Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  The ER staff instantly mobilized with a deference they don’t show hysterical wives. Within moments, Norman was on a respirator, and though he didn’t open his eyes, his color warmed from ash gray to a mottled flush as his vital signs stabilized. I scribbled through the paperwork, glancing nervously toward the door. Where’s the neurosurgeon?

  “We’d better get some x-rays,” I told the nurse. “If this is a spinal cord injury, he’ll need a steroid injection right away, won’t he?”

  “Yes, Doctor.” He looked at me oddly but nodded and handed me a form for the x-ray.

  There were no broken bones in his back or neck. Still no neurosurgeon. And not so much as a flicker of Norman’s eyelids.

  “I want him moved to St. Mary’s. Call the trauma hawk.” I called Sandy from a phone at the nurse’s station. “This is … this is Dr. Brinker. We’re bringing that patient I told you about.”

  Sandy was waiting for us with a team of specialists. Norman was whisked to the ICU. I stood in the hall, shaking in my muddy boots. One of the merciful sisters came and spoke quietly with me, reassuring me. Over her shoulder, I watched them splay Norman out spread-eagled with monitor wires snaking out from his neck and torso, ventilator hose to his mouth and nose, IV tubing taped to his arm, catheter between his legs. A hole was drilled in his forehead, and a four-inch pipe protruded from it, standing straight up. The ICP, I would soon learn, the intercranial pressure monitor.

  The coming and going settled into a quiet dusk. I pulled a plastic chair next to Norman’s bed. The room fell still except for the soft beeping of the heart monitor and the librarian scold of the ventilator: shush-hushhhh, shush-hushhhhh. Norman was in a deep coma. I stroked his arm and pressed my dry lips to his hand, listening with all my heart for any echo of where he might have gone, aching to follow. Wherever he was, I hoped there were horses.

  This is that part of the movie they don’t show. They insert a montage of cross-fading images, the terrified wife pacing, the shattered son and daughters lingering in the hallway, the doctors with their grave faces and endless jargon—a babble of technical terms and hope-crushing numbers. “On a scale of one to ten, he’s a one.” All this has to be compressed from days to moments, the space of a moving piece of music. To sit through it in real time would be unbearable. It was unbearable.

  Dr. Phil Williams, a dear friend and neurosurgeon, came from Dallas, examined Norman thoroughly, and discussed the prognosis with us.

  “If he comes out of the coma—and that’s a big if right now—he’ll likely see some progress initially. He might be able to recover some mobility and be quite functional as far as speech and cognition. Typically, with this type of injury, there’s improvement, then a plateau, followed by steady decline.”

  Periodically, the ICP protruding from Norman’s forehead issued a shrill warning, and the attending physician rushed in and administered a drug that kept the swelling of his brain in check. The rest of the time nurses and orderlies came and went quietly, maintaining him in this terrifying suspended animation. Norman’s attorney came with the president of Brinker International, and we crafted a press release. Norman was the CEO of a fast-growing, publically held company. We had to be circumspect but truthful in the statement that would be released late in the afternoon on Friday, after the stock markets closed.

  “He’s still undergoing tests,” I said. “He’s stable. He’s strong. I’m going to assume that he’s going to be all right.”

  It was agreed. They faxed me the statement. We made copies, and Eric took them to a little bank of pay phones in the hall. The phones rang one after the other. Eric, Daddy, and Margaret and a few others kept a rotation going, sitting there answering the phones, reading the statement to media people and others who called.

  Norman E. Brinker, chairman and chief executive officer of Brinker International, Inc., was involved in a polo accident at the Palm Beach Polo Club in Florida on Thursday, January 21, 1993. Exact details of the incident are not yet known. Brinker is in the hospital, where he is being treated for his injuries. His vital signs are stable and the prognosis appears favorable.

  On Sunday, the Brinker board met and named an interim chairman and CEO.

  Instead of satisfying curiosity or settling rumors, the statement opened the sugar bowl for the ants. Reporters tried to sneak in and get pictures. Eric saw a “doctor” in surgical scrubs at the nurse’s station outside Norman’s room and recognized him as a man he’d seen down in the gift shop.

  “Hey, that guy’s not a doctor,” Eric told Mommy and me. “Mom, when I went down to mail your letters, he was at the counter asking about Dad.”

  Mommy strode over to the guy, jammed her finger into his sternum, and said, “You get the hell out of here! I’m about to call the cops. In fact—no! You stay right where you are. I’m going to have you hauled out of here.”

  The guy was already sprinting down the hall, and for the first time in days, I found myself laughing.

  “Oh, Mommy, that was stellar.” I dabbed tears from the corners of my eyes. “That was a great moment. I can’t wait to tell Norman.”

  The neurologist told me to watch the EKG and blood pressure monitor while I talked to him. I don’t know if he really thought something was going to happen or he was just trying to keep me busy, but I did it.

  “We usually do a tracheostomy by the ten-day mark,” he told me.

  “Can you wait? He won’t like it if he wakes up with that thing. He’ll hate it.”

  “We’ll give it ten days.”

  We settled into a daily routine. I insisted they help me get Norman dressed. The hospital gown was just not him. He wouldn’t have wanted his children to see him like that. I’d rallied his friends so we could keep a steady rotation of stimulating conversation going on around him. Polo game videotapes on a VCR. The Wall Street Journal read cover to cover every morning. I rotated in with medical journals and research, but instead of continuing on the path of discovery I’d been on during the fifteen years since Suzy was diagnosed with breast cancer, I did a deep dive into the perplexing science of brain function and dysfunction, ravenously consuming everything I could find on decerebrate rigidity and decorticate posturing (the tortured poses that indicate severe brain injury) and the Babinski response (what the toes do or don’t do when the sole of the foot is stimulated). I was trying to assimilate a daunting amount of information, and none of it was very comforting.

  The physical therapist helped me work every muscle in his arms and legs. The radiologist’s team came and took him for daily CAT scans and MRIs. I rotated his wrists and massaged his hands, telling him about his horses at home.

  “Kachobie’s going to be all right. The vet says you can ride her again in a month or so. Juanita and Little Delta miss you. Every time I walk into the barn, they come nosing over, wanting to know where you are.” I flexed his fingers one at a time and whispered, “Where are you, Norman? Where are you?”

  He’d been perfectly still for ten days and was beginning to look gaunt.

  “He has a very high metabolism,” I told the nutritionist. “He needs more calories. I don’t want him to wake up and find himself wasted away.”

  I brought in a St. Anthony icon and a St. Jude to boot, fixed a mezuzah on the doorframe and set a Hindu prayer wheel on the nightstand. I played John Philip Sousa marches on a little tape deck during his exercise time and stirring classical pieces the rest of the day. No “Moonlight Sonata” or baroque quartets; I played “Hall of the Mountain King” and “March of the Toreadors”—Grieg, Mahler, Wagner—music that demands get up, get up, go forth, while I sat by Norman’s side, writing dozens of thank-you notes for flowers and gifts and well wishes that poured in from all over the world. We weren’t allowing visitors other than family (“family” included Margaret Valentine, of course), but the Fords, Reagans, and Bushes called, along with Larry Hagman and his wife, Maj, and a host of celebrities who’d been feted at our annual luncheons over the years. Norman’s friend Ross Perot went to Chil
i’s in Dallas, had his picture taken surrounded by a bevy of shapely young waitresses, blew the photo up to the size of a panel truck, and posted it against the wall in the hospital room.

  The Sunday after the accident, a great crowd of people turned out for the Race for the Cure in Palm Beach. The day Norman got hurt, I’d spent the morning completely preoccupied by the details and doing of it, but I’d hardly thought about it since. I heard there was a minute of silent prayer for Norman.

  On February 3, he flexed his hand. The whole room cheered. Mom and Margaret and I whooped and cried and hugged each other. But no matter how we begged, he didn’t do it again. I asked Ray Martinez, another good friend, to come in every morning and talk about polo. Still not a flinch from Norman. Another three days went by.

  Norman’s physician was pushing for the tracheostomy now. I’d been begging for another day, another day. We were sixteen days out now.

  “Norman,” I whispered in his ear. “Wake up. Wake up, Norman. They’re going to put a hole in your throat tomorrow, and you’re not going to like it. Norman. Norman. I’m selling the polo ponies. Do you hear me, Norman? If you don’t wake up, they’re gone. The horses and everything that goes with them. So you have to wake up. Please, Norman, wake up.”

  Nothing.

  The next morning, Ray Martinez came in as usual.

  “Good morning, Norman.”

  “G’morring, Ray.”

  I uttered a sharp, involuntary cry. Ray and I stood there, frozen in the moment, waiting for … anything. There was no sound or movement in the room for what seemed like a long time. Then Norman flexed his right arm.

  “Norman?”

  He turned his head slightly toward the sound of my voice. He opened his eyes, just a drowsy slit, but enough for me to see the color there.

  “Oh, God, Norman. You’re awake. You’re here.” I gripped his hand, weeping, kissing his face. “Thank God … thank God … you’re here … oh, Norman.”

  He tried to mumble something, but I couldn’t make it out with the tube in his throat.

  “Don’t try to talk. Just squeeze my hand if you understand me.”

  I gripped his hand the way you’d grip your brother’s hand if you found him hanging off the side of a cliff. Norman took hold of my hand and didn’t let go.

  Norman had lost about twenty-five pounds while he was out. The left side of his body was paralyzed. He lay there without speaking for several days, drifting in and out of a fitful but normal sleep. Then he started talking incessantly in a strange, liquid language that cobbled together clicks, hums, and fragmented English. His body thrashed and flailed with all the kinetic energy he hadn’t spent during those weeks of lying still. It was the tightly wired, slightly impatient, fully charged energy I’d always found exhilarating (and not just a little sexy)—the energy Norman and I had in common—only now it crackled, hissed, and twisted like a downed power line. Norman had to be restrained for his own safety.

  “Please,” I begged the neurologist, “there must be a better way. To be tied down like this is torture for him.”

  They started him in language and occupational therapy, and he didn’t do well. They expected him to do things like make a bed, make coffee, recite the ABCs. It wasn’t Norman.

  “He doesn’t even drink coffee,” I said. “He runs restaurants. Ask him about that.”

  I told them to assign him to the youngest, prettiest physical therapists and engage him in conversations about polo horses and business. He did respond better to that, but his progress was two steps forward, one step back—and sometimes three steps back. It’s ironic; if Norman had had cancer, I’d have been completely in the know. I’d have been up front with the action plan, on the ground and mobilized from day one. Brain injury was something I knew virtually nothing about. I was starting from zero, and while I’d grown a lot as a patient advocate in general terms, I felt dwarfed by everything I didn’t know about his condition. I’d amassed a stack of books and publications and was wading my way through them, but I felt as if I were searching for my husband in some vast unknowable wilderness.

  Eventually, he began putting together words that made sense but which came from some cubbyhole in his memory, as if doors and windows to the past thirty-five years were randomly opening and closing. Every once in a while he’d let loose a stream of profanity and X-rated jargon—words I’d never once heard from his mouth. He kept wondering what to do about his rabbits. He’d ask about his polo ponies, then want to go ashore on leave. Sometimes he thought I was his dead mother.

  “Norman?” The neurologist leaned over him, shining a light in his eyes. “Do you know where you are?”

  “On a boat. San Diego,” Norman muttered.

  “Do you know where you work?”

  “Steak & Ale.”

  The neurologist held a mirror in front of Norman’s face. “Norman, who is this?”

  He studied the image in baffled annoyance. “It’s some old man.”

  Standing off to the side by the machine that monitored his vitals, I felt an ice-cold trickle at the back of my neck. I had a box of home movies brought in and sat for hours, watching with him, narrating and prodding while Norman jerked and fought with his restraints, his eyes searching the room.

  “Norman, look, there we are skiing at Vail. Look how beautiful Brenda is. She reminds me so much of her mom. Look at Eric and you, playing with Undie. Look, Norman. Here’s us at our engagement party. And then we told everyone we were already married. Remember? Mommy said, ‘Look, are you adults? How old are you? What are you waiting around for?’ so we went to city hall and instead of an engagement party, we had a wedding reception.” I leaned in and whispered to him about that night, everything we were to each other in our private moments. “We’ve been married twelve years tomorrow, Norman. Do you know that? How many days is that? Help me figure it out. Twelve years times 365 days … that’s more than 4,000 days, Norm. Think about that.”

  He touched my face and smiled at me with all the affection a man has for his dead mother. The next morning, I heard Eric coaching him.

  “Dad, what are you going to say when Mom gets here?”

  “She talks too much.”

  “No, Dad, say Happy Anniversary.”

  “She needs to calm down. Too high strung.”

  “Dad, can you say that? Happy … C’mon, Dad. Happy Anniversary. Easy.”

  I smiled, remembering how Norman had plagued Eric with math drills when he was little. When I walked into the room, Norman grinned his old grin.

  “Happy Anniversary, Bruni.”

  I laughed and cried and hugged them both.

  “I brought all the Wall Street Journals from while you were out.” I set the stack beside him on the bed. “We have a lot of catching up to do. There’s an article here saying the story of your injury generated more queries than any other CEO injury they’d ever reported. It’s because your people love you, Norm. You should see the cards and letters. I’ve got them all in boxes according to region.”

  The support of Norman’s corporate family meant so much to him. Their affection for him and dedication to the company lit a fire under him. The neurology team told us it would be a year or more before Norm would achieve any meaningful recovery, and that he was going to have to accept certain limitations in his life now. He was sixty-two years old, they told him, and couldn’t expect to bounce back like a kid.

  “You’re wrong,” he said flatly.

  But they weren’t.

  It’s so difficult for me to describe the years that followed. The first several weeks, we worked all day every day on simple cognitive functions and basic motor skills. He’d spend hours with the physical therapist while I took care of household matters and foundation business; the rest of the time we were together, drilling photographs and flash cards. I brought in videotapes of polo matches, and those calmed his restless limbs. With sheer grit, he kept excavating, drilling, grinding ahead, fighting for every small victory.

  Norman did mak
e a dramatic comeback. He had to accept that he’d never play polo again or ride horses in anything approaching the way he’d ridden before, but he worked at walking on his own, and he had realistic hopes of eventually resuming a role in his company.

  April 29, 1993, we flew home. It was just the two of us, and Norman was very emotional. We flew into Love. (One of the reasons I still dig Dallas: you get to “fly into Love” over and over.) It was a forty-five-minute drive to the house, and Norman stayed wide awake.

  “Good to be home,” he said again and again. “Oh, boy, it’s good to be home.”

  Norman had always embodied—and always will embody—everything about Texas that speaks to my soul. This was where he thrived, and I was so happy to see him back in his natural habitat. I had hopes for a while. When he’s home, I kept telling myself, he’ll remember who he is. We arrived at the house, and Norman stared out the tinted window, waiting for the driver to open his door.

  Slowly, laboriously, he moved his legs, set one foot on the driveway, then the other. The driver made a move to help him, but I cleared my throat sharply and shook my head. Norman struggled to stand, got his bearings for a moment, then made his way to the front door without a cane or crutches, stitching one step onto the next, his arms taut as a tightrope walker’s but hanging straight down at his sides. I stayed behind him and didn’t make a sound. He rattled the front door open and stood in the foyer, breathing, steadying himself after the great effort.

  “Well. I’m not Superman,” he said. “But I’m back.”

  “You’re home.” I put my arms around him, kissed his mouth, stroked his neck. “We’re home, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  There was a Brinker International board meeting scheduled for May 4. I made flash cards with photographs of the board members and drilled Norman relentlessly on their names. We practiced shaking hands and making small talk. Reassuring phrases, pleasant conversation. The meeting went well, and he was officially reinstated as chairman and CEO. Some people had reservations, and I understood that, but it was the right thing to do for the stockholders’ sake, and more important (more important to me, anyway), it was something Norman desperately needed. This company was the culmination of his life’s work. If they’d taken it from him, he would have felt defeated and betrayed. We had to surround him with full confidence now, full faith, full support.