The Secretary of the Army, Thomas White, dropped by to visit Brian, which was a big deal considering White is one of the top men in the military.
Brian had another surgery that day. In each surgery they debrided him, scrubbed off the dead skin, and did skin grafts with synthetic pig or cadaver skin until he was infection-free and ready for his own skin to be grafted.
Each time was stressful for me; I knew every time he underwent anesthesia he could die. Plus the risk of infection grew greater with every day.
Later that afternoon my next-door neighbor Jolita phoned and asked, “What can I do? What do you need?” She was a godsend. I told her, “I need some clean clothes because I haven’t showered in three days and I’m still wearing my clothes from Tuesday morning.” So within a few hours she got a house key from my other neighbor, Sara, and brought me some clothes. I went over to my hotel room, took a long, hot shower, and changed outfits. I felt almost like a new person.
By this point the hospital had agreed to pay for one hotel room for all of the families to share, just to take turns taking naps and showers. Mostly we used it to bathe because what little we slept was in the ICU waiting room. After the first couple of nights, the hospital quickly realized none of us were leaving the ICU area. There was a conference room just down the hall from the ICU, so they graciously put roll-away beds in that conference room for us to get some sleep and still not have to leave the area. After that, the Red Cross offered to pay for each family to have a hotel room, so thankfully I had to pay for only one night.
As I thought about all that had happened in the last few days, I grieved. I worried about Brian and our future. But I also knew God was still in charge—even down to working out the details of our finances.
Seven
Unconsciousness Is Bliss
* * *
Journal 9/17/01
He’s exhausted and grouchy this morning. Didn’t sleep last night and got no rest yesterday. He walked two laps today. I pretty much spent the day in his room, praying over every cell of his body, rubbing his feet, and just being there for him and for me. Read to him a lot and just enjoyed him being alive. Thank you, God, for sparing him.
* * *
Mel
What is this? I wondered as I walked into Brian’s room one morning and spotted a bright orange DNR sign on Brian’s medical chart.
When Brian’s nurse entered his room that morning, I asked, “Why is this here?”
She replied that someone from Walter Reed put it there that morning.
Then it hit me. DNR stands for Do Not Resuscitate.
I was angry. Why are the people from Walter Reed doing this? I thought. I ripped up the sign and threw it in the trash.
I went back into Brian’s room and stood by the foot of his bed. My heart was slamming into my chest. I touched Brian’s feet while he slept.
God, you can’t let him die, I prayed. You can’t! I began to pray over every cell in Brian’s body. I started at his head and focused on each area, praying that God would supernaturally heal and strengthen him.
I hoped that was the only time I’d ever have to see a DNR sign on my husband’s bed. But soon I discovered how fruitless that hope would be. The next several mornings I entered Brian’s room, saw a new DNR sign on his chart, and ripped it off.
Finally, after several mornings of this, I’d had enough. I discussed it with Brian’s nurse that day. And she assured me they didn’t intend to honor that sign—that they’d do whatever it took to resuscitate Brian.
That was all I needed to hear. I never contacted WRMC to complain, because I knew the staff at the Burn Unit had things under control.
On Friday, September 14, John Collison, the officer who had escorted Brian to Georgetown, came to the hospital. I met him for the first time, hugged him, and thanked him for what he had done for Brian.
“I didn’t know how badly hurt Brian was,” John said, “until Dr. Williams at Georgetown told me, ‘We’ll know in six hours.’” John continued, “‘What do you mean you’ll know in six hours?’ I asked Dr. Williams. And he said, ‘Because in six hours he’ll either be dead or he’ll still be alive.’” According to Dr. Michael Williams, Brian was probably five minutes from death from his inhalation injury. Had it taken five minutes more to get him to the hospital, he would not have survived.
It was an emotionally difficult visit for all of us because of what John had been through with Brian and how serious Brian still was. As soon as John saw Brian, John began to cry. He continually wiped his eyes and blew his nose into a red bandanna. He said, “Sir, it’s good to see you. How are you doing?”
After the visit John mentioned to me that he had given Brian’s ring to Colonel TW Williams, one of Brian’s coworkers, because he thought Colonel Williams would be in to see Brian before John did. I hadn’t really given Brian’s ring any additional thought until John mentioned it. But once I heard about it, I became eager to get it. I called Colonel Williams to ask about it. He apologized for not making it to the hospital yet and assured me he would bring it as soon as possible.
Later that day a friend picked me up so I could go home and spend some time with Matt. The only reason I felt comfortable leaving Brian was because Brian’s cousin Mike Ponder, a physician, offered to drive three hours from his home to spend the night with Brian.
At home I was unable to sleep or eat. I gathered some clothing, my makeup, which I hadn’t worn since September 10 and desperately wanted to have, and my Bible, plus any information regarding our bills.
Earlier in the week a son of one of the patients offered to take family photos from all the victims’ families to Kinko’s to have them enlarged to poster size. That way we could hang them in the rooms. He thought that would bring some comfort to each victim. So while I was home, I grabbed several of our favorite photos: a picture of Matt and Hayley, our golden retriever, playing; a photo of Brian and Matt sitting together on a canon at a Civil War battlefield; and a family portrait we’d taken at Fort Leavenworth two years earlier. Brian was standing tall and trim in his Army uniform, his dark hair neatly combed. I was sitting in front of him smiling happily, as was our sweet red-haired son, Matt. After they were enlarged I would hang them on Brian’s curtain.
I knew these photos would be especially important for Brian to see. Because of the large amounts of pain medication he was taking, he experienced hallucinations, such as thinking he was at the Metro in downtown DC or at a laundromat. If he could look at the photos, I thought he could tell himself, Okay, I haven’t left this room. No matter what my mind is telling me, this is where I still am.
By eight o’clock Saturday morning, September 15, two friends from church, Dana Williams and Joanne Gerkins, dropped Matt and me off at the hospital.
The nurses had Brian up, forcing him to walk a lap in the ICU. They called the walk the “Bag and Drag”—because he was still on a ventilator, so they had to pack up all his “stuff”—IV pumps, oxygen, food bags, urine dispenser, rectal tube—and drag it along. He had quite the entourage of machines. They wanted him to walk every day to keep his muscles from atrophying.
It was exciting yet unbelievable to watch the staff get him up and start him walking. To think that on September 10 Brian had run almost five miles—and less than a week later it took two nurses and two physical therapists to help him walk even a few steps. While the walk was short, just around the nurses’ desk in the middle of the ICU, it was incredibly painful. Brian was exhausted and took a long nap when he was finished.
Once more General Peake visited and asked where Matt was. I told him he hadn’t yet seen Brian.
“Mel, you really need to get Matt in to see Brian.”
“Thank you for your concern, Sir,” I said firmly, “but my son just isn’t ready yet to see his father.” I knew Matt wasn’t at a place where he could handle seeing how bad Brian looked. And even with everyone’s good intentions, I knew no one knew my son as well as I did. I knew the time would come for Matt to see his father—it
just wasn’t now.
So Matt went back to stay with the Vances. It was so much easier for me at the hospital when I didn’t have to worry about Matt and could focus totally on Brian. I felt guilty for feeling that way—especially because Matt was such a trooper. He kept telling me he understood I had to be there for Brian. Yet I could tell Matt really missed me and was trying to work through all of his emotions. Underneath it all, I don’t think he really could understand everything that was going on. How could any kid? How could anyone?
Later General Eric K. Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff, and his wife, Patty, stopped by to visit. No sooner did the general clear the door than Brian was spelling coin in the air! The general pulled a special honorary Army coin from his pocket and gave it gladly.
After the general left, Brian mouthed to ask if I found his wallet and glasses.
“No, honey,” I told him. “I’ve talked with the FBI, and they can’t find your wallet.”
“Did you cancel my government credit card?” he mouthed slowly while I struggled to understand.
“No.”
“You need to do that, and you need to pick up my uniforms from the cleaners.”
“Brian, I don’t think you’re going to need your uniforms for a while.”
But he insisted. “You need to get my uniforms picked up from the cleaners!”
That was one of the best communications I had with Brian—even though it took a long time to figure out what he was mouthing! His questions brought back some semblance of normalcy; it showed me that underneath all the bandages and pain, my same wonderful husband was still there. I knew if he was tracking those things, then everything would be okay, because that’s just what Brian would do. What a reassurance! It was these lighter moments I prayed for.
* * *
On Sunday, September 16, Dr. Jordan did a marathon five-and-a-half-hour surgery to autograft Brian’s fingers. They used his abdomen as the donor site. Basically, this meant they used healthy skin from his abdomen to replace the charred skin on his fingers.
During the surgery I sat in the hallway, and when Katie, one of the surgical nurses, came out of the OR and said Brian looked beautiful in there, I was relieved beyond words. It was one more step in what was becoming a very long process. Little did I know how long the healing would take.
That first week I knew some of the details of what was happening to Brian. But I didn’t know the specifics of what the hospital staff did. The old adage says ignorance is bliss. And I’m convinced that’s true. I really think God shaded my eyes from a lot of the ugly details during that time so I didn’t understand exactly what he was going through. I’m not sure I could have handled knowing the true extent of Brian’s injuries and the excruciating hell he was living through.
Now that the ICU staff was allowing others besides me to see Brian, we had lots of visitors, including Brian’s family—Wade, his brother; Liz, his sister-in-law; and Loretta, his mom. They arrived after the long drive from Texas.
Most of the visitors had a difficult time seeing Brian, especially the first time. Dennis Boykin, our close Army friend, came in, took one look at Brian, and in his most compassionate way, said, “Oh, you don’t look too bad for a guy who got run over by a 757. Quit riding the profile. Get out of bed, and get back to work.” And then Dennis went outside and wept.
Later that evening I went back into Brian’s room to catch him tapping his foot, lip-synching to country singer Kenny Chesney’s “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.” I was so grateful that in the midst of such pain and tragedy we could still have moments of lighthearted laughter. While I shook my head at his antics and laughed, in my heart, I knew these moments would be few and far between. We had a long way to go.
The respiratory therapist started to adjust his ventilator to wean him from it. He was on it for four hours, then off for four hours. He began to cough excessively, which was good since he needed to get rid of the dead tissue from his lungs. The burned lung tissue had to be suctioned out by plunging a tube down Brian’s throat to make him cough. This lung tissue, which looked like black cotton, came up through the tube. Coughing was terribly painful for him, obviously, because even moving was terribly painful. The nurse would usually push the tube down once. But Brian would have her plunge twice so he would cough more and bring up the tissue faster.
I thought, That’s overachieving there, buddy. Once was bad enough, but to do it twice right away? That was inconceivable to me. It was just one of the ways in which Brian showed his toughness, his character, through this whole horrible ordeal.
The nurses would plunge, then he’d weakly lift his hand toward his throat and motion, as if to say, “Again.”
The nurse, Michelle Howard, would say, “Are you sure?”
Brian would purposefully blink his eyes to say yes.
The nurse would look at me as if to say, This is not right. But the staff did it. I think they were pleased because they knew the dead tissue had to be removed—and the faster, the better.
I felt so helpless watching him suffer and not being able to take away any of his pain. Still the only part of his body I could touch was his feet. So I rubbed them constantly. Because he couldn’t sleep, I stayed awake with him for days. Sometimes I slept fifteen or twenty minutes, but that was all. I became physically exhausted. Each time I’d try to sleep, my mind would race, and sleep just wouldn’t come. I truly thought that if I stayed awake, nothing bad could happen to Brian. So to make the time pass, I talked to him incessantly. When I was too tired to talk, I read the Bible, especially the Psalms, to him for hours, hoping to find the comfort we both desperately needed.
Brian
I had been taken in and out of surgery more times than I could count.
The Sunday after the attack the doctors grafted all my fingers, which had third-degree burns. I still had my fingertips and fingerprints. My fingernails were still there, although they were badly burned. I lost all the webbing between my fingers on both hands.
Even though so much of my body needed grafting, the doctors were able to work only on my fingers because that was such an intricate job. Plus everything else was so badly burned I wasn’t ready for grafting. My body was already fighting infections, and any time there’s any infection they can’t graft over it. My fingers weren’t burned as badly, apparently, because Dr. Jordan was able to autograft them, meaning he was able to use my own skin on them.
Later that day General Keane, Army Vice Chief of Staff, visited with his entourage and briefed me on the damage to the Pentagon. I lay on my bed in shock as I listened to what had happened just five days earlier.
Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked American Airlines flight 77, flying from Washington’s Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles. About a half hour after takeoff, the terrorists hostilely took over the cockpit and turned the plane back toward Washington DC—with their sights on hitting the Pentagon, the nation’s symbolic fortress.
As the plane hurtled toward the building, it swept down so low, it clipped trees and utility poles on nearby Route 27 and a backup generator at the Pentagon. Flight 77 then smacked and bounced off the helipad before it smashed at a forty-five-degree angle into and through the twenty-four-inch-thick walls of the first and second floors of Rings E, D, and C, between corridors 4 and 5.
When the plane struck, there was apparently enough force for the tail to thrust itself through the aircraft and cockpit, then continue traveling through most of the Pentagon. Traveling at more than 350 miles an hour, and carrying sixty-four people, including children, the terrorists smashed the Boeing 757 into the west side of the building. Its point of impact: four windows from mine. They used the plane as a giant missile.
Ten thousand gallons of jet fuel spewed out of the wreckage, igniting a fire that reached more than 1,450 degrees. The fire was so hot that the firefighters could only move toward it for about five minutes at a time before their uniforms would melt. They would fight the fire and retreat, fight the fire and retreat. The fire blazed for more th
an twenty-six hours. Late Wednesday evening, September 12, they were finally able to extinguish it.
The Pentagon sprawls over twenty-nine acres and more than thirty thousand people are on its campus on any given day, many of them civilians. If there was one fortunate point about the place of impact it was that the terrorists hit the newly renovated section of the Pentagon. Not all the offices were occupied that morning because of the renovation, which was five days from being completed.
Part of the renovation included a reinforcement of the outer ring with floor-to-ceiling steel beams that ran through all five floors. Between the beams was a Kevlar-like mesh, similar to the material in bulletproof vests. Those reinforcements provided strength enough to keep the top floors from collapsing for about thirty-five minutes—time enough for many people to escape. That also stopped the concrete from becoming shrapnel in the blast.
The renovation included installing two-inch-thick, blast-resistant exterior windows that were covered with a Kevlar coating, making them blast-resistant. The windows above the crash site didn’t shatter. And the new sprinkler system kept the fires from spreading through the entire building.
Yet even with the renovation, the damage was still tremendous. The crash damaged or destroyed two million square feet of office space. The extreme temperatures melted steel girders and turned sturdy concrete columns into piles of dust. It damaged more than four hundred support columns, some severely and some with microfractures. They would have to rebuild four hundred thousand square feet where the plane hit, an area nearly as large as seven football fields.
Demolition crews were working twenty-four-hour days, removing five thousand pounds at a time.
Refined by Fire Page 9