TIM by Dennis Lang
“That day. The day you first learned about what had happened. How did the word come to you?”
“I got home from work at about 5:30,” his mother said. “I could hardly have had my coat off and there was a pounding on my back door. The pounding startled me. It was the sheriff. The sheriff, there was something unreal about a sheriff standing at my door. He stood in the doorway in his sheriff’s uniform and handed me a note with a phone number of someone from the Army, in Hawaii. I could tell by the area code. It was the Army base in Hawaii.”
“Then?”
“The sheriff left. He wished me luck. He said good luck and left. What else could he say? I closed the door.”
“When did you make the phone call?”
“My heart just raced. What is it? Your mind is a blur. The world is a blur. I was scared. You can’t think. I had to call. I could try wondering what had happened. That would be worse. No, I had to call in that moment. The voice on the telephone from Hawaii said there had been a serious injury with a gunshot to the head, that he had been flown to Baghdad where they were performing emergency surgery.
“I’m standing there. Had I even taken off my coat? I don’t remember if I had taken off my coat. It was like I was there and I wasn’t there, the room suddenly seemed so distant. I screamed. I screamed. I know I screamed. I don’t know how long that went on. Finally, I called my daughter. She came over.”
“You knew nothing more about the injury? How extensive it was? His condition? How it happened?”
“I thought he might die. He was a million miles away and I thought he might die. Would God let this boy die? His commanding officer promised to call me personally every day and update me on his condition. It was a Monday, March 8, 2004. He called me everyday.”
“This story. Are you able to tell your part of the story?”
“There is a story to be told. So, no matter how hard it might be I will struggle in doing so, and I must say this has brought up things that I spent years trying to put behind me and move forward.”
* * *
2004 was a superb season for the air-evac planes arriving at midnight at Andrews Air Force Base. They’re loaded with the severely injured and seriously ill service men from Iraq and Afghanistan, and hospitals all over the world. That is, if we measure superb by the sheer mounting volumes of the commuting casualties, then this is a vintage season and they’re blooming on all sides out of control. The soldiers are being dispatched to Walter Reed Army Medical Center situated in the seamy downtown of Washington D.C. where lives on the street are lived on the edge. At night, bathed in resonant neon, clusters of strangers are arranged in ominous formations on Georgia Avenue. We’ve entered an inner city where the streets seem to constrict and threaten, a long way from animals grazing on open fields in New Middletown, Ohio.
On the fifth floor a sixty-one-year-old woman is sitting restlessly, staring through the curtains at the night outside her window. Her blond hair is cut short and streaked with gray. Tonight her face is drawn and weary. She’s listening to the hubbub in the corridors, to the movement of stretchers and gurneys, to indecipherable snatches of conversation, and occasionally the tightening of her own nerves. She’s a social worker for the Army at Walter Reed. Ward fifty-seven. They call it the amputee service. She’s stretched to the max at a caseload of ten. Now she has fourteen.
She spent much of the late afternoon avoiding her supervisor, who more often than not is a distraction rather than a support. “No one ever complains about you,” says her supervisor. “I’ve got a new one for you, just arrived, over in Surgical ICU.” So she ends up with the cases no one else can handle.
Number fourteen was in Iraq and riding in a car with two other soldiers and an interpreter when they were stopped for a roadblock. As they pulled over, shooting began. The social worker’s number fourteen was shot in the head and legs. He was taken to a police station and the Army came to collect him and the others as they were bleeding on the floor.
“The day his mother arrived from Ohio they did surgery on his brain to remove fractured bone and several weeks later his left eye,” the social worker was saying. “He was in ICU for a long time. His brother came from a vacation in North Carolina and his girlfriend flew in from Hawaii, his last station. His mom was an insurance agent.”
* * *
In a small town in Ohio you will find him sitting by his bedroom window, a half-silhouette in the February sun. Carefully draped over the back of a wooden chair is a flight jacket heavily decorated with embroidered patches. He’s living with his grandpa, helping him out. He peers thoughtfully through the window for the moment then begins remembering again. So much of this is coming back to him. As much as before, has it changed, or is it slowly sliding away? When he turns his head to the soft winter light he looks too young to have been in a war.
He graduated from high school and went to Youngstown University for a year and didn’t like it at all. He felt like a loser he said. He was just working and felt like a loser.
When he was six he had no real idea what divorce meant or what was going on except his dad wasn’t living with them anymore. “Some kids at school made fun of me for awhile. I got close to my mom, and my grandpa was like my father.”
The first time he ever saw his dad was when he was eleven. His dad died when he was sixteen, then his mother’s fiancé died when he was eighteen. Then he became the man of the house. All the deaths were hard on his mother. “My birthday that year was really bad because that’s the day my mom’s fiancé died.” He thinks that maybe he had to grow up quicker than everyone else because of all the deaths in the family. Was he happy? He says he wasn’t happy and he wasn’t unhappy, just average.
“I thought college would be fun and exciting but it sucked. I wasn’t happy there so I partied a lot.” He wanted to get a degree in business so he could open a bar. He wanted to get married and have kids. He’s been engaged three times and the last one he thought he would marry but that didn’t happen. Things with the relationships just didn’t work out. The relationships didn’t end bad – they just ended. So, he’s still waiting.
“I was working in a car audio store. We sold car audio and TVs and surround sound for homes. This was my job in college. A loser? I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do for the rest of my life working at a car audio place. I didn’t like college. I didn’t just want to stay there and party. I didn’t have enough credit to start a business.” One of his friends enlisted in the Marines. Tim enlisted in the Army. He says his mom was kind of freaked out.
“I didn’t like the army at first and was going to get out after my two years but I finally started to get rank and passed my schools. I got my corporal, then September 11, 2001 happened and I decided to re-enlist.”
The Army wasn’t fun because when you’re a private you have no say and you’re still getting used to having someone tell you what you can do and what you can’t do. After a year and a half Tim couldn’t wait to get out, but he started to get to know his job and things started to get better. He started moving up in rank and things were good. He was getting paid every month. “I was helping protect our freedom and our country, and most of all I was there so my family was safe.”
He started drinking a lot and thought it would make his life better but all it did was make him drink more. A bottle of rum a night he said. With each jump up in rank came more responsibility. It was usually a couple of beers after work, and then on weekends it was his Captain Morgan and Coke; or when he went out, a shot called three wise men. He figured a couple drinks would calm his mind down.
“Even when I came home I had work to do. My guys would call me and ask for advice or have a question, or if they didn’t feel good. I was at work no matter where I was. To me, alcohol was an escape from real life for a little bit. Almost everyone in the Army drank as a result of being stressed out. Even the E-1 would drink because they were the new guys and wanted to hang out with the older soldiers, the ones already in for awhile, to try to be accepted.”
Tim says the drinking was just to relax. And for the most part it helped because in those couple of hours he got to be drunk-happy, and he was relaxed. He talked to his mom a lot in those days. It was hard on her to see her youngest son stay in, and now Operation Iraqi Freedom was starting, and we were in Afghanistan already.
* * *
“Well then, is it difficult to remember? Take your time. Try to remember the experience as best you can.”
“No problem with the questions,” Tim’s mother said. “I just have to compose myself. I still can’t talk about it all without crying. I doubt if you’re interested in a hysterical woman.”
“When the commanding officer called as he said he would, the next day, what had happened?”
“They asked if I would be willing to fly to Germany if need be. I was smart enough to know if the military would do that, Tim wasn’t going to make it. I told them I would fly anywhere.”
“What does a person feel at that moment, expecting the worst possible outcome after the worst possible phone call?”
“I had faith. It’s faith that got me through the whole ordeal.”
“Then you were no longer afraid?”
“I had faith. That’s all I can say.”
“Tell me when Tim first told you he was enlisting in the Army.”
“I wanted him to go to college. I have thought all his life he was called to be a pastor, but when I told him he would just laugh. Of course I wished him all the best. I just wished he would have made a different choice. He climbed the ranks quickly and did well, and I was very proud of him. Then when he came home on Christmas Eve. . . . Two weeks later he was deployed to Iraq. When he left, my heart sank into my shoes. I didn’t raise a son to fight in a war where we didn’t belong in the first place. The sleepless nights began. There have been many.”
“Tim was flown from Baghdad to Germany to Walter Reed?”
“Yes, he was injured March 8. On Sunday, March 14, he was at Walter Reed. I received a call offering to help me with my travel plans. They asked if I wanted to fly but my daughter was coming along. We decided to drive to Washington. I was told my reservation would be at the Mologne House and they would be waiting for me. They were.
* * *
Through her office window the sky is changing. Dark gray clouds, so dark they are almost evergreen, are massing and rolling in. A thunderstorm is blowing up. For a moment the social worker was remembering the beautiful rose garden she used to have. She can still see it but it’s not quite as clear to her as the last time. She has been literally on the run for two days. It’s a strange job she calls it. The hardest workers get more work. Now, in addition to all her orthopedic cases, she now has patients from neurosurgery and neurology piled onto her workload. Both services meet at the same time so she missed her ortho meeting despite having so many patients there. The neuro-service doesn’t have as many patients, but they tend to be more work and time intensive – head injuries, seizures, brain surgery.
“Here’s a typical example of my day,” the social worker says. “The guy’s doctor gives me one day notice. They’re discharging him. I still haven’t found lodging for him. Then I had to get paperwork signed for his new orders, and arrange for a wheelchair and a shower chair (he hasn’t had a bath in a month), get his medical holding company paperwork signed and run back and forth to his room with the information. Then I went back to my office and the phone was ringing from a patient at Fort Campbell who needs a vascular clinic appointment. He was discharged by the doctor who never signed his paperwork, so the poor fellow has been sitting in his aunt’s living room for three days, and on and on.” She never had time to check on her other patients. Tomorrow.
When the social worker leaves at night she will use the drive home to distance herself from the day. She watches the news, eats dinner alone, and maybe gets back to that novel on any subject far away from her life. Then she will be in bed early where she’s thinking about what one mother told her today: no one understands what it’s like to be here, the mother said. Except those of us who are here. The mother’s son had lost both of his legs. Two or three times during the night she will awaken with a start, go to the bathroom, get a drink of water for her dry mouth, and then try to turn off her brain. The next morning it begins again.
* * *
“The trip turned out to be very long. It’s supposed to take five hours, but it seemed like it went on forever,” Tim’s mother said. “I thought back after we arrived and realized that there were miles and miles where I didn’t remember a thing.” Everything is a shade of gray unreality, a cold, dreary gray from the first news to the days immediately after, to getting on the turnpike to D.C. “After about forty-five minutes Heidi asked me where I was going. Mom, you’re going the wrong direction. Amazingly all my clothes matched. I really didn’t know what to pack. I didn’t know how long I would be there.”
In the dark, the two drove around until they found their way to Walter Reed. “Did you know it’s in the heart of the ghetto? I mean if you stand outside at night you hear gunshots.” They asked a police officer for directions to the Mologne House, the hotel on the grounds where they would stay. Later that night Tim was a passenger on an air-evac plane from Germany that landed at Andrews Air Force Base around midnight. He was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at Walter Reed in the early morning hours.
* * *
Tim says he was really relaxed about being deployed to Iraq. All of his friends from different units in the Army had been there: he felt it was time to go, and he was going as a staff sergeant. He’s climbed the ranks. “Kirkuk looks like all the movies you see. Dirt houses. Toilet stuff coming out of dirt houses and going down the street. Some houses were really nice though, brick or stone, really nice.”
When he got there it was cold. It had snowed eight inches and that hadn’t happened in twenty years. He didn’t know how his guys felt about being there except that they seemed confident, and he felt a protective love for his squad. They were his new family. He worried about how much his mother was worrying about him and if that was making her life hard. Each morning in Kirkuk started pretty much the same: he smoked a cigarette, brushed his teeth and shaved, then got dressed. Every four days his assignment changes from taking a position as a guard, to training the local police or providing back-up. When he guarded the base he could go get food, use the computers and phones, maybe get a piece of pizza or grab a burger at Burger King.
The day of his last mission he had a cyst on his spine. The doctors told him everyone here gets it but it could get infected and grow. “The day I was going on that mission I wasn’t supposed to go. I was supposed to go to the medics for the cyst because I had no idea what it was.” They were going to send Tim’s friend instead but he has two kids and Tim knew it would be rough out there. “I took some aspirin, sucked up the pain and went.” Tim said that you never know who your enemy is, that every place is dangerous.
“I remember it was cold that day, not freezing, but cold and overcast. We weren’t in uniform. We were in a civilian car and didn’t do much talking, just watching out the windows. It was the day they signed the new constitution so everyone everywhere was celebrating and seemed to have a weapon. I was in the back sleeping from the mission the night before and got woken up and briefed. My back was killing me. Everybody out there looked like a threat. I didn’t trust how any of them looked.”
There were too many things to watch out for. You don’t even know exactly what you’re looking for. You never look at the ground; it’s the rooftops, watching the rooftops. You feel exposed. You could get killed by accident. You’re trying to look in all places at once. In the car it was Tim, Burke, Frias, and the interpreter. It was around noon. He had been in Kirkuk two months. Then everything went wrong.
* * *
On the grounds of Walter Reed, the Mologne House is only about a block from the hospital. They could walk it.
“Heidi and I went right over to the hospital after we got checked in. I remember standing outside of Intensive Care just shaking, like I was acting in someone else’s dream, not knowing what I was going to see, what Tim would be like.
“That night there were only nurses on duty. I wanted so much to see him and I was afraid to see him. Then, somehow I was right there looking at him lying there asleep, familiar yet also strange, all connected to tubes and monitors and intravenous, and he was on a respirator. Christmastime, that was the last time I had seen Tim. Now, there was one scratch on the bridge of his nose where the bullet grazed before going into his eye and skull. He wasn’t black and blue, and no bruise marks. His head was completely bandaged.”
“In your imagination, when you thought of what this moment would be like, did you see something much worse?”
“Yes. It was weeks later and only when the bandages were removed. There were fifty-two staples in his head. Then the realization set in.”
* * *
In an instant everything went wrong. There wasn’t even enough time for disbelief. Their car was turning down a side street and got blocked in. Frias got out of the car.
“This will be in little spurts. I don’t know all that was happening then,” Tim said. “The last thing I remember is our guy getting out of the car with an AK-47. He got shot, more than once, he was getting shot. And then he was staggering. I remember we were driving again and having my friend hold my head in the car. Then moving into another car. I don’t know how. It was a police car; then getting laid on a bed somewhere. And that is all in little spurts because I was losing consciousness.
“I had a dream then. I dreamt that I got shot and no one would help me. And in the dream I died and went to a dark space, and scary with weird noises. I don’t know if it was me really dying or if it was just a dream, and when I woke up out of my coma it seemed I was in that dream the whole time. I was told later that I died twice in Iraq.”
* * *
Baghdad’s 28th Combat Support Hospital is like a fortress, once the exclusive palace of Saddam Hussein. In the cacophonous din of machines and medics, you’re unconscious and being wheeled into the Trauma Room. The ER staff is dressed in boots, camouflage pants and scrubs. Seconds ago one soldier was alive, now he’s dead. Another is screaming, “Look at me – I’m all apart.” There are others who can be heard weeping and moaning. The injuries are horrific. They’re the worst I’ve ever seen, says one doctor, but most of these lives will be saved, living on after terrible wounds and brain injuries.
The bullet tore your left eye in half, then shattered the frontal lobe of your skull. You felt nothing.
While you’re unconsciousness, mechanical ventilators support your breathing and keep pressure down on your head or you risk brain herniation – intracranial pressure increasing to the point it displaces brain tissue. If this is prolonged there will be irreversible brain damage. There are likely hematomas. A penetrating wound, like a bullet will tear membrane that surrounds the brain, letting in bacte-ria. You have no way of knowing this, but gunshot wounds to the head are ninety percent fatal, and that neurologists estimate up to thirty percent who have seen active duty longer than four months are at risk for disabling neurological damage. You may be an exception. You’ve seen active duty only two months.
But you’re not a statistic just yet and in that moment there is a lot of company surrounding you: a neurosurgeon, trauma surgeon, respiratory therapist and a team of nurses. They’re proceeding with a craniectomy, removing the front bone of your skull.
The surgeon is drilling a series of holes in the bone then progressively cutting between each adjacent burr with a device resembling an air drill, until a flap of bone can be separated from the surrounding skull and lifted free. No one is mentioning the high probability that you will never recover, or that unlike amputees, once you’ve had a traumatic brain injury your personality isn’t the same, and may never be the same.
* * *
“Tim’s mother was having a very hard time at Walter Reed,” the social worker said. “She was alone and wasn’t sure he would ever function again. In the beginning, Tim was critical for weeks and she thought he would die. You see so many mothers. The mother’s eyes talk to you. Sometimes you can see the terror in their eyes. She had one friend nearby but that friend only visited occasionally. Maybe that’s why she hooked onto me so well.”
* * *
His mother was told that Tim was in an unmarked car with four men. Santiago Frias was riding in front with an Iraqi interpreter. The car was cut off by another unmarked car and men jumped out in police uniforms and riddled the car with bullets. Frias threw the interpreter out and opened fire on the men dressed in police uniforms. Frias had seven or nine bullet wounds. He saved their lives.
“Tell us what you saw at Walter Reed?”
“It was awful. I looked around at all those other parents and had to leave the room and just cry and get some fresh air. I was afraid of whatever was going to happen next, of the unknown. The fear didn’t go away. I could hardly remember then what it was like not to be afraid.
“There was an eighteen-year-old boy with multiple stomach wounds who they said wasn’t going to make it. No family here. Maybe they couldn’t get out of work. I felt so sorry for that boy suffering alone. Maybe because I felt alone. There were so many with legs and arms missing, sides of their faces and half of their heads gone, with their eyes gone. I remember the sounds of the machines, and nurses running, one nurse for two patients, twelve-hour shifts, the pace could be frantic. You remember the activity and needles, bandages, oxygen, the smells of antiseptic and death; the crying, you heard grown people crying, and the parents’ eyes, haunting, empty, each of us just looking at one another and waiting.”
* * *
Tim was diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury. He had lost part of his brain and was in an induced coma. The doctors kept saying they wouldn’t know until they allowed him to come out of the coma, if he could breathe without a respirator, or walk, talk, think, or ever come out of the coma. They would come in and check his reflexes. Sometimes he would respond, sometimes he wouldn’t. They weren’t giving him much of a chance.
The social worker is called in. She comes from the ortho unit, ward fifty-seven, but recently has added some neuro-patients. She’s trained in crisis management and how to prepare the family emotionally to face a mentally and physically disabled patient. Tim is added to her caseload. He’s number fourteen.
The Monday after Tim’s arrival she went directly to the Surgical Intensive Care Unit to see him. He had come in with his friend who was two cubicles down. She heard the friend keep yelling: How’s Tim? How’s Tim over and over. Is he still alive? At the time, the social worker had no way of knowing the friend two cubicles down was Santiago Frias.
* * *
His girlfriend when he got shot was Desiree. She was twenty-two and Tim says had no idea what to do, so she took his bankcards, got a tattoo, had her tongue pierced, and bought a bunch of clothes. She was a real party animal who quickly became a favorite with the outpatient soldiers staying at the Mologne House. Her reputation was so wild even the doctors knew about her escapades. No one wanted to tell Tim.
His mother didn’t like her from the moment she set eyes on her. “She came with one pair of shoes and left with two suitcases full of shoes while Tim was still in a coma.” One night when Desiree was outside smoking and talking to her male friends, Tim’s mother overheard her. Desiree was asked if she was still going to marry Tim. She doesn’t think or even know if she will. She wants to make sure his brain would work. The windows were open. Tim’s mother was listening to every word. Desiree looked up and knew she was overheard. Tim said later, I guess she lost interest in a guy with half a head. “A gold-digging slut,” his mother said.
* * *
“Do you have children?” his mother asked. “Imagine getting a call like I did, experiencing what I have. Would you worry if your child would ever function again? A healthy, vibrant young man went to war, he came back in a coma, shot in the head by people who hate our guts and don’t want us in their country. When they take him off the ventilator . . . what is he going to be like, can I handle whatever has become of him . . . will I be able to be supportive . . . or will I lose my mind?
“You ask me what anxiety feels like. Anxiety is having your foot on the gas pedal of your car, all the way to the floor, 24-7 and never allowing your foot to come off the pedal. The pounding in your heart and head is never ending.”
High iron gates surround the entire facility of Walter Reed. There is one entrance / exit where ID’s are checked. Her days and nights were long and her sleep, when it came, was disruptive. She feels just drained, tired, emotionally and physically expended. She didn’t like to leave the hospital room in case a doctor would come in and she might miss him. She never left the grounds at night and only very rarely during the day when she ran out of something essential. It was too dangerous the visitors were told.
* * *
When Tim woke up he had no idea half his head was missing. Everybody said don’t touch your head or your left eye. So he looked in a mirror and went and got his left eye taken out.
The doctors didn’t explain in much detail how they were going to remove it, only that the bullet went directly through and cut it in two, and that there was no way to save it. They said they could leave it in but he would be in a lot of pain and eventually ruin his right eye. His mother offered one of her own but the damage was too severe for a transplant to work.
Sometimes after a craniectomy, the removed skull is stored in the stomach hoping it could be replaced later, but Tim’s was shattered, so along with his eye, it couldn’t be saved either.
* * *
They took him for his operation in the morning but asked his mother to go to the waiting room first. She thinks they sensed that she wasn’t in the best emotional shape and didn’t want their patient upset.
The surgery lasted less than forty-five minutes. Seems taking away an eye you’ve had your whole life deserved longer but that’s all it took. When Tim woke up, he had one eye; the other was gone and the socket sewn shut. He was drugged up and felt tired. Sometime later the realization came over him: “I was really pissed that I lost my eye and my job and half my head, and I hated life and anyone that was from over there, Arabic people.” He got past that after awhile he said. And after awhile longer he could be grateful to God for at least giving him another chance at life.
His mother would cover one of her own eyes and try walking or driving or just everyday activity so she would understand. She recalls waiting for the doctors in a waiting room like any other: magazines, a morning talk show on the television, and the expressionless faces of people waiting, young and old, no one talking, no one was speculating or remotely imagining what was happening in those operating rooms. Years later she would say that she can’t get beyond the fact that her son lost an eye and part of his brain. She’s still waiting, but this time to wake up from a bad dream. “Every time I think of this, my heart breaks all over again.”
* * *
Doctors were amazed when Tim came out of his coma with only some memory loss and slurred speech. But relapses from Traumatic Brain Injury are the norm, not the exception, so they were cautious about offering much encouragement. He became an outpatient staying at the Mologne House. What he remembers is a lot of people who were always drunk and depressed, and Tim was going through Alcoholics Anonymous himself where guys were hooked on hard drugs. He felt trapped. He noticed many of the parents and families of the other patients weren’t with them or even visiting, so they were trapped there also, by themselves.
Seven weeks later he was getting along and it was decided to send him to a rehab unit in Richmond, Virginia. He left Walter Reed in an ambulance with his mother following behind in her car. Tim would stay there for one month, visitors on weekends only. His mother had to return to Ohio. When she left she felt she had deserted him. Every three days they spoke on the phone.
On his discharge from rehab his mother went to bring him home to Ohio for a thirty-day leave. All the swelling had gone down on his head and the bandages were removed. “I saw half his skull was missing. All that covered his brain was the skin on his head and all those stitches. When I saw how much of his skull was gone I just started reeling. It was so startling. The feeling isn’t describable, only the room was slowly spinning; I felt faint. This was the baby I used to hold close to my heart.”
* * *
When he got home to Ohio on that first leave Tim was depressed and drank beer once in awhile. He felt like he let his guys down. So he drank some beer, sat around, watched TV and slept a lot and began having horrible headaches, something crushing his head. When his mom wasn’t there he felt really lonely and if someone asked him what was wrong he said “nothing” because he couldn’t imagine that anyone else could possibly understand what he was feeling, and maybe he could never explain his feeling anyway. He said it wasn’t suicide or anything. He was just depressed. Sleeping at night was totally messed up because he could only lay his head on the side that wasn’t hurt.
“When you wake in the morning and look at yourself you try to figure out why you’re still living and how much worse your life can get.”
Desiree was around but not that great at being supportive. She would go out and have fun and Tim knew she didn’t really care about him.
* * *
“Back in Ohio, were you afraid?”
“I began to learn what it’s like to always be afraid,” his mother said.
She didn’t sleep well or eat properly; her heart often pounded so hard she thought it would jump out of her chest. Thinking about an unknown future could be unbearable. She saw a son who was in despair, for whom all he valued in his life was suddenly stolen away and she was helpless to fix it.
At night when there were no sounds in the dark house, sometimes she would feel strangely outside of herself, watching herself purposelessly, frantically pace the floor, impossible to gather confused thoughts that raced in all directions at once. The bills had piled up. She was fighting for unemployment. Life was moving on without her, indifferent to what had changed and what was changing.
Tim wore a ballcap to cover his head. There was no hero’s welcome but visitors and friends came to offer their sympathy, support and gratitude. Sometimes Tim felt bad when they looked at him. Would they prefer to look away? Could he see it in their eyes, an unspoken revulsion over his wounds? At least we’re not him they might say after they left, returning to their normal lives. One of his mother’s friends said his head looked like a deflated basketball. That friendship ended.
* * *
He had his first seizure in September 2004, two weeks before returning to Walter Reed for work to begin on the prosthesis for his skull. His mother had gone to the dentist and when she came home she heard an awful sound, heavy breathing and what she described as gurgling, the strangest sound. She went into Tim’s room and found him frothing on the floor between the bed and a desk, unconscious. At first it looked like he had just lain down. She shook him and called out to him.
“I called 911. When they got there they tried to put something into his mouth so he wouldn’t choke, but they couldn’t snap him out of it and he fought them. He was unconscious but fought them as though by reflex. They gave him a shot of Valium.”
“A seizure is like you are dying but you are watching it happen,” Tim said. “You can’t breathe and you have no control over your body. You can see but you can’t talk and if someone comes near you and gets caught in your arms and legs it hurts terribly. After I have one I couldn’t talk for awhile. I would try and think about what I wanted to say but nothing comes out or when it does it’s like when a baby tries to talk. After awhile I could talk again but then for days I would have no energy because every muscle in my body would get used during the seizure and get worn out. It’s the worst feeling in the world.”
“You panicked?”
“I had no idea what was happening,” his mother said. “Imagine coming home from the dentist and seeing what I saw. Could you be prepared for that?”
The paramedics took Tim to the local hospital but they couldn’t treat him. He had no skull. He was life-flighted to the Akron Trauma Center fifty miles away. His mother drove there. Doctors consulted with Walter Reed. The episode had passed. When they released him three days later Tim and his mother drove on to Walter Reed, just hoping he wouldn’t have another seizure on the way.
“I’m sure I was doing eighty-five miles per hour the whole time. I remember passing the highway patrol. He just looked at me as I went by. He must have decided to let this crazy woman go.”
Neurologists say the problem with seizures is not the one you’ve already had but when the next one will occur.
A few weeks earlier his mother was fired from her job. Her boss told her he simply couldn’t afford to pay her if she wasn’t there. Two days after Christmas her own mother would die. A long-absent father leaving behind an economic mess to be sorted out. There would be many more seizures.
* * *
“They were really isolated and terrified,” the social worker said. “There is something about a brain injury that is harder than most injuries. Maybe it’s the unpredictability of it. When Tim had his first seizure I think she thought he would die again. She was terrified. She called me. Can you imagine? I’m a social worker, not a doctor. What could I do when he was in Intensive Care in Akron, Ohio?
“But in all of this, in all she went through, her worst nightmare was Tim having to return to ICU at Walter Reed. She was petrified to walk back in there, so I took her each day and we just walked around to de-sensitize her to the smells, lights, sounds, the activity of it all. I understood. It took me a long time to get used to it. No. . . . You never ever get used to it.”
* * *
When he wakes up this morning it will be just over four years since his new life began at a roadblock in a war thousands of miles away. There are photographs in his room of some really good friends: there’s his squad in Iraq, and one of Staff Sergeant Santiago Frias. He’ll check on his e-mails and let the dogs out. He has a beagle named Doc that sleeps in his bed. His grandpa’s is a German shepherd. He looks in on his grandfather making sure he’s okay. The canvas jacket he puts on displays various colorful embroidered patches: his division patch, brigade patch, assault wings, a combat infantry badge, and his medals. Then he goes to work, Mondays and Sundays off. He’s become an outpost leader with the Pointman International Ministries, a Christian organization dedicated to support the adjustment of returning vets. Tim is preparing to be a pastor. On Wednesday he has Bible studies. Each evening when he gets home he feeds Gramps dinner and makes sure he took all his pills. He’s ninety-one but doing pretty good for his age. Their house in the country is being remodeled. Grandpa’s side is waiting for paneling and wallpaper.
He remembers back to Walter Reed, getting his head put on, he calls it. It wasn’t really his skull but a piece of titanium. It was built from scratch from high-tech imaging and took months to get it made, from September to December 2004. They kept it in a sterile wrap and locked up so that no human hands touched it until it was time to put it in. After that he liked watching his fake eye being made, but the person who made it died a short while later. The fellow had been looking forward to his retirement. This was very saddening.
Mostly while he was waiting at Walter Reed he felt he let his guys down when he got shot and was sorry for leaving them while he was here and they were still there. He says he was hating life then and if it wasn’t for God and his family and his friends who were mostly Viet Nam vets he would have been totally lost in life.
It was the social worker who he remembers always being happy and trying to make him feel welcome, who would do anything for him. At first he forgot her name but that was just because of the injury, because he knows God gave her to him, and without her he would probably still be in Walter Reed.
“She goes through all the same stuff we do but she does it everyday and then has to go home and think about it,” he said.
* * *
“Not long ago I met Tim’s mother for lunch. She was in town visiting some friends and she has a new job and a boss she likes, and all is going well for her,” the social worker was saying.
“But you know, they can’t stop talking about the whole experience. I thought maybe it was just because of me, because their association with me is at the hospital, and we shared that time together. Even though it’s been awhile ago now, they were there from March 2004 to almost May 2005, sometimes I have an eerie feeling that they’re still living it as if it were happening today.
“They sent me a plaque from Hawaii saying ‘Thanks for helping me get out of Walter Reed.’ I have it on my wall in the office. Tim by all accounts shouldn’t be alive and he knows it. And so does his mother.”
* * *
“I’m not sure how I made it through,” his mother said. “I look back and often times I can’t recognize that the person going through it was really me. Doctors kept saying he was never going to be normal again. But he continued to defy them.”
“Today, how has it changed him? How has Tim’s personality changed?”
“No. . . . No, I can’t say that his personality has changed. There is something though in the way he sees life. I think that’s what has changed about him. I think he’s learned that a day can start out like any other, orderly and with some purpose. But the unexpected can happen, and everything can be different, undone in an instant. I think Tim has learned an appreciation for every moment.
“I can see him playing on the floor for hours with his little Matchbox cars. He’s four or five. Concentrating. Who knows where he is in his imagination? Then he senses me watching and turns to look up at me. He smiles. A little blond head and beautiful blue eyes. . . . It seems like that was so long ago . . . and yesterday.”
Author’s note: My gratitude to Army Staff Sergeant Retired, Tim Pollock, and his mother Marge for sharing their story.
Dennis Lang’s nonfiction has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review. “Tim” is his second nonfiction publication.