of my old vinyl records and a huge cassette-tape collection. More than anything, I liked and often played along with my favorite drummers: Neil Peart from Rush, Keith Moon from the Who, Nick Mason from Pink Floyd, John Bonham from Led Zep, and, of course, Ringo. Unfortunately, we ended up having to sell my drum kit early in our marriage. There were bills to pay. After the accident, Jim remembers me putting on records and dancing around the living room with the boys. Maybe we did that before the accident, too. Maybe we had danced around the living room on that very Sunday afternoon in May.

  We had resided in the house on El Greco for less than a year, but Jim already knew the way to the hospital. I was apparently accident-prone. Less than three years earlier, at our wedding, my father had taken Jim aside and told him, “Find the nearest emergency room as soon as you get to Texas, because about every six months, Su finds a need to be there.”

  In our short time living on El Greco, I had already proven him right. Eight months earlier, a fierce bout of influenza had sent me into early labor. Patrick was born in the hospital downtown, a month premature and weighing not quite four pounds. We called him our little spider monkey. A few months after that, Benjamin, while throwing a typical eighteen-month-old’s temper tantrum, had hurled a heavy wooden Playskool truck through the window in our bedroom, creating a hole the size of a volleyball in the glass. Impulsive and impatient, I reached through the broken glass to pick up the truck and somehow managed to slice through the webbing between my thumb and forefinger, badly injuring my hand. When I couldn’t get the bleeding to stop on my own, I called Jim. He drove right home and took me to the ER. I ended up needing nineteen stitches both inside my hand and out.

  As we settled into our evening routine on that Sunday in May, Jim thinks that he and I talked about the possibility of renting a movie after the kids had gone to bed. Then our thoughts turned to, “What shall we eat for dinner?”

  Later I was clattering around the electric stove making macaroni and cheese, adding dollops of Velveeta to the pot because that was the way Benjamin liked it, smooth and creamy with no lumps. I may have been planning to boil some peas in another pot. Jim sat at the kitchen table, reading the Sunday edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and playing the part of suburban dad. Benjamin sat in his high chair eating Cheerios. I may have also been fixing a bottle of milk for Patrick, who was crawling around entertaining himself with his toys on the carpet in the family room right off the kitchen.

  It’s the next moment when Jim’s memories come into sharp focus. He distinctly remembers seeing Patrick out of the corner of his eye, crawling from the family room into the kitchen.

  Nobody knows what exactly happened next. Jim’s back was turned. “I hear this noise,” Jim recalls. “I have only an auditory memory of what it sounded like. I remember being startled. I turn, and this is the picture: It’s something out of the movie Carrie, where I’m standing, I’m turning, you’re holding out Patrick, and as you’re handing him to me, you’re collapsing, blood flowing from your head down your front.” As I crumpled to the floor, Jim says he watched the light in my eyes go out.

  For a few seconds, Jim just stood there, his mind not yet comprehending what had happened.

  “I’m trying to figure out what to do next,” he recalls, “because what I’m seeing makes no sense.”

  My body lay on the floor in a heap, inert. The ceiling fan hovered a foot or so above me. Somehow, those facts were connected.

  Jim’s moment of paralysis passed. He stepped around my fallen body and the swaying ceiling fan and crossed the kitchen to the telephone hanging on the wall just around the corner. With Patrick in one arm and the phone in the other, he dialed 911.

  “Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?”

  “I’m in my house. My wife has collapsed.”

  “All right, sir. Is she breathing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right, sir. We’ll get someone there as soon as we can.”

  Patrick’s voice had risen to a wail, and by the end of the call, Jim was shouting over it. Jim gave the dispatcher our address and hung up the phone. Benjamin sat in his high chair, speechless, his eyes fixed on the floor where his mommy lay.

  Jim stood in the kitchen and studied the scene. I lay on the floor, a pool of blood expanding outward from the gash in my forehead. Above my limp body swung the ceiling fan, now freakishly suspended by a frayed cord. Jim’s eyes followed the cord to the ceiling and saw the bare hook that had once held it sticking out from a ragged hole in the plaster. I wonder now about that fan. Were there any other exposed wires hanging down? Was it a fire hazard? Wasn’t Jim worried about himself or the boys getting electrocuted? How could he have left it hanging there? How is it that the oddly dangling fan could have been ignored?

  The fan had come with the house. Nothing in its previous behavior had given us cause for alarm. It was quiet, well balanced, and it had always cooled the kitchen nicely.

  For a few moments, panic receded and Jim’s engineer brain asserted itself. He pieced together what he thinks might have happened: “I thought back, and I can remember you saying, ‘Weeee,’ ” Jim recalls. “And I’m thinking, so, you walked over to Patrick and said, ‘Weeee,’ and picked him up. As you held him up, over your head, either his back or his feet hit the fan, and it came crashing down on you.” He reenacts this scene for me with a pillow.

  I have often thought about Patrick: By what miracle was he totally unharmed? How is it the fan did not hit him? How was it that I was able to hand him to Jim before collapsing? And what about Benjamin? Jim says he was right there, sitting in his high chair. What did he see? His mom lying on the floor, in a pool of blood? How awful would that be for him? Thankfully, he says he doesn’t remember anything about that day.

  Jim considered what to do next. He knew enough first aid to know not to try to move me. He thought, “Okay, the ambulance is coming and they’re going to take you. I need to figure out somewhere for the boys to be.” He scooped them up and dashed across the street to the Knotes, our neighbors and friends.

  Pam Knote opened the door. Jim said, “There’s been an accident. The ambulance is coming. Can I leave the guys with you?”

  Pam recalls that Jim looked “calm but frantic, you know, very urgent.” The tone in his voice told her there was no time to explain. “I mostly remember him just handing me Patrick.” She left all four kids with her husband, Mike, and set off across the street with Jim to put together a diaper bag.

  The photo of Patrick reaching the magic five-pound weight so he could leave the hospital. This hung in the hallway of our home on El Greco.

  An ambulance had arrived by this point and now sat parked outside our home; Jim and Pam walked in to find two paramedics tending to me. “You were lying on the kitchen floor,” Pam recalls. “There was blood on your face and under your head. The paramedics were asking you some questions, and you were able to respond, but I don’t know how coherent you were.”

  Pam, too, remembers seeing the ceiling fan dangling near the floor. She also saw, protruding from the ceiling, “a hook with a lip on it that should have been up in the ceiling but wasn’t.” As she took in the scene, she marveled that I had somehow managed to keep the fan from hurting my baby. “That was your first instinct as a mom,” Pam remembers thinking to herself, “to protect Patrick.” Pam collected diapers, bottles, blankets, and changes of clothing, stuffed everything into a bag, and headed back across the street to Benjamin and Patrick, leaving Jim to stay with me.

  Jim hovered over the paramedics. One looked up, gestured across the room, and said, “Sir, please stand over there and stay out of our way.”

  A paramedic shined a bright pen light into my pupils. One of them had
shrunk to a pinprick; the other had swelled. Neither one responded to the light the way it should. Jim watched the men stick pins in my fingers and then heard one of them say, “She’s completely unresponsive.”

  Was I awake? Jim and Pam’s accounts differ on this point. Pam says she remembers me speaking to the paramedics. But is she really just remembering them speaking to me? Jim says he doesn’t remember hearing my voice or seeing me stir at any point, not in the seven minutes from when the fan hit me till the paramedics arrived, nor in the ten minutes from their arrival until my body was whisked away on a backboard. But his memories of that day are colored by panic and shock. When he heard the paramedics say, “She’s completely unresponsive,” did they mean that I was out cold, or merely that some of my fingers and toes were numb and failing to react to the prick of a pin?

  A second rescue unit pulled up; this one was a full-size fire truck. An incident commander entered the house with two or three other men in heavy fire jackets and hats. Two of them carried a backboard that was meant for me.

  A big red fire engine with flashing lights and firefighters rushing around in jackets and hats must have made for quite a scene outside the door of our little home. Did our neighbors step outside to see what was going on? Did they stay indoors and peer through curtains? Did other people on El Greco wonder what could have drawn the Fort Worth Fire Department to the Mecks’ door? Did they care?

  Inside our house no one was talking much, but Jim remembers glimpsing the frequent nonverbal cues passed back and forth between the commander and the paramedics, a faint shaking of heads and furrowing of brows, all seeding a sense of foreboding. “I remember them being very grim,” Jim recalls. “You know: it just did not look good, not good at all.”

  The paramedics bandaged an inch-long gash on my forehead: such a small wound, but so much blood, pooling in a three-foot diameter around my head. Workers carefully fitted a cervical brace around my neck. Then several of them encircled me and ever so gently lifted me onto the backboard. They strapped my body to the board and rushed out of the house to load me into the ambulance.

  Jim asked if he could come along. “No, sir,” a paramedic told him, “you can’t go in the ambulance. We aren’t covered for that.”

  The ambulance door swung closed, and I began my journey to the hospital. I would like to tell you that the paramedic gazed pensively at my vital signs, steadied my wounded head, held my hand, and even though I couldn’t hear the words, he told me in a thick Texas accent, “Everything’s gonna be just fine.” But Jim wasn’t there, and I don’t remember, so there is nothing more to tell.

  2

  Confusion

  —ELO

  I have read through all of the medical records of my stay in the hospital, and, quite honestly, I haven’t a clue as to what much of it means. There seems to be a lot of secret medical language that us patient types aren’t meant to understand. But I do, unfortunately, notice plenty of discrepancies among the hundreds of pages of records from the hospital. In the notes from one doctor on May 25, 1988, it says that the ceiling fan struck me on the left temple, but I was actually hit on the right side. There are accounts written about my condition on June 9 describing my impaired memory, impaired communication, dysfunctional mobility, impaired judgment, and decreased attention span, and yet I was discharged the very next day. It was noted on May 31 that my long-term memory “seems fairly unaffected.” (Really? Hmm. Interesting.) There are several pages included in my records that aren’t even mine.

  I guess I expected, and was hoping, for those records to somehow hold the key that would give me answers and fill in gaps. I was hoping that these official records would be just that. Instead, the written record just raises even more questions about why I am the way I am and what the medical community did and did not do when I was first injured. It is difficult for me to piece together all the facts of my stay in the hospital from these discombobulated accounts, but I will do my best.

  Jim always talks about how after I was whisked away in the ambulance, he can remember climbing into his powder-blue Chevy Malibu in our driveway. But he doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital. He always says that he arrived before the ambulance, ruining his car’s transmission in the process.

  My records show that I was registered into Harris Methodist Southwest Hospital at 6:30 P.M., a Caucasian female, age twenty-two, of Presbyterian faith. The diagnosis, in capital letters: “CEILING FAN FELL ON HEAD.” The bottom of the page bears my husband’s hurried signature: James R. Meck.

  Jim thinks he phoned his parents, and then my parents, calling collect. Remember this was the 1980s, and there were no cell phones. My mom recalls the conversation this way: “Jim said that you had had an accident. And I said, ‘What now?’ I had to ask him that because you were always such a rambunctious daredevil.” (I have since heard stories of my childhood escapades—tumbling off trampolines, plummeting headlong out of trees, and careening down steep hills in wagons.) Mom continues: “And I just remember Jim saying, ‘I need your help, it’s really serious this time.’ ”

  There is a moment from that evening when Jim recalls sitting alone in the waiting room. Waiting. He watched the sunset out the window and gazed across the newly developed area of suburban Fort Worth. “My mind was racing, trying to think of anything and everything that could be done,” he remembers. “This was before the Internet. All I had was what was between my ears.” And as he sat there thinking, it struck him how alone he and I were. My parents and younger brother were in Houston, four or five hours away. His family was in Georgia. “There was this profound sense of dread and loneliness, or aloneness,” he recalls. “There wasn’t anything to do, and yet there was a huge motivation to do something.”

  Because there was nothing else to do, and Jim was tired of sitting, he pestered the duty nurse every few minutes. Finally, a physician emerged. He told Jim that I was stable but comatose, and partly paralyzed on my left side. Fluid was pressing against the inside of my skull, but if doctors attempted surgery to relieve the pressure, there was a good chance the pressure would cause my brain to burst. Not a happy thought. The doctor explained that the brain floats in fluid, and a sac holds it in place, sort of like a parachute. The impact of the fan, he said, had set off a chain of events: The front of my brain had struck the front of my skull, and then it had bounced back, and the back of my brain had struck the back of my skull. The doctor continued, “Imagine if you ever put Jell-O in a fridge, and you take it out and you shake it, and there’s cracks in it. That’s what happened to your wife’s brain.”

  Then he told Jim that there was nothing more he could do, which Jim didn’t appreciate. “I’m a systems engineer. We systems guys fix stuff. There are always things you do, and if one thing doesn’t work, you do the next thing.” It was just inconceivable to Jim, and frankly, he found it irresponsible that they would do nothing. It seemed like a cop-out. It was as though they were only worried about covering their asses rather than doing something in order to help me. Jim got hot. He lost his temper and became verbally abusive. He says he can remember distinctly challenging the doctor and nurses, screaming at everyone: “What do you mean you can’t do anything? What is your medical degree worth? Because right now you’re doing nothing.” He doesn’t remember what else he said. “To their credit, they didn’t have me arrested. And in retrospect, it’s the only reason you are still alive, because they did nothing.”

  A decision was made to move me from Harris Methodist Southwest to Harris Methodist, a sister facility in downtown Fort Worth with a comprehensive neurological intensive care unit. I often wonder if Jim’s ranting and raving had anything to do with why I was moved. But Jim recalls “having a feeling in the back of my head that they were overwhelmed” at Harris Methodist Southwest, and they couldn’t handle my situation. Regardless, the people working in that emergency room were probably glad to see me transferred. And Jim along with me.

  The discharge papers from the first hospital lis
ted my condition as poor, and to Jim’s eye, I looked like I was getting worse. I was more pale and fragile-looking. The transfer was a delicate maneuver. At the downtown hospital, another very calm, very senior nurse asked Jim to recount what had happened. When the narrative got to Patrick, and to the fact that it was his little body that had struck the fan, the nurse suddenly grew alarmed. Patrick had, after all, been in the same accident as I had. “Where is Patrick now?” she asked. “Who checked him out?” No one had. She said, “We’ll get the rest of this information later. Go now and get your son.” Jim drove home to get Patrick from the Knotes’ house. When he arrived back at the hospital, Patrick was rushed to the pediatric ER for a battery of tests. He had a small scrape on his cheek, but thankfully nothing worse.

  Jim was told that one of the hospital’s top neurosurgeons was coming on duty at midnight. This doctor was said to be brilliant, but antisocial, even kind of reclusive. “He asks for the night shift,” one doctor told Jim, “because he doesn’t like talking to people. Don’t expect a lot of bedside manner. But trust me, he’s as good as we have for making this kind of neurological call.”

  At 11 P.M., a nurse at Harris Methodist examined me. Her notes state that I did not lose consciousness immediately upon being hit on the head, but passed out shortly thereafter. A subsequent note states that I lost consciousness “approximately three minutes post-injury” and remained out “for about five minutes.” Another note from that night states, “Patient is easily aroused but drowsy,” and is “oriented to space and time.” Yet another note says: “Patient’s left arm feels ‘funny,’ her left leg feels ‘heavy,’ and her head hurts ‘inside.’”

  At 11:20 P.M., the famed antisocial neurosurgeon swept in like a character from a sentimental tearjerker disease-of-the-week movie. Dr. Joe Ellis Wheeler was middle-aged and portly, with pasty skin, salt-and-pepper hair, piercing blue eyes, and a pleasant Texas drawl. He examined me. Then he called Jim into his office.