My Life, Deleted Read online

  I struggled to come up with some other way to prove my story. “Get my pants,” I insisted. “Let me show you.”

  Joan reached under the bed, where she found a plastic bag that contained the black polo shirt and olive-green pants I’d been wearing. Once she acknowledged the oily, dark blotches, I was finally able to relax a little. Then I moved on to the other important part of the story.

  “There were two men, the security guard from the front desk and a custodian in the bathroom, who were helping me and getting me paper towels to hold on my bleeding head,” I said.

  I told her what I’d said to the guard and relayed his direction to the custodian to clean up the mess on the floor. With all that out of the way, I was done talking for the most part. My head was killing me. The nurse kept asking how much pain I was in, and I kept saying “ten” because that seemed fitting. But she apparently figured it had to hurt a little bit less after the morphine she’d already given me, so when she suggested, “An eight?” I said, “Okay.”

  Feeling the need to protect myself from further harm or any conflict, I mostly tried to agree with what she and Joan said—anything so as not to raise more red flags than necessary over my condition. I also figured it would be best to let Joan take over and be my voice. Let her figure things out for me.

  Joan was nice, but she kept asking me questions when really all I wanted to do was close my eyes and sleep.

  “Are you feeling okay?” she kept asking. “Are you feeling sick?”

  “Pain,” was all I could manage. “It hurts.”

  They’d given me something for the nausea, but I was still throwing up and feeling dizzy. It also didn’t help that I couldn’t answer most of Joan’s questions, which only made me more frustrated, embarrassed, and scared because I didn’t understand why I didn’t know the answers. I did my best to focus, to pay close attention, to listen and learn, making new connections with words and concepts whenever I could. Even so, Joan was starting to realize that my condition was worse than she’d thought.

  I heard her tell the nurse and doctor that she used to work there and at another hospital as an ER nurse. That helped explain how she knew so much, such as when to put cool cloths on my head, which felt good. So did her touch.

  As I nodded off, the memories of my fall and these early conversations with Joan soon faded into a blur of the emergency room chaos.

  When the results of my blood work and CT scan came back normal, Dr. Douglas Smith figured I had a bad concussion and he was ready to send me home. Wherever that was.

  Joan, however, seemed very uncomfortable with the idea of my being released in this state; she sensed that something else was wrong.

  “He’s always had a very high pain threshold,” she told the doctor. “It’s unusual for him to complain of so much pain.”

  She was also troubled, she told him, by the gaps in my memory, which didn’t seem to be improving.

  I was apprehensive myself. No matter what the tests said, I felt anything but normal. And I had no idea what “home” was other than it meant leaving this place where people were taking care of me and giving me medicine for my pain. I was still in too much agony to move, and I was scared of doing anything to hurt myself further.

  Dr. Smith didn’t seem all that concerned about my headaches, saying they were a normal symptom of a head injury like mine. They were taking steps to discharge me when around 10:00 A.M. I noticed a dark area beginning to form in the bottom of my right eye, like a black pie-shaped wedge between four and eight o’clock in my field of vision. As if the pain and memory loss weren’t enough to deal with, was I now losing my sight too? I tried not to let Joan see the panic that was building inside.

  “What’s going on with my eye?” I said. “Part of my eye is dark. I can’t see.”

  Joan looked even more scared than I was.

  “I’ll draw it for you,” I said.

  She grabbed the cardboard tissue box next to the bed and handed me a pen out of her purse. I turned the box upside down and drew a circle as if my field of vision was a clock with the dark hours shaded in.

  She immediately motioned for a nurse, who sent the doctor over. Joan had become the interpreter of my new, small world, like a mother watching over a baby, only she wasn’t aware of her role and I didn’t want her to be. I watched for her reaction to determine how I was supposed to feel and to interpret the mumbo jumbo the doctors and nurses were saying. I quietly collected every piece of information I could and held them close, as if they were the bytes I needed to rebuild the master file that held my moments, knowledge, and identity—all deleted in the fall. But for now, I needed these people to keep helping me because I didn’t have the faintest idea how to use those bytes to survive on my own.

  I watched Joan’s face as the doctor shone a penlight into my eye. She looked worried, and now the doctor seemed concerned too, which only made me feel more uneasy. Telling us he was going to call a specialist for a consultation, he left the room but returned a short time later to inform us that the doctor was busy.

  “We’re going to keep him and have the neuro-ophthalmologist evaluate him upstairs on the floor,” Dr. Smith told Joan.

  I looked at her for a translation, so she explained. “He’ll be able to look in your eye and figure out what’s wrong.”

  It seemed like forever while we waited for them to transport me to my private room. Joan kept checking with the nurses about the room status and let them know when I needed more pain medication, which was once an hour. After I complained that the morphine wasn’t doing the trick, they threw in some Tylenol.

  Around noon an ER nurse said my room was ready, and we waited for a tech to wheel me into the elevator and up to room 636. There I was relieved to find that my new bed was much more comfortable—larger, softer, with controls that allowed me to raise and lower the top half of my body. This was a big improvement because, while lying flat, the pain in my head was unbearable.

  It was a smaller room than my corner of the ER, but it had a great box with moving pictures mounted on the wall next to the window. Joan controlled the gadget that changed the picture box for me, which I soon learned were called a remote and flat-screen TV. I gradually started to learn my previous programming likes and dislikes because she stopped when she got to one of my favorites, such as the Fox News Channel, King of Queens, and Everybody Loves Raymond.

  Once I was settled in, Dr. Johnny Walker, an upbeat doctor in his midforties, came in and introduced himself as the primary care doctor who would be coordinating my treatment. “He seems to have suffered a severe concussion, but everything should start coming back to him in the next few days,” he said, directing his comments to Joan and me as I watched both of their faces. “The neurologist and neuro-ophthalmologist are on their way to see him.”

  Walker asked me the same questions I’d heard before, and little by little I was learning some of the right answers. I didn’t want to look stupid, so I listened most closely to things I knew I’d be asked again.

  “What is your name?” Walker asked.

  By now I knew that one, so I told him.

  “Who is the president?”

  “Bush,” I said.

  “Well, that’s close. Barack Obama just won the election.”

  I didn’t really understand what that meant or what a president was, but I mentally chalked up the correct answer. At least now I knew what to say next time.

  “What is your birth date?”

  “February 23, 1960,” I said, repeating the same answer I’d been giving.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joan mouthing to the nurse, “That’s my birthday.” Catching that, I internally noted that I was still wrong and that I needed to figure out the right answer, my own birthday. But at that point I didn’t realize that I’d gotten her birth year wrong as well.

  Walker had me do a series of tests that he and the other doctors kept repeating—pushing my hands against his, squeezing his fingers, and pushing my feet against his hands. />
  “For now, just focus on resting and getting rid of the pain,” he said.

  Right before he left for rounds, he told us he’d Googled me and noted that I’d played in the NFL. Baffled by the terms Google and NFL, I just played along.

  “You’re a tough guy,” he told me. “You’ll do fine.”

  I understood the gist of what he was saying and wanted to believe him, but somehow I still wasn’t convinced.

  After he left I asked Joan about the terms he’d used. “What’s the NFL?”

  “The National Football League,” she said. “You played professional football.”

  That still meant nothing to me, any more than Joan’s explanation about Google being a search site on the Internet, because I didn’t know what those words meant either. So I just filed them away to figure out later.

  I got some answers that evening when I came across the NFL playoffs as I was flipping through the TV channels.

  “Oh, there’s football,” Joan said.

  “I played that? Get out of here,” I said, skeptical that I could have done something shown on TV.

  “Did I play on television?”

  “Yes,” she said, which also left me amazed.

  Oddly enough, I still knew certain football terms and rules such as offside, penalty, and holding; I also understood what a touchdown was and what was happening on the field. But I had no recollection of playing, how many players were on a team, or any players’ names.

  The neurologist, Dr. Richard Goodell, showed up about an hour after Walker left. He checked out my eyes and threw a bunch of medical terms at us that went right over my head, but luckily Joan understood them. Although he couldn’t see a hemorrhage in the retina or vitreous, he said that was likely the cause of what he called my “posttraumatic visual defect.” Less likely, he said, was that the fall had caused a trauma to my occipital lobe, the part of the brain that controls what you see. After he left Joan tried to explain what he said, but her explanation still left me mostly in the dark. Now that I was in a private room, the nurses hooked me up to a morphine pump, which helped bring the pain down to a slightly more manageable level. And there, on the wall, was a chart showing the pain scale—with a happy face at zero and a progression of crankier expressions from one through nine, with a crying face at ten—which helped me keep things straight. It was frustrating to need the drug, but I felt that if I could get the pain to stay at a five or six rather than sliding back up to an eight or nine between doses, my mind would clear a bit and I’d be able to understand more of what was going on around me.

  Joan had been continuing to ask me questions between doctor visits and was slowly seeing just how little I knew, which prompted her to challenge Goodell’s prognosis.

  “But he has these large memory gaps,” she said. “He doesn’t know our business, where we live, or any details about our twenty-four years together.”

  And she didn’t even know the half of it. Nonetheless, Goodell didn’t alter his prognosis, saying the neuro-ophthalmologist would be by shortly. All business, he was the kind of doctor who got annoyed when Joan’s cell phone rang while he was talking, and he left us with the same reassurance as the other doctors: I had a bad concussion, and my memory should come back within a couple of weeks. The headaches could last as long as two years, he said, but their intensity should lessen. I didn’t understand the difference between two weeks, two years, and twenty-four years, but based on Joan’s comment, it sounded like we’d known each other for a long time.

  At 3:15 Dr. B. K. Suedekum, the neuro-ophthalmologist, brought in some special equipment and put drops in my eye. After examining me, he said he couldn’t tell for sure either, but he thought I might have a retinal tear, so he wanted a retinal specialist to take a look at me.

  Clueless once again, I looked over at Joan to figure out what that meant. Seeing her crying for the first time was a clear enough indication that the prognosis couldn’t be good. I’d learned as much from the pain chart.

  Given the severity of the situation, Joan thought it best to let our family and my bookkeeper know I was in the hospital. When she told me that Grant and Taylor were coming to visit, I had no idea who she was talking about.

  “You didn’t forget your kids, did you?” Joan asked.

  I nodded reluctantly.

  “Well, do you remember what they look like?”

  I shook my head, so Joan picked up the rectangular metal thing she’d been talking into and pointed to a photo of Grant, then opened a flat, folded pouch for a picture of Taylor.

  Joan started telling me about them, that Taylor was sixteen and a cheerleader. “Everybody says she’s a mini-me,” she said.

  Grant was nineteen, she said, pausing. “He’s more quiet. Used to ride motocross. Very competitive. He’s really tall, like you.”

  “Are we close?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we’re a very close family,” she said. “We deal with whatever comes our way. We handle it.”

  Despite my attempts to hide it, the vast extent of my memory loss was starting to sink in for Joan, so she tried to give me the information I needed in simple terms. She informed me that my children loved me and that I’d always been a good and active father. Trying to ease my anxiety, she underscored that head injuries could cause a temporary memory loss. But honestly, I was in so much pain I wasn’t paying much attention. I was barely able to acknowledge what she said.

  Around 2:30 P.M. a beautiful athletic blond teenager walked into the room and started crying as soon she saw me lying there, still hooked up to the blood pressure monitor and morphine drip.

  “Daddy!” she said, coming over to hug me. I hugged her back and gave her a kiss. Even though I felt no emotional attachment to her, I did feel what I can only guess was an instinctual urge to comfort and protect her. That said, I couldn’t tell if she was crying because she was sad or scared or both.

  A very tall—six feet three inches—and broad-shouldered young man with light brown hair came in behind her, waiting his turn to lean over and give me a somewhat cooler partial hug and pat on the back. I didn’t feel the same level of affection from him as from the girl, but it was obvious from the way they touched and interacted with me that family meant something more to me, and vice versa, than did the doctors or nurses, who showed me a brief and much more superficial level of concern.

  Taylor seemed afraid to come too close at first, not wanting to cause me any more pain.

  “Let me see the back of your head,” Grant said.

  I turned to show him where they’d shaved off my hair to put in the four staples, which seemed to satisfy the young man in some way.

  “Do you want to see?” Grant asked his sister enthusiastically. She screwed up her face to say no but couldn’t resist looking anyway.

  “Yeah, when I had my staples, they drove me crazy, itching,” he said, as if we now shared a special bond. I noticed that Grant had both of his ears pierced with dime-size objects.

  Taylor really was a mini-Joan, curling up next to me on the bed and asking me a bunch of questions, exploring how much I really didn’t know.

  “Do you know we have two dogs?” she asked.

  I could answer that one. “Yeah,” I replied. “We have a yellow and a brown.”

  “No, the yellow lab, Cody, died,” she corrected me. “We have the black one, Aspen.”

  I shook my head blankly to convey that I didn’t remember that. “And the brown one is Anthony,” I offered.

  “Dad!” Taylor said, looking to her mom and brother for support.

  “What?” I asked, confused. Taylor seemed upset, but Joan and Grant were laughing.

  “That’s Taylor’s boyfriend,” Joan explained. “The brown one’s name is Mocha.”

  It was strange how, occasionally, these few little glimpses of memory came back to me, but they were all scrambled up. Later Joan told me that I often teased Anthony about being Hispanic but didn’t mean anything by it. I also found out later that Anthony had just crashed Ta
ylor’s car the day before my accident, and I had been understandably quite angry, so they were both hoping I would forget about that too.

  While we were talking, Taylor and Grant pulled out these flat contraptions that looked like the one Joan had been talking into. I watched the kids staring down and moving their thumbs around on them, and wanting to fit in, I figured I should have one too. Even if I didn’t know how to use it.

  “Do I have one of those?” I asked.

  “Yes, right here,” Joan said, pulling mine out of her purse, where she also had been keeping my watch and wedding ring, which the nurse had given to her. The screen on my gizmo, which they told me was called a BlackBerry, said I had missed two calls.

  “Do those names look familiar?” Joan asked about the people who had called me.

  “No,” I said, wishing they did.

  As I started touching the different buttons, trying to see how it worked, Taylor sat perched on the bed beside me, clicking through the various photos of people and airplanes I had stored in my phone. She kept asking if I recognized any of them, but none of them triggered a single association, emotional or otherwise.