When the paramedics showed up they whisked me off to Bristol General Hospital. I was still thinking this would be a simple matter of getting checked out, maybe stitched up, then off to the Residence Inn, where I’d stay overnight and host The Sports Reporters the next morning. But that’s not how it went.
In the emergency room they stapled my head shut, which wasn’t much fun. I still prefer old-fashioned stitches. My head was pounding so bad that I had blurred vision and couldn’t tolerate light, so they gave me a little morphine. It kicked in quickly, so I was pretty upbeat and figured I’d be getting out soon.
Aleah was at home, but Wanda was in Toronto helping Jenna move into Ryerson University. Bernie happened to be in Toronto on vacation, so the three of them went out for dinner that night. I didn’t know that one of my best friends at ESPN, a senior producer named Gerry Matalon, called Wanda on her cell to give her an update. The problem was that he thought she already knew about my fall, so he started by telling her, “I’m on my way to see John in the hospital.”
Wanda is pretty hard to rattle, but that scared her. When Gerry backed up and explained the situation, she calmed down, called me, and told me she’d fly back that instant. But this was September 10, 2011. The next day was the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and I didn’t want any of my girls flying anywhere. Besides, I thought the worst was behind me. There was no reason to do anything rash, so I told her not to worry about it. I’d be fine.
After they put me in the intensive care unit, Jesse Palmer, Rob Lemley, and Bill Graff, the man in charge of the studio for college sports, along with another good friend, showed up to see me. The 7:30 P.M. Notre Dame–Michigan game had just started, so we decided to turn it on. To our amusement we couldn’t get ESPN in Bristol—probably the only place in America you couldn’t! Hell, if we had just opened the window we probably could have heard the broadcast coming out of the studios. We had to laugh at that. Nothing seemed too serious at this stage.
So I opened up my iPad, and the four of us gathered around my bed to watch it on the WatchESPN app. At halftime the nurses moved me from the ICU to a hospital room, a good sign. My friends followed, so we watched Michigan start the fourth quarter down 24–7 and come back to win 35–31 in the final seconds. After the thrilling finish my friends went home, and everything seemed okay. I assumed I’d be released the next day, shake off the headache, and get back to work, just like always.
I didn’t have a clue.
I was not walking out of the woods. I was walking into them—as deeply as I ever had in my life.
CHAPTER 26
Scaling Mt. Sinai
WITH CONCUSSIONS, IT’S COMMON PRACTICE FOR THE nurses to wake you up every hour to make sure you’re okay, then let you go home the next day. But the nurses at Bristol General hovered around me the entire night.
To stop my brain from swelling, the doctors had started me on intravenous steroids the night before. But it turns out that fluids actually increase the swelling, so by Sunday morning the pain in my head was unbearable. I still had blurred version, and I still couldn’t tolerate light, but now I couldn’t stand up and keep my balance. I’d slowly keel over. But my biggest problem was the least obvious: by swelling my already-bruised brain with liquid steroids, the damage was increasing by the minute—an issue I’d be dealing with for months afterward.
That afternoon Aleah, then twenty-two, drove up from our home to see her dad in another hospital bed. When she walked in she saw what I couldn’t see, which was a crimson halo behind my head on the pillowcase from the blood oozing from the back of my head. She started crying. When she finally spoke she didn’t say, “Daddy, are you okay?” but “Daddy, are you going to be okay?”
I got the message. In spite of the excruciating headache, I reassured her that I was going to be all right. But at that point I was starting to have real doubts myself. They had stepped up the morphine, but it wasn’t working. My head was killing me.
After seeing me in this state Aleah took a few days off from work to stay with me, and Wanda joined her the next day. But as one day became two and then three, I still wasn’t getting any better.
During the neurologist’s one visit he told me I had suffered a traumatic injury to my brain, which wasn’t very surprising. He also said they had found an abnormality in my brain scan, but he never told me what it was, and I never saw him again. The rest of my care at the hospital consisted largely of pain management—namely, more morphine.
By Thursday I called our family doctor, Michael Gerdis. He’s normally a very calm guy, but when I told him what had happened and what the doctors were doing, he sounded genuinely alarmed.
“We’ve got to get you out of there.”
Just hours after we hung up, Dr. Gerdis had arranged for an ambulance to rush me a hundred miles to Mt. Sinai’s brain injury ward.
“Your brain is swollen,” the first doctor told me. “It’s pressing right up against your skull.”
They started immediately with intensive steroid therapy too—but with pills, not fluids, to get the swelling down. They also did an MRI, an echocardiogram, and a stress test. When they sent me to the brain injury ward with the top neurologists at Mt. Sinai, I knew they were concerned. I was slowly recalibrating the magnitude of what I was facing, and not for the last time.
The next day Bernie flew back from Toronto to see me. My poor wife has been visiting me in hospital beds for twenty-five years, but my brother has been doing it his entire life. All together I’ve spent more than a year of my life in hospitals, and my brother has visited every time, almost every day.
Bernie has seen it all, and he’s a very even-keeled guy—far more so than I am. But when he walked in this time, from the change in his expression I could see how bad I must have looked. And when he had to help me walk to the bathroom, we both knew it was more serious than any of us had thought.
Near the end of my first week in Mt. Sinai they were able to take me off morphine and put me on Dilaudid—a small step down but still a very addictive narcotic. They had me on the highest dose I could take. Wanda started to get worried because whenever she saw me I was totally out of it. They decided to switch me from the Dilaudid IVs to the Dilaudid patches, which are time released, so they don’t give you that loopy jolt that the IVs do. My situation wasn’t getting much better, but I was always reassured to see Wanda by my side, looking out for me.
After a week in Mt. Sinai’s brain injury ward I was moved to the testing ward so the doctors could study my brain for forty-eight hours straight. A nurse came in to hook up dozens electrodes to my skull, then wrapped my head like a mummy to keep them all in place. I could feel what she was doing, but she didn’t tell me why she was doing it, and I couldn’t see it. So when my brother saw me in this mummified state, with dozens of wires attached to my head, he said, “Whoa, where’s my brother?” I didn’t know what he was talking about.
That night when I went to sleep my head was pounding so hard it hurt to open my eyes. I buzzed the nurse for help, but she didn’t realize I was already on the painkiller patch, so she gave me some painkiller pills and, later, still more. After all this kicked in I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. But I still had all those electrodes stuck to my skull and chest, with the wires attached to two different machines, which stood on the far side of the bed from the bathroom. When I started padding toward the bathroom I felt the pull of the wires on my head and torso attached to the machines. But I was so out of it that I started yanking off the electrodes, like the Incredible Hulk tearing off his shirt. Then I grabbed onto anything I could to steady myself on my way to the bathroom.
Once I got to the bathroom I was in for a bigger surprise: the mirror. When I saw this alien looking back at me, in my heavily drugged state, I wondered if I had been abducted by some mad scientists running bizarre experiments on the human brain. I managed to stay calm enough to pee, but when I got back into my bed I was in full freak-out mode, ripping off the wrapping around my head and pulling
the electrodes off my skull.
I rang the nurse again.
“What is all this? What are you doing to me?”
Then I saw the little plastic cap they put on your finger to monitor your pulse, and for some reason it looked to me like it was homemade. So now I’m thinking none of this makes any sense—the electrodes, the mummy wrap, this homemade finger cap. I was right! I’ve been abducted! That’s it!
The nurse got a doctor on the floor to explain what was going on, and I calmed down. Then the doctor sat at the foot of the bed and started asking me questions in a soothing voice:
“Do you know where you are?”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“Do you know what month it is?”
They asked me questions like that every day. At first the only one I could answer correctly was, “Who is the president?” With each day I got more questions right, but on this night, when I couldn’t answer anything except “Barack Obama,” she furrowed her brow and looked at the nurse for a moment—never a good sign.
If she had any doubts that I was not quite right, I erased them a moment later when I bolted upright, whipped my head to the side and asked, “Did you see that?!?”
Her eyebrows raised. “See what?”
“The cats! Did you see the cats?”
“You see… cats?”
“Yeah, they went right across the bed! And they go so fast, you just can’t catch ’em!”
They looked at each other again, checked my chart, and discovered that I had inadvertently received a double medication of Dilaudid—the patches and the pills. But they knew that would likely have knocked me out, not created hallucinations. They concluded that the head trauma sparked the illusions, which told them my condition was worse than they thought, too.
They gave me something to put me to sleep. The next day the same nurse started reattaching all those electrodes all over again. In a much clearer state of mind I could tell she wasn’t very happy with me, and I couldn’t blame her.
I’ll always be grateful for the care I received at Mt. Sinai—but not the food! So my friends smuggled in all my favorites. Tim Brando snuck corned beef hash from the Carnegie Deli; Kelly Naqi slipped me some carrot cake, a personal favorite; and Rob Lemley, my producer, somehow got a dozen Heath bars to my room. I know I’m a diabetic, but I was happy. When the nurses came in to check my blood sugar, they found it was a little high—imagine that!—but they weren’t going to give me any more insulin because they hadn’t yet gotten approval to administer my daily medication.
Because Aleah and I have diabetes, my wife always keeps an insulin syringe in her purse. After the nurse left the room Wanda pulled it out and was an inch away from injecting the needle when the door burst open and the nurses started yelling, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! STOP!”
I’ve never seen my wife look so scared. She jumped back. “I’m just giving him his insulin!” she said, and they soon understood.
After they left the room I told her, “They probably thought you were trying to kill me. ‘Dammit, if the fall doesn’t kill him, this will!’”
Wanda started laughing, something we both needed, so I kept it up. “Uh, you weren’t trying to kill me, were you?” This had her rolling. Despite everything we’ve gone through, we still manage to laugh a lot, but rarely had it felt so good than it did at that moment.
Before she left she slipped the insulin needle to me, and I gave myself an injection after everyone was gone.
The data from the forty-eight hours with the 120 electrodes didn’t turn up anything unusual. You might think that would be a relief, but it only left all the questions unanswered. Why did I black out? Why was I struggling to do even the most basic physical and mental tasks—like walking to the bathroom and remembering what day it was? And the scariest question of all: Would I ever be the same? That week the doctors could provide no clear answers to those questions.
I just wanted to find out what was going on, get it fixed, and get out of there—back home, back to work, and back to my life. Instead, they moved me back to the brain injury ward for more tests, but none of them explained what had caused the blackout and all that followed. That was a low point.
The days dragged on. After four weeks at Mt. Sinai they moved me to a new room in the rehab unit, just as the parents of my new roommate were getting ready to leave. He was maybe sixteen years old. He was in a wheel chair too, but he didn’t look like he’d be getting out of it any time soon. He had a thick, fresh scar running from his left ear across his shaved head, all the way down to his chin on the right side of his face. His head was tilted to the left, as if his neck wasn’t strong enough to hold up his head, and his speech was slurred. I didn’t know what had happened—maybe a car accident—but you could tell he was in serious trouble.
After his parents left he started crying hysterically. The nurses gave him something to calm him down, but right before it was time for Wanda and Aleah to leave that night he went into hysterics again, crying that he needed his mother. The nurse got his mother on the phone and tried to persuade her to come down, but for whatever reason she couldn’t—or wouldn’t. When the nurse had to tell my roommate that his mom was not coming back, he started shouting, “Mommy!” to a mother who was not there. “Mommy, why did you leave me here?! I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I am! Why did you leave me here? You don’t love me!”
There was no calming him down. I have never heard anyone sound so desolate, so forlorn.
Aleah was distraught. She whispered, “Isn’t there something we can do for him?”
“Not really,” I said. “There isn’t anything anyone can do for him.”
There wasn’t anything more that Wanda and Aleah could do for me that night either. They told me they loved me, kissed me, and hugged me, as they did every night, then headed out, promising to come back tomorrow.
After they left all I could do was listen to my roommate wail in the dark. I felt so heartbroken for him.
It brought me back to my first visit to the hospital as a ten-year-old after my explosives experiment went wrong, when I waited weeks for my father to show up, and he never did. My roommate’s cries exhumed my feelings of being abandoned, unworthy, unloved, even unlovable.
Our room at Mt. Sinai was at the corner of Madison and 99th. From our window I could see the structure where Wanda had parked. That night, after they had said goodbye, a few minutes later I saw them walking to the car. I started crying quietly. I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t sleep.
I’ve been depressed before, but I always had other things going on to distract me, including my duties as husband, father, and sportscaster. But this time there was nothing to stop all these horrible feelings from rushing up to me and weighing me down. That night was devastating.
The next morning the nurses wheeled me out for yet more tests, which took a couple of hours. On the way back they told me they were going to move me into a new room, I’m not sure why. But I had to ask, “What about that young boy?”
“He’ll be going home soon.” I was relieved to hear it, but when we came back to get my stuff—including a Western Michigan football helmet the guys at ESPN grabbed from the set and had everyone sign—the kid was still there. He was by himself again, eating his lunch—and crying while he ate. That has to get you.
Two days later I saw him leave with his parents. I still think about him. Even at my lowest point it was not hard to find someone who had it worse.
CHAPTER 27
Learning to Walk
WHEN YOU’RE IN THE REHAB UNIT, YOU’RE SURROUNDED by victims of aneurysms, tumors, severe car accidents, and strokes. You get a pretty clear sense of just how many ways your life can be turned upside down—often in just a few seconds.
While my brain injury was certainly serious, compared to the people around me, I knew how lucky I was. But these were now my peers, just like in the psych ward, and that was a chilling realization. I felt like I’d been sent to the cancer ward with a common
cold.
After four weeks at Mt. Sinai they started me on a rehab program consisting of physical therapy, mental therapy, and walking therapy—literally learning how to walk again. And yes, I needed to learn how to walk again with complete balance. I could now go to the bathroom by myself, but they wouldn’t let me walk down the hallway because the last thing I needed was to fall and suffer another concussion.
That might sound like we were being overly cautious, but one of the least talked about side effects of concussions is the loss of balance and spatial judgement. The victim of a serious concussion has a hard time just standing in place without tipping over, so walking through a doorway becomes a complicated task. It feels like the doorway moves as you start walking through it, so even if you get through it safely, your judgment is off, so you end up banging into furniture on the other side. (You can see why neurologists don’t call them concussions but rather “brain injuries”—because that’s what they are.) Of course, we have to navigate more than bathrooms and doorways in this world, so maneuvering your body through all the obstacles your day presents becomes a constant challenge to avoid falling down, hitting your head—and starting all over.
On my first day of rehab at 10 A.M. sharp, a small, sweet, and feisty woman named Fanny Hernandez came to take me down to the physical therapy room. She started my session by instructing me to pick up a rubber ball and put it into a basket on the table. It wasn’t difficult, but it was humiliating. I’ve spent my career covering world-class athletes who can put a ball in a basket while spinning through the air past a defender. And here I was, sitting down, picking up a rubber ball and placing it in a basket.
At the same time I was surrounded by people for whom it was very difficult, people who, just a year earlier—before their aneurysms and accidents and strokes—would have been just as embarrassed by this preschool exercise as I was. But when I looked around and saw people who had to be propped up by two nurses so they could lift a five-pound weight, you take a different view.
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