by Scott Bolzan
The negative thoughts started coming at me in a rush, my anxiety mounting into a panic with each new scenario I feared would happen next.
If this is permanent, will my memory loss be as well? Is the rest of my body going to start failing too? Will I start forgetting things I learned since the accident?
I felt like I was losing what little hope and control I had left, and a blanket of hopelessness fell over me. I disintegrated into tears, crying so hard I couldn’t even talk.
My life is coming apart, piece by piece, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. I’m on a death-defying roller-coaster ride of misery, only I didn’t ask for a ticket and now I can’t get off.
McPhee sat quietly and let me vent while Joan hugged and tried to console me, even though she was crying now too. When I was finally able to get a few words out, I apologized to the doctor. “I’m sorry, but it’s just been a real difficult road here,” I said.
“I understand,” he said. “But you’ll get used to this to the point where you won’t even notice it.”
He said I could get a second opinion and repeat the MRI if I liked, but he wanted me to come back in six weeks for a follow-up. As we were leaving, I told Joan that I didn’t see any point in coming back only to receive the same prognosis again.
I’m not sure if I grieved my vision loss properly, because as soon as we got back to the car my mind shifted back to the Grant situation, with all the emotions that evoked, and I went on another ten-minute crying jag.
Not only is my vision loss permanent, but my son is addicted to painkillers and cocaine. I wish I could remember, but did I not encourage or support him enough? Was I mean to him? Was this somehow my fault?
Joan rubbed my back and my leg, letting me get all the emotion out, until I was ready to head home. Still, on the drive back, my ruminations continued, as I came up with more questions about possible causes for Grant’s condition.
After I was settled in my chair at home and had tried to deaden my headache pain with more medication, Joan and I dived deeper into the issue. It had been a rough day, which made it even more difficult than usual to try to absorb a lot of information, but I felt I needed to take in as much as I could.
“When did his drug use start?” I asked.
Joan said Grant began using drugs in his junior year of high school, but we didn’t know until it escalated during his first semester at ASU in the fall of 2007. “He was in school barely a month,” she said, when we pulled him out in October and took him to rehab. “He wanted help.”
From there, the questions I’d been thinking about on the drive home started pouring out of me: “Is it something I did or didn’t do it to make him turn to drugs? Did I not teach him the right way to grow up? Did something bad happen in his life?”
Consumed with doubt that I had been a good father, I listened quietly as Joan told me a story she’d been saving until I was ready to start dealing with the negative issues from my past. Up to this point, I’d been having so much trouble coping with what was in front of me, she knew I couldn’t handle anything more.
“Well, he did have a head injury when he was eleven,” she said. “And we always questioned whether there were some residual depression issues that might have led to his low self-esteem.”
Grant was playing touch football during recess at school, she said, and took an elbow to the head. I was at home that day, and she was working in the recovery room at the Greenbaum Surgery Center at Scottsdale Healthcare–Osborn when she got a call from the school nurse, who was a friend of hers. The nurse said Grant had been hit in the head, was vomiting, and needed to be picked up.
Joan asked me to bring him home to relax, which I did, but once we got there he didn’t get any better. In fact, he complained he had the worst headache of his life and continued to throw up.
Our son was in tremendous pain and I was worried, so I called Joan at work and she told me to bring him to the emergency room at Scottsdale Healthcare–Shea, which was only five minutes away. Meanwhile, she called some of her trusted ER nursing colleagues to tell them we were on our way. The nurses met us in the triage area and immediately took him back to see the doctor.
Joan, who had worked at the Shea ER only four months earlier, arrived in her nursing scrubs shortly after we did. By the time she got there, one of her nurse friends had already started his IV and was giving him fluids and medicine to stop the vomiting while they waited for him to be taken up for a CT scan. After the scan they moved him into an acute bay, which meant his condition was growing more serious.
Dr. Paul Francis, a neurosurgeon from Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who had just finished a surgery in the Shea operating room, came bursting into the ER.
“Where is the boy with the bleed?” he asked. “Is he still awake? We need to get him into the OR immediately.”
“Let’s get a helicopter and get him to Barrow,” Joan said.
But the doctor said there wasn’t enough time. “He will go from awake to asleep to dead,” he said bluntly.
Francis told us that Grant had suffered an epidural bleed in the left temporal region and a skull fracture that had punctured the temporal artery. The doctor reassured us that he could perform the surgery at Shea, then have Grant transported to Barrow once he stabilized.
We agreed, so Grant was wheeled up to the operating room, where we stayed by his side until it was time to go in and repair the damage. Because Joan was a hospital employee, she was able to see Grant directly after he came out of the hour-long surgery. She was concerned about his mental functioning, but as soon as he asked about the catheter—“What is in my penis and how did it get there?”—she knew he was going to be fine.
Thankfully, she told me, our son didn’t suffer any permanent damage or experience any seizures. As the doctor had promised, Grant was transferred later that day to Barrow and spent the next couple of days there healing. He was released without any complications, but he wasn’t allowed to participate in any sports or other activities that might reinjure his head.
This began to take a toll on Grant, Joan said, because he’d been playing hockey on a traveling team in Phoenix and now was forced to sit on the sidelines. “This was the kid who was always picked first to be on the team, the best athlete, almost like a mini-you,” she told me. “He was a little alpha male, and for the first time he was stripped of being that kid who could do anything.
“It was like a surgeon losing his hands,” she went on. “An adult could have handled it, but an eleven-year-old couldn’t understand it. His whole life was, ‘I’m a hockey player.’ He couldn’t go to recess, he couldn’t play any sports, and he felt isolated.”
I feel like that too.
As Joan went on, I felt a connection growing with my boy for the first time. Maybe this common experience could help me reach out and build a closer relationship with him. And Joan didn’t have to cue me this time. I saw it all for myself.
His friends didn’t want to play with him anymore; I don’t have any real friends other than Joan and Taylor. He must have had pretty bad headaches too.
Also, for the first time in his life, Joan said, Grant was being teased. His head had been shaved for the operation, and until his hair grew in, the long red and swollen scar, configured like the number 7, was exposed on the side of his head. “It was so difficult for him,” she said.
When the anger and depression seemed to last longer than they should, Joan said, we decided to seek counseling for Grant and guide him through the process. After months of therapy, he seemed to get better at controlling his temper, but it was not until he was able to return to sports six months after the accident that we saw any real improvement.
By then, however, his team had moved on without him. He was no longer the star of the traveling team; in fact, he’d lost his position altogether. As a result he started pursuing extreme and unsafe sporting activities such as jumping his bike off rickety ramps or off the second-story patio and into the pool. At that point, Joan said,
we introduced him to motocross, in which he could wear a good helmet and safety gear and be protected during his “need for speed” phase, which ended up lasting six more years.
Joan’s story took about an hour to tell, and by the end of it I was exhausted. I had long ago reached my saturation point for information, even on this very important topic. “I need to relax and close my eyes,” I told her. “It’s just so much.”
As this new reality sank in over the next few days, I began doing some research myself. I found some statistics showing that, at least in some cases, head trauma and drug addiction appeared to be correlated. I couldn’t help but wonder if this injury had led to Grant’s drug problem.
Chapter 8
IT HAD BEEN about six weeks since the accident, and I was starting to go stir-crazy at home, so Joan and I decided it was time for me to go someplace other than the doctor’s office. I wanted to contribute to the household, and although I wasn’t sure exactly how, a trip to the grocery store seemed like a good start. Still, just the thought of completing this simple task, which most people took for granted, filled me with dread before we even pulled up to the Safeway near our house.
Although I’d seen supermarkets on television, I still wondered what it would look like inside. Would I be able to tell I was in a grocery store? Or, worse yet, would I see people I used to know and have to deal with the awkward situation of not recognizing them?
I gripped Joan’s hand tightly, but she had to break away to pull a cart from a long row of them. Right away the place seemed unfamiliar, and I felt lost amid the stacks of cans and boxes surrounding me. I started to push the cart as if I were trying to help Joan, when in fact I was really just trying to stay close to her, my trusted human security blanket.
We passed a display with bouquets of flowers near the entrance and started walking up and down the aisles, where I watched her take items from the shelves and toss them into the cart. I’d never seen most of the items she was choosing, and I was feeling overstimulated with being in a new environment. I wanted to be of help, but I also felt I needed to venture off and clear my head.
“Is there anything I can grab?” I asked.
“Why don’t you go get a bag of potato chips from the next aisle?” she suggested, as if that should be an easy task for me to handle.
The problem was I had no idea what a bag of potato chips looked like, though surely, I told myself, I would recognize one when I saw it. Well, I found the correct aisle all right, but I wasn’t anticipating there would be more than fifty different types, sizes, and brands, all of which said “Potato Chips.” Not knowing what else to do, I started pacing back and forth, scanning each bag and storing the label in my empty memory bank to try to properly evaluate each one. Barbecue, salt and vinegar, cheddar, onion, garlic, ruffled, baked, and low fat. If I didn’t know what any of these tasted like, how was I supposed to choose? Feeling so unequipped to make such a simple decision made it even more difficult to do so. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead as I told myself that Joan was counting on me to make the right choice and I was going to fail. Just then she came around the corner.
“Honey, just grab a bag,” she said, as if there was no wrong choice.
“How do you choose?”
“Just choose whichever one you want,” she said.
I grabbed the red, white, and blue jumbo bag of chips with the ridges, called Ruffles, because I liked the colors on the bag and the look of the chips’ rippled edges. I had no idea that it was a brand we usually didn’t choose, but I did notice that Joan didn’t correct me. Only later did she tell me that we usually bought the healthier baked chips these days. I felt dejected. Everyone else on that aisle had made his or her choice so easily. The trip was just one more reminder that I didn’t know anything about the outside world.
While we were waiting in the checkout line, I walked over and grabbed a cellophane-wrapped dozen red roses from the flower display. I’d seen Anthony buy these for Taylor on her birthday, and I’d seen plenty of men on TV do the same for their wives or girlfriends. Joan had been doing so much for me, I thought it would be nice to give her these as a token of my appreciation.
As I handed them to her, she teared up. “Thank you, I love you,” she said, giving me a hug and a kiss right there in line. That’s when I realized it didn’t take much to please Joan. My small gesture had cost only ten dollars.
Now that I was feeling a little better, I wanted to be more helpful around the house. Joan showed me how to pay our bills online, which I then started to do on my own. I knew from overhearing her conversations that she was worried about money, but I didn’t like it when she told me I’d used the wrong credit card to pay a bill that charged no interest or penalty before paying one that did or when she said we couldn’t buy something that I wanted her to have.
We’d be in a department store, for example, and she’d see an item that she liked for herself or Taylor.
“I want those shoes,” she’d say.
“Well, then, just buy them,” I’d say.
“We don’t want to spend the money now because we’re still trying to figure things out,” she’d reply.
She’d already told me that I’d been the primary provider for our family, and from watching The Sopranos I knew that the man of the house was supposed to say these things to his wife, so this made me feel like less of a man. Worthless. Stripped of the power I used to have, lacking my own identity, and unable to provide for my family like I used to. I didn’t think Joan was trying to make me feel this way, but at times her remarks were hard to take.
Then one day I overheard her talking on the phone to Anita, our bookkeeper. Of course, I could hear only one side of the conversation, but I tried to piece things together.
“Anita, relax, we’ll get it figured out,” Joan said. “We’re not in panic mode yet. You need to calm down and get a grip here.”
After she hung up I came in to find out what was going on.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
Joan broke down crying as she explained that Anita was concerned that our bills were piling up but no new money was coming in. She’d asked Joan how we wanted her to handle the situation, and Joan tried to tell her that we were waiting to see what happened with my memory, hoping that I could get back to work one day soon. Joan told me I’d been close to finalizing a deal, but she couldn’t find any of the paperwork because I’d apparently kept all the details in my head. Meanwhile, she was trying to make some sales by following up with other potential clients.
I didn’t know how to respond—I obviously couldn’t retrieve the details of that deal now—but I tried to do what I could to reassure her. “We’ll get it figured out,” I said. “We’ll be okay.”
Our financial troubles, not to mention the sad state of the economy, caused me to reflect even more on the material objects I saw around the house. I wondered not only why we needed all these expensive baubles but also whether we should start selling them—my watches and some of the cars, for a start. I also noticed that Joan wore a very nice diamond ring on her wedding finger and a beautiful diamond tennis bracelet on her right wrist.
“Tell me about this ring and bracelet,” I said.
Joan was only too happy to tell me about them, saying that we’d had a custom jewelry designer make the ring several years ago. I’d already replaced the small diamond I’d bought for our engagement with a 1.5-carat marquis diamond some years ago. More recently, we’d had that same diamond placed into a new platinum setting with twelve new smaller diamonds, six on either side.
She said I’d purchased the tennis bracelet, a string of six carats’ worth of diamonds that shined so brilliantly, to congratulate her for completing her master’s degree of science leadership at Grand Canyon University. I was amazed at how proud she sounded as she told me about the gift, which I had given her on graduation day when she was still wearing her cap and gown.
“You are the least selfish person that I’ve ever known, and you’ve alwa
ys been happier when you buy something nice for someone in the family than when you buy something for yourself,” she said.
It was wonderful to hear how much the bracelet meant to her, but I couldn’t help wondering if I would ever be in a financial position again to show my love in the same way—by purchasing a special gift for the woman who meant the most to me.
In the third week of January Joan and I went to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix for an EEG, a test that measures the brain’s electrical activity, to see if we could get some answers. Rather than follow up with Goodell from the hospital, we’d decided to seek a neurologist at Barrow, because it specialized in brain injuries. Dr. Terry Fife, whose daughter was on Taylor’s cheerleading team, ordered the EEG and also referred me to a memory specialist and a neuropsychologist for more tests. Although I still hoped that my memory would come back, I was starting to prepare myself for the possibility that it wouldn’t.
As if I didn’t have enough problems already, the clerk at the check-in desk called me over a few minutes after she entered the information from my medical insurance card into the computer. “Your coverage has expired,” she said.
Joan and I looked at each other, shocked.
“There’s no way,” I said. “That can’t be right. Are you sure?” This didn’t make sense because we’d just gotten a prescription filled.
The clerk said yes, unfortunately, but we could pay for the $895 test in cash, if we wanted, and submit the bill to the insurance company for reimbursement.
“No,” Joan said, “we’re going to have to figure this out. We’ll reschedule and come back.”
Joan and I went out to the car in the parking garage, where she tried to reach the people who had bought West Jet Aircraft (WJA) back in February 2008. Joan said she clearly remembered that they were supposed to have paid our premiums through February as part of the deal. It was late in the day and these people lived in Florida, so we knew it was unlikely we’d reach them, but we waited for half an hour, hoping they’d respond to our voicemail. We finally gave up and went home to search for the sale paperwork in my office, where we found proof in my desk drawer that Joan was correct.