“It’s going to be okay,” Scott tried soothing me. “It’s going to be okay.”
In my pain, I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t believe him. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole.
When we got back to the Pflugs’ house, where we were still staying, I sat down with June and practiced counting money. We got out a bunch of quarters, nickels, and dimes, and she helped me add them together. “This is a quarter,” she’d say. “When you take two quarters and put them together, you have fifty cents.”
After a while, I slowly started to catch on. The knowledge that a quarter was equal to twenty-five cents never left me. The part I no longer understood was What does twenty-five cents mean? What do people do with money?
It was just about impossible for me to add numbers in columns, however. It was just too overwhelming to distinguish the different numerals. They all blurred together. I had to use a calculator to add, subtract, multiply, or divide numbers.
Other abstract concepts, like telling time, were hard for me to grasp. I knew what six o’clock was—that it was an hour in the day—but what did that mean? What did people do with time?
“At 6 P.M.,” June patiently explained, “people are getting off work, starting to come home. In an hour or two, many people eat dinner….”
The fact that there were two six o’clocks—6 A.M. and 6 P.M.—was also confusing.
“At six in the morning” June said, “many people are getting up to go to work. At six in the evening, twelve hours later, people are coming home from work and sitting down to dinner.”
June helped me learn more concrete lessons too. I’d point to the arm of a chair and say, “What is this?”
“That’s the arm of a chair,” she’d say. I’d point to other objects and she’d say, “Those are blinds, that’s a couch, that’s the seat of a chair.”
Life in Minnesota was lonely. The only people I knew were Scott’s family and friends. Since I couldn’t drive, I had no way to get around and make new friends. For a person who loves meeting and talking to people, and exploration and adventure, this social and physical isolation was particularly limiting. I felt totally dependent on Scott for all my needs. After being so independent all my life, I felt like a helpless child again. It was only when we arrived in Minnesota that I realized how much I needed a solid support system.
Day after day droned on and I felt bored, restless, and useless. I was supposed to heal, but what did that mean? None of the doctors in Malta, Germany, or Minnesota helped me understand all the changes I would be going through or suggested I get rehabilitation or reading help. They essentially stitched me up and cut me loose. I was supposed to figure everything out alone, and I had no clue as to what I was dealing with.
Much of the time, I felt helpless, out of control, and lonely. No one took me by the hand and told me what I needed to do to get on with my life. I was terribly sad, lonely, depressed, and bitter. My emotions fluctuated between happy, giggly highs and tearful, depressed, irritable lows. It was scary because I didn’t understand why this was happening—and no one explained it to me. Was I going crazy?
In Minnesota, I had to meet with more doctors than I ever knew existed. Every time I turned around, it seemed, I had to see another doctor.
Knowing that our destination was Minnesota, the American doctor in Germany referred me to a prominent neurosurgeon at the University of Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis. I saw him at least once a week for the first few months after the hijacking. He and other doctors wanted to keep a careful watch over the status of remaining bone fragments lodged in my brain. I had to have regular CAT scans to check on the location of these fragments and make sure there weren’t any major changes.
My neurosurgeon reminded me of an old German grandfather: he was all business and very stubborn. I always had the feeling he was in a hurry to get my examination over with so he could move on to his next patient. He had no time for my questions about my treatment or condition. His bedside manner was “Why are you asking questions? Just listen to me, I’m the doctor.” He was set in his ways, a man who knew everything.
It was hard for me to question his approach. I’d always looked up to doctors as authority figures. As the patient, I thought my job was to accept and do what they told me. In time, I came to appreciate how human they are.
On one visit to see my doctor, maybe three months after the hijacking, I was wearing a wig to cover my bald head—and feeling pretty good. The doctor walked right up to me and said, “Boy do you look good!” He immediately began running his hands through my hair, without giving me a chance to take off my wig. He searched, in vain, for my scar.
Can’t he tell that I’m wearing a wig? I wondered. Can’t he feel the little net?
I looked over at Scott, and he had his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. The doctor wasn’t giving up.
Finally, he said, “Where is your scar?”
“Doctor,” I laughed, “I’m wearing a wig!”
I took it off and my hair was just barely growing back—my scar was so obvious.
“Oh, well, your scar is looking pretty good,” he said, still stone-faced.
Scott and I cracked up with laughter as we got in the car to leave the hospital.
What troubled me more than my doctor’s lack of humor was my sense of not being heard when I talked about my ongoing health concerns. For example, I kept telling him about a problem with my neck. Anytime I moved my neck forward, the whole left side of my body went numb. He put me through some painful x-rays to diagnose the problem, but came up with nothing. He and several other doctors said I’d just have to learn to live with the problem. They said I had a brain dysfunction.
My first doctor had a pessimistic view of my future. He was convinced that I would never be able to work or drive again, or be able to live by myself. “There’s no way you can drive with your vision,” he said. Though he didn’t even know what level I was reading at, he said, “You’re not going to be able to read any faster than you do now. What you have right now is what you’re going to get.”
I wanted to change doctors, but I didn’t know if or when I should. It would take time and energy for another doctor to become familiarized with the pages and pages and piles of stuff on my case. Was it worth the risk of leaving someone who knew my medical history?
I scheduled an appointment with an educational diagnostician at the University of Minnesota. I wanted to know what my strengths and weaknesses were.
The first test she gave me was the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale, Revised or WAIS-R. As an educational diagnostician, I’d taken the test before and administered a similar version to hundreds of children in testing for learning disabilities.
A learning disability is a very specific type of learning problem. Before a student can be considered learning disabled (LD), I as a school psychologist had to first rule out the possibility that the child’s learning difficulty was not caused by a physical disability (such as deafness or blindness), and/or environmental, cultural, or emotional problems. Students had to have a significant gap between their intellectual scores and reading and/or math achievement to be considered LD. If there’s no gap, it may just be that the child is a slow learner.
While ignorant teachers and parents believe LD stands for “Lazy and Dumb,” the great irony is that LD kids have higher than average intelligence.
Some LD experts believe that many brilliant historical figures, including Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Woodrow Wilson, Socrates, and Leonardo da Vinci, could probably be classified as LD, based on the problems they had with formal schooling.
I went through an extensive two-year training in my master’s degree program to be able to administer the WAIS-R. I was completely familiar with all aspects of the test and its scoring.
Under these conditions, there is no way that I could take the WAIS-R and have the results be considered valid. “You really shouldn’t give me this test,” I objected. “I’ve given this test many times. It�
�s not going to be valid.”
“We’ll just see how it comes out anyway,” the tester said.
I felt hurt and patronized. I felt she was treating me like a child—not as an equal. Yet I felt helpless to do anything about it.
I went ahead and took the test, hoping the evaluator would still pick up on some of my learning problems. I puzzled over many questions on the WAIS-R. I could tell that my responses to some of the questions were different than they would have been before I was shot.
As I studied the words and pictures on the page, I’d get a sudden flash of insight and think, Oh my God, I just did something significant. I just did something that was pretty weird.
I looked up, hoping the evaluator had caught it too. Though evaluators are always supposed to observe persons taking a diagnostic test, my tester wasn’t watching me. She was busy scoring my previous test. I felt terrible.
I also saw myself in her. As a school psychologist and diagnostician, I often did the same thing. While kids were taking one test, I was grading the previous one. I wondered if my students felt as frustrated as I now did because nobody was paying attention to them or their learning process.
This testing session was frustrating in other ways. I knew something was wrong with my memory and vision. I couldn’t see the words clearly. I was also working at a very slow pace.
I actually did fairly well on parts of a memory test. I was given two words like dog and house, then asked to recall them. By visualizing a picture of a dog sitting on top of the house, I often answered correctly. I had taught students this mnemonic technique to sharpen their memory. Unfortunately, using the technique now allowed me to mask a deeper problem: I wasn’t recalling words; I was remembering pictures—a completely different mental process.
I asked the evaluator to give me another memory test, but she didn’t think it was necessary. I was very disappointed. At the end of the testing session, I still didn’t know what grade level I was at in reading or math because she didn’t test my reading or math comprehension.
Little things that I had always taken for granted were now, suddenly, huge obstacles. Since all of my clothes had been left in Egypt or lost on the plane, June Pflug took me shopping one day to buy some new clothes. It wasn’t easy walking around the mall where we went. I had to hold on to my mother-in-law to keep from falling sometimes.
After going to a few stores, June saw a pair of pants that she thought might look good on me. I went into the dressing room to try them on but came out crying.
I couldn’t tell what they looked like on me. I only saw pieces of the pants in the mirror.
I knew something was terribly wrong with my ability to process information. I didn’t feel any less intelligent than I had before getting shot in the head, but I knew I was slower in understanding things. I thought a lot about my years of teaching learning disabled kids, hoping that, somehow, I could draw upon that knowledge to get a handle on my situation.
Before the hijacking, my second job after college was teaching special education classes to second, third, and fourth graders at Bowie Elementary School in Baytown, Texas. This job taught me a lot more about learning disabilities and the frustrations of LD kids.
LD kids were smart enough, but they had a hard time doing simple things such as finding their way to and from the bathroom. I had to take them by the hand and lead them to the bathroom time and again. After a few times, I’d say, “Okay, do you think you can find the bathroom by yourself?”
They would nod their little heads “yes,” so I’d let them try going alone. I remember what happened to little Beth one time. She was a skinny, little girl who was quite a bit slower than the rest. She suffered from a lot of diseases.
I let Beth go to the bathroom by herself one time, but twenty minutes later, she wasn’t back. “Now where is Beth? How could she be in the bathroom for twenty minutes?” I was worried.
I went looking, but Beth wasn’t in the bathroom. I started roaming the halls. When I found Beth, obviously lost, she was crying. “I couldn’t find the bathroom,” she said. She’d been wandering the halls all that time, unable to find her way back to the classroom to tell me she was lost.
Sometimes I lost patience with my students. “Why aren’t you listening?” I’d ask. “Why aren’t you paying attention?”
Oh, the irony.
CHAPTER 6
GOT YOU THIS TIME!
IN JANUARY 1986, LESS THAN TWO MONTHS after the hijacking, I flew down to Houston for the first time since Scott and I were married. I was still too scared to go on a plane by myself, so I arranged to fly to Dallas with Scott’s sister Margaret, who had to travel to Dallas-Fort Worth on business. Barb Wilson would fly to Dallas, meet me there, and then we’d fly to Houston.
It was scary being on a plane again. I cried when I sat down in my seat. Almost immediately, I found myself staring at other passengers’ laps to check for guns and grenades. Somehow, I managed to settle down after a while.
Barb Wilson was waiting to greet me in Dallas. Together, we got on a commuter flight to Houston’s Hobby Airport.
On the drive home from the airport I gazed out the window, watching the familiar landscapes of my youth scrolling by on our way to Pasadena, the Houston suburb where I grew up.
Pasadena has a couple of big claims to fame. It’s home to many of the world’s largest oil refineries. Driving along Highway 225, between Houston and Deer Park, oil fields and refineries stretch as far as the eye can see. At night, it’s quite a sight. The flashing, glowing lights of the refineries create the illusion of strange, ghostly cities out of a science fiction novel.
Before it burned down in 1989, Mickey Gilley’s famous country western nightclub was also in Pasadena. Gilley’s attracted national attention as the place where Urban Cowboy, the 1979 movie starring John Travolta, was filmed. Barb Wilson and I used to go there on Friday nights to ride the famous mechanical bull and practice country western dance steps such as the Cotton-Eyed Joe, the shottish, the polka, and the two-step.
In the daytime, there’s nothing romantic about the area immediately west of Houston. It’s a sprawling urban mess—a mishmash of residential, commercial, and industrial construction. Houston is the only large American city with no zoning laws, and you can see the results. In Houston, and its suburbs, your next-door neighbor can open an automobile repair shop in his backyard—or a marble and cement mixing operation, for that matter—without a permit. Abandoned oil rigs, like iron dinosaurs from another era, dot the landscape. They stand idly by fast-food restaurants, miniature golf courses, flea markets stocked with velvet paintings and cheap jewelry, gas stations, and motels.
Pasadena is a blue-collar, working-class suburb where southern hospitality still prevails. People drive Ford and Chevy four-by-fours, wear cowboy hats, and enjoy home cooking.
On this first trip back home, I stayed with my parents and with Barb and Wayne part of the time, as I had the previous summer. Outside Barb’s house was a big banner that read WELCOME HOME JACKIE. She and my other friends had tied a yellow ribbon around the huge oak tree in her front yard.
It felt good to be home again, surrounded by close friends and family. I spent a lot of time with my mom and dad, in the same house where as a young girl I’d played school with my sisters and neighborhood friends.
My mother, Billie, and my father, Eugene, met in the navy during the Korean War and settled in Pasadena soon after. They were typical of their generation. Dad joined the navy after high school and worked as an aviation electrician. He served on board the Intrepid in the South Pacific and later in Seattle, Washington. After the war, he worked as an operator for Ethyl Oil Corporation for thirty-four years.
My dad’s ethnic background is German—and he is known to display the stubbornness which Germans are famous for. My dad also has a very gentle, loving, and sensitive side. His mother’s maiden name was Brahms—and she was directly related to the family of the famous composer, Johannes Brahms. The two Brahms brothers came over to Am
erica on a ship in the late 1890s. One decided to stay in Texas; the other, the composer who wrote “Brahms Lullaby,” returned to Germany.
Moms background is French and Irish. She grew up in New Hampshire and, after high school, joined the navy. She later served in the Korean War and was stationed in Seattle, Washington, where she was a chaplains assistant and met my dad.
When I first arrived at Barb and Wayne’s house, I sat in the same kitchen where Barb and I watched the TWA hijacking unfold in June. How different the circumstances were this time!
I was wearing a red scarf and wig to cover my shaved head, and the scar from my bullet wound was still visible. I removed the scarf and wig to let Barb see the soft spot in my head move up and down when I breathed—just like the soft spot on the top of an infant’s head. It was pretty scary.
Barb arranged a homecoming party for me that gave me a chance to see all my old friends again. It gave me a big boost to see how much they cared about me. “I was praying for you, Jackie,” my friend Debbie said. “We’re all so glad you made it through.”
About three hours later, after the last person left the party, I went into Barb’s bedroom and just broke down. I sobbed and sobbed. I felt as though I had to hold everything in while people were around. Now I could let go and let things out.
Barb must have heard me, for she came in and sat down next to me on the bed. She just held me while I cried. “It’s okay, Jackie. It’s okay to cry. Just let it all out,” Barb said.
“Why am I crying?” I said. “I just get so down.”
“The only way to get through it is to let your emotions out, honey.”
“But I’m so afraid of letting people down. I want to be strong. But it’s so hard.”
“Tears are good,” Barb said. “If you don’t show your emotions, you’re going to have a hard time. Don’t be afraid to cry.”
Miles To Go Before I Sleep Page 10