As I lay awake each night praying and thinking about how I was going to adapt to this new life, I would be afraid one minute, mad the next, and everlastingly confused. All kinds of questions flew through my mind. What will life be like from now on? What kind of person will Krickitt turn out to be? Will she always be different? Is the young woman I married still in there, or is she gone for good? When will we know that her recovery has stopped—that she has improved as much as she is going to? It was all I thought about. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t relax, and I couldn’t get rid of the stress. Though Krickitt still had a chance to recover part of her lost memory, the doctors had told me there were some things she would never remember. The most agonizing question of all was: Would one of those things be me? I quickly put that thought from my mind. I couldn’t bear to contemplate the fact that my wife might never remember me.
Krickitt soon got into a routine with her therapy, and we saw steady progress in her coordination, walking, speech, and reasoning. Everything was a process, though. For example, when she started walking on her own, she jerked her right foot forward, then dragged the left one on the floor behind her. Gradually the movement got smoother and more natural. Before long she could dress by herself, eat, and take care of all the basic necessities of life.
During those first weeks of rehabilitation, Krickitt didn’t seem to mind me being around, but she talked to me like she talked to all the other familiar faces in the rehab center. At first she was cordial, even friendly, but our interactions were without any depth or dimension. They were strictly surface conversations.
Scott Madsen, Krickitt’s physical therapist, was an energetic trainer who had a special gift for encouraging his patients to do just a little more every day than they thought they could possibly do. His plan for Krickitt’s therapy included time on the treadmill, working with hand weights, and a range of exercises designed to help her get as much flexibility and strength back as possible.
As a coach, I watched Scott’s process carefully. I considered that a physical therapist’s relationship with his or her patient was similar to my relationship with one of my baseball players. After Scott had been working with Krickitt for a week or two, I felt like she was getting a little bored with the whole process. Frankly, I thought Scott was going too easy on her. I was convinced that Krickitt needed a fairly heavy dose of coaching along with the rehab. In my opinion, she simply wasn’t putting enough effort into it. She needed someone to push her a little.
I finally said, “Scott, you’re going too easy on her. Krickitt is not your ordinary patient. She is an Academic All-American gymnast. Her body was in top physical shape before the accident. I think you need to push her a little more.”
Scott agreed that Krickitt could handle doing more than she was. I was encouraged by his response, but Krickitt was unhappy with the new standards. She pouted and complained because Scott was always wanting more from her; he was never satisfied.
While it was true that Scott was making Krickitt work harder than before, the change in her routine wasn’t all that drastic. Even though Scott had agreed with my assessment, he wasn’t about to deviate from what he thought was in his patient’s interest, no matter what I had said. But you wouldn’t know it by talking to Krickitt. She acted as if he was almost torturing her. And as the physical therapy became more intense, Krickitt’s spirits took a nosedive.
From the time Krickitt had started talking again, she had acted strangely childlike. This childishness hadn’t gone away with therapy; in fact, it seemed to have become a permanent part of her personality. During her therapy sessions she experienced wild mood swings and threw tantrums that would make a preschooler proud. When she was mad at me, she would lash out at me in sudden bursts of temper. Her lack of subtlety and propriety rivaled that of a little girl, and she had no qualms about telling anybody exactly what she thought about them or their suggestions. She thought nothing of using curse words that she would never have dreamed of saying just a month earlier. She was a far cry from the polite, amiable, easy-going Krickitt of the past.
These traits, I learned, were common for someone with Krickitt’s injuries. The frontal lobe of her brain had been damaged—the part that controls personality, emotions, and decision-making. Her parietal lobe was also affected, which meant there likely would be permanent changes in her language and mathematical comprehension ability. Not only would her body be different from now on, but so would her personality. Again, until she got to her final recovery plateau, no one knew how much she would improve or to what extent she might return to her pre-accident self.
Though there were some worrying aspects of this new Krickitt’s personality, my fears were often offset by the good things about her recovery. As her therapy continued, she kept getting stronger physically. That was encouraging, but what excited me even more was the mental progress she was making. She started having what are called “flash memories” or “snapshot memories.” These were mental pictures she would get of a specific moment during the past year, but the problem was that there was nothing to link those memories with anything from her life before or after them. Even so, I put a lot of hope into these flash memories. I knew they could be the key to her remembering our life together if I should happen to be in one of them. One of these still shots was of her sitting outside at a table surrounded by lush tropical plants. That snapshot was from our honeymoon, though unfortunately I wasn’t in the frame of her Hawaiian “camera.” But I held on to that memory because it was one more link she had with her—our—missing past.
The most encouraging part of Krickitt’s recovery was that somehow her faith in God had remained intact. She remembered things about God, church, and the Bible, as was obvious from her first journal entry after the accident and from other comments she had made about what she called “this Christianity thing.” As scrambled as her thinking was, she had praised God and prayed to him shortly after being charted out of a coma. Even so, I still had some fears about whether or not Krickitt’s faith would be as strong as it had been. Her brother Jamey calmed some of my fears with these words: “Krickitt’s Christianity is in her core, Kim—it’s part of her soul. Her soul can’t be affected by any injury because it’s immortal. Her faith will always be there. It’s there now. We’ve seen it. God has preserved her for some great purpose, and her faith is there to carry her through.”
The advice, encouragement, and love I received from Jamey and other members of the family helped me hold things together when I should have been falling apart. As surely as God had saved my wife for some great, unknown purpose, he also had surrounded me with loving, supportive people I could talk to. When you’re a guy—and especially when you’re a coach—you often feel as if the world expects you to just suck it up and get on with life. But I absolutely could not have made it without my parents, my brothers, and Krickitt’s family to share the burden. I would have given up if I’d tried to keep everything inside.
Krickitt rang in the new year with consistent, steady progress. We saw a little more improvement every week. Her mood swings were still wild and unpredictable, and she complained regularly about the way Scott was pressuring her to excel in her physical therapy. However, she was stronger and more independent every day. She had started going on short walks with staff members in the neighborhood around Barrow. She loved those outings, especially when she was allowed to go to the nearby shopping center. A near-fatal brain injury had not affected her love of looking for a good deal on shoes.
This might seem like a crazy thing for a husband to say, but I was actually excited about my wife’s desire to shop, at least during her rehab days! Because of the shopping option, Krickitt lobbied to go for walks more often, which likely played a part in speeding up her recovery. But as an inpatient, she wasn’t allowed to leave the grounds of the hospital by herself.
All of the patients in her area of the hospital wore security bracelets, and every door had a keypad on the wall beside it. Whenever a patient approached a doorway he or sh
e had to stop until a staff member punched in a code. If anyone wearing a bracelet walked through the door without someone having punched in the code, an alarm would go off.
One day as I was walking down the hall with Krickitt and a nurse, we all stopped short of the door so the nurse could key in the code. But before the nurse could reach the keypad, Krickitt shot her hand out and punched in the numbers. She’d learned the code by watching the nurses. As a result, they had to change the security code for the entire hospital wing. Even though that was a hassle, nobody was upset with Krickitt because it revealed the progress she was making. It was one more encouraging sign of her recovery.
I looked everywhere for indications of the old Krickitt. I just knew that if I could only help her embrace the rehab program with every ounce of her being, I could get her back. I couldn’t reach her as a husband, but I thought maybe I could break through to her as a coach. So I traded one identity for the other, coming to her therapy sessions with Scott and pushing them both to pick up the pace. I was like her own personal Jillian Michaels. If Scott told her to do ten sit-ups, I wanted twenty; if he wanted her to walk five minutes on the treadmill, I wanted ten. True to form, Krickitt was not very happy with me in my new role.
A week or two into the new year, Krickitt and I were playing Wiffle ball. I tossed the ball to her underhanded, and she swung and missed time and again.
“Come on, Krick,” I prodded, “I know you can hit it. Let’s try again.”
“I’m tired,” she answered with a pout. I could suddenly see what my wife had been like as a six-year old.
“Let’s do this a few more times,” I encouraged her.
“I don’t want to.” There was that first grader again.
“Please?” As I said it, I tossed her the ball one more time. Pressing her lips together she gave a mighty swing and connected with the ball. We both watched it sail over the nearby volleyball net.
“That’s it, Krick! Way to go!” I was elated.
“You’re mean to me.”
“Not mean,” I answered back. “Just trying to help.” For the thousandth time I looked hard for the woman I had fallen so incredibly in love with. I knew she was in that slowly recovering body, struggling to get out. She just had to be. I didn’t want to consider the alternative.
The daily therapy sessions became a challenge for Krickitt. It’s not that they were physically difficult, she was just bored and distracted most of the time. The only reason she was doing it was because people kept making her do it, not because she wanted to get better. She would do or say anything to get out of doing her therapy. A session would be going along well and she’d stop all of a sudden and say, “I’m tired. I want to go sit down.”
“Let’s just do a few more reps of this.” I wouldn’t give in.
“I don’t want to! Stop bossing me around! You don’t play fair!”
Sometimes she’d be working on movement and coordination in the swimming pool, then quit doing the exercises and suddenly announce, “I’m going to the hot tub.”
If I had been in charge of her therapy, Krickitt never would have gotten near a hot tub. Needless to say, I was heavily into tough-love mode. Her parents and the staff at Barrow were a little more understanding. They did what they could to balance out her demands with what they knew she needed. But Krickitt was shameless when it came to pulling people’s strings.
One of the few things Krickitt truly enjoyed was food, and her favorite snack was yogurt. We used this knowledge as an incentive to get her to do things she didn’t want to do, because we usually could bribe her with a cup of frozen yogurt. However, she was not above putting a big guilt trip on anyone she thought might cave in and give her a treat when she really hadn’t earned it. She was rarely successful.
I couldn’t seem to build more than a casual friendship with my wife no matter what I did or how hard I tried. When I attempted to play volleyball with her, she quit playing. When we went jogging together, her comments and complaints got steadily more personal and cutting. I never knew what to expect from one day to the next. One minute she’d be friendly and smiling, then I would do or say something she didn’t like, and in a heartbeat she would look at me and yell, “Leave me alone! I don’t even know who you are!”
One afternoon, still stinging after some sharp rebuke Krickitt had given me earlier in the day, I walked into the physical therapy room and found her lying on her stomach on the carpet, head up, chin resting in the palms of her hands, feet alternately paddling up and down. She was quiet and thoughtful.
“What are you thinking about, Krick?”
She turned her face toward me, still resting her chin on her hands, then turned back. She paused and slowly shook her head.
“Life is so confusing,” she said slowly. Then, looking back over at me she inquired, “Are we really married?”
“We’re really married, Krickitt. I love you.”
Silence followed another slow shake of the head.
Was this our new reality? I could very well be waiting for some kind of recovery or reconnection that never was going to happen. As I walked out of the room I thought, Is this it? Maybe this is the best it’s ever going to be. For the first time I truly let myself consider the fact that my wife might never be the same person she was before the wreck—the person I fell in love with. Very possibly, the woman I married no longer existed.
We knew that Krickitt’s mental recovery could stop suddenly at any point. What if that happens before she remembers me? I would think to myself, over and over again. In a way the idea that my wife might never remember me and would never be the same woman I married was harder to deal with than death. If Krickitt had died in the wreck, there would have been a clear ending to our life together. I felt that I could have dealt with that horrible situation because I understood what death was. What I had instead was a complete unknown to me—life in an hazy emotional, spiritual, and relational netherworld where my wife was still with me, but at the same time she wasn’t.
At times I wondered how our lives would have turned out if the accident had never happened. I longed and grieved for all the dreams we might now never see come to fruition. But I also came to realize that we had a chance to build a new future together. My wife was still with me. She still could have a life. We could still have a life. But I had to accept the fact that it would not be the life I had been looking forward to. As hard as it was, I knew God must have preserved her like this for some great purpose he could see that I couldn’t.
When Krickitt had been at Barrow for a month, the doctors started telling us she could soon be released to live with her parents and continue therapy as an outpatient. Krickitt was delighted at the thought, both because she would be spending more time with her family and because she would be spending less time with her physical therapist, who she still thought pushed her too hard.
On January 13, 1994, almost seven weeks after the accident, Krickitt moved into her parents’ house in Phoenix. From all appearances she enjoyed being around familiar things: her college yearbooks, photo albums, scrapbooks, furniture she’d grown up with, and mementos from her childhood. Her mom showed her the photographer’s proofs of our wedding pictures. They had been sent to Gus and Mary while we were getting settled in Las Vegas, and our plan had been to look at them while we were in Phoenix for Thanksgiving and pick out the ones we wanted to order for our wedding album.
We sat side-by-side on the couch as Krickitt flipped through the photos from our big day. It had all the hallmarks of a traditional wedding—Krickitt in her elaborate wedding gown, me in white tie and tails, the front of the church lit entirely by candles. Her parents and I all hoped that seeing the pictures would spark some more of those flash memories in Krickitt and give her something that might lead back to more detailed memories of our marriage. She recognized the bride in the pictures as herself, but that was all. She still had no emotional connection to me . . . or any interest in creating one.
However, Krickitt did still have an i
nterest in her relationship with God. Soon after she moved home, she told her mother that she had a nagging feeling something was missing in her life. It turned out she missed writing to God in her journal. She had written one lone entry with the help of a friend, but then she forgot about it for a while. Since she had a renewed desire for it, her mom took her shopping for a journal. That seemed to be the answer. Although she was still mentally mixed up much of the time, she had felt the absence of communication with God in her life and wanted to make it a regular part of her routine again by writing to him in her journal. It was a bittersweet feeling for me to know that even though my wife wasn’t yet ready to get to know me again, she was ready to draw closer to God.
So the emotional roller coaster continued. One day I’d be riding high because Krickitt had walked farther than ever before on the treadmill, or she had read something she couldn’t read the day before, or she had experienced another flash memory. The next day I would drop down into the depths of despair because she had lashed out at me again for pushing her in therapy or because one more potential memory jogger—a picture, a name, a letter, a memento—had failed to bring back any remembrance of our life together.
By the time Krickitt moved into her parents’ house, I hadn’t worked in two months. My job had been the last thing on my mind. All I had been thinking about day and night was how I could help Krickitt get better. I was still getting no pressure from the administration at Highlands, and the assistant baseball coaches were gearing up for spring training without me there. My parents and in-laws, however, were convinced that the best thing I could do at this point was to get back into my everyday life in New Mexico. They suggested I move back to our apartment in Las Vegas, rejoin my baseball team, and make it a priority to restore some sort of normalcy to life. At first I was totally against leaving Krickitt. But the more I talked about it with all of our parents, the more I agreed it was the right thing to do for both Krickitt and me.
The Vow Page 7