Chapter 8 (Part 2 of 5)
(continued)
AT NINE THE NEXT MORNING a nurse appeared in the waiting room.
“You’d better come in,” she told Cherie. “I think we’re losing him.”
Steve was bathed in an eerie green light from all the medical instruments.
“This is his worst nightmare,” thought Cherie. Fitness and strength had been the foundation of her husband’s life. Now his shaved head was stained yellow-orange from the antiseptic, and the tangle of life support lines attached to his body made him look like prey caught in a strange spider web.
The beeping of a monitor slowed, then stopped. On two screens, electronic lines recording brain and heart activity fluttered, then went flat. A frocked Catholic priest, his back to Cherie, intoned the last rites.
It was all over. Cherie could barely grasp what was happening.
And then the monitor beep-beep-beeped to life again. The instruments flared with the resumed signatures of heart and brain. Major Stephen Rodgers had come back from the dead.
Cherie was the only one in the room who wasn’t surprised. She knew what had happened. Even though he lay unconscious, as Steve heard the priest’s words, his lingering spirit simply rejected them. Cherie knew, as no one else did, that her husband would never leave this world without a fight.
From a hospital waiting room, Cherie called her mother. “There were complications. He’s in a coma. I’m going to have to stay here and try to figure out what to do.”
“Don’t you worry about anything here,” Arlene told her. “We’re doing just fine. Everything’s going to be just fine, Honey.”
With the phone cradled to her ear, Cherie found herself staring at a patient strapped into a wheelchair just a few feet away. Although his eyes were open, he appeared to be unconscious. Someone should be taking care of him, she thought. His catheter bag was full, and he had pulled out his IVs. Liquid pooled around his chair. The orderly who was supposed to be watching him was chatting with a friend across the room.
When the hospital informed Cherie it was time for her to vacate her room, she hardly noticed. She spent her days in the hospital waiting room anyway, from dawn each morning until after ten at night. She needed to be close by in case Steve started dying. The priest administered last rites eight times in the first ten days after the surgery.
By then Cherie had taken on a mission: to get Steve out of Germany. She could see that the Landstuhl hospital personnel had given up on him and were waiting for him to die. She wanted him back home in the states where he would receive the highest quality medical care.
She accepted that Steve would have some degree of permanent disability, but how much, she thought, depended on how hard they were willing to work at recovery. The first order of business was to claw their way out of the coma.
Cherie began sleeping in their car, a white Fiat, in the hospital parking lot. There were no other accommodations around. She had brought only two pairs of slacks, two blouses, and a few pairs of extra underwear. And she had packed no warm clothing at all. At night, as the temperature dropped below freezing, she pulled Steve’s sweat clothes over her own and wrapped herself in a thin blue blanket the hospital had given her. When she grew too cold, she ran the car’s heater.
At five a.m. each morning she would brush her teeth and take a sponge bath in a hospital restroom. She rinsed clothing and dried it on a line stretched inside the car. Her long, thick hair was inconvenient, so with a pair of fingernail scissors she chopped it off.
Cherie was unable to access Steve’s military pay, which had become mired in red tape. Their pooled cash of $40 was all she had to live on. After a week, when just two dollars remained, she purchased baby food at twenty cents a jar. Finally, she rummaged through the hospital dumpster each morning to select her daily food.
The car battery died, but when a military friend offered to drive her back to Goeppingen to sort out her finances, she declined. She knew that if she left Steve alone at the hospital for even one day, he would die.
At four o’clock in the morning, a voice jarred Cherie from a troubled sleep.
“Go check on him,” said the voice. “Go check on him right now!”
Cherie’s eyes snapped open, and she scanned the darkness to see who had spoken. She was alone.
Tumbling from the car, she sprinted across the parking lot and burst into Steve’s ward. Because of an administrative oversight before Steve’s doctor left town on vacation, Steve had been moved out of intensive care to make way for expected casualties of an American embassy bombing in Beirut. The new ward itself was deserted except for Steve. His desperate gasps were almost deafening.
Cherie rushed back out into the hall, where a handful of patients huddled.
“Where are the nurses?” she demanded.
On break, she was told. One of the men confessed that he and the others were driven from the room by Steve’s death rattle.
Cherie charged into the staff break room and stammered out what was happening. Munching donuts and sipping coffee, the nurses were unmoved.
“We can’t do anything,” one of them explained.
Again, Cherie raced through the labyrinth toward the only hope she knew, the intensive care ward. A big man trailing an entourage of officers stepped out of intensive care the same moment Cherie streaked into the corridor. The gold stars on his collar stopped her dead in her tracks. The general and his staff were surprised at the sight of this diminutive, rumpled apparition in bulky clothes.
She blurted out her anguished story. Towering over her, the stranger listened intently, then said, “Ma’am, your husband will be down here in two minutes flat.”
The general turned and found a phone. While Cherie was praying to herself, his voice boomed, and faster than she could believe, rattling wheels announced an approaching gurney. Protruding from the sheets were Steve’s feet. Within seconds, her husband was reconnected to the life-giving, humming, beeping equipment. “Back in his cocoon,” Cherie thought.
She never saw the general again and had no clue about the source of such stunning authority. But she remembered his nametag: Mittemeyer. Not until twenty years later would Cherie learn that the stranger who helped her was Bernard Theodore Mittemeyer, Surgeon General of the United States.
When Steve’s doctor returned from vacation, he was so ashamed of his oversight (forgetting to put the designation “VSI,” very seriously ill, on Steve’s chart) that he agreed to allow the patient to be transferred to the states.
At Walter Reed Army hospital in Washington D.C., Cherie and her father followed a nurse who silently wheeled Steve’s gurney onto a big elevator. No one spoke on the ride to the fifth floor. Once off the elevator, Cherie scoped the surroundings, immediately located the nursing station, and then fastened her eyes hopefully on the door into the patient room nearest it. But the nurse rolled her comatose husband past that room, which contained an empty bed. Cherie’s heart tightened. She knew from experience that patients closest to nursing stations were favored with priority care.
After an eternity, the nurse turned Steve’s gurney into the last room on the ward.
Within minutes of arriving at what she hoped would be the healthcare Mecca that would restore Steve to his wife and children, Cherie understood that the Army wasn’t going to try to save her husband. The cries of children emanated from the adjacent pediatrics ward.
As the nurse connected Steve to life-support equipment, a woman in civilian clothes appeared. She introduced herself to Cherie as a social worker and handed Cherie papers to sign.
“You have to get on with your life,” said the social worker. “You’re still young. You have young children to raise. You have to get on with it.”
Cherie studied the paperwork.
“This transfers him to a V.A. hospital?” she asked the stranger.
“Yes,” said the woman.
Cherie understood the significance. The V.A. meant to put Steve in a room and close the door until he died.
She made an instantaneous decision. “No,” she told the social worker. “I’m going to take him home with me.”
Cherie’s father had a business meeting but said he would return and take her to dinner. She pored over a thick sheaf of admission papers, carefully reading every word before agreeing to anything.
“He won’t get the care he needs here,” a nurse told her. “We don’t have enough staff.”
She informed the nurse that she herself would attend to Steve around the clock.
“That’s against the rules,” the nurse told her. “Visiting hours are ten to two and six to eight.”
“Please let me stay with him,” Cherie pleaded. “I’ll just sleep in that chair in the corner. I’m no trouble. You won’t even know I’m here.”
“It’s not up to me,” the nurse said sympathetically. “The doctors won’t allow it. But you know what? They’re done with their rounds by five-thirty. You could probably get here at six in the morning and no one would say anything. You could probably stay until ten-thirty at night.”
Cherie figured she could push that until midnight. It would have to do.
Where could she find a room? she asked.
The nurse sadly shook her head. “There really isn’t anywhere.”
A few awkward moments passed before the nurse reluctantly acknowledged one possibility. Five blocks away was a condemned building, she said. She happened to know that District of Columbia officials were looking the other way, and that people were staying there.
The problem, warned the nurse, was that Walter Reed now occupied one of the highest crime areas in Washington, D.C.—in the nation for that matter. The hospital’s workers were prime robbery targets because of their dependable military pay. Only two months earlier one of her friends, a fellow nurse, had been murdered in the hospital’s lighted parking lot and robbed of fifty dollars.
Before leaving the hospital, Cherie rummaged through the drawers in Steve’s room. She found strong adhesive tape but no scissors. So she unearthed Steve’s prized Ranger knife from the athletic bag and tested the button on its handle. A wicked four-inch blade flashed out. She sliced off a section of tape and affixed a hundred dollars to the bare skin of her stomach. She taped her military I.D. to the sole of her right foot and drew her sock over it. As an afterthought, she dropped the roll of the tape in the bag.
In the elevator she was by herself. “We’re all alone,” she thought. “The system’s not going to help us.”
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While living in her car outside the Landstuhl hospital, with her husband in a coma, Cherie trimmed her hair with fingernail scissors. She managed a smile for this passport photo.
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