Chapter 8 (Part 4 of 5)
(continued)
THE HOSPITAL STAFF TRIED TO PREPARE Cherie for Steve’s grim prognosis. Every day the social worker urged Cherie to commit Steve to a V.A. hospital, and every day the nursing staff reminded her that Steve’s condition was irreversible. But the issuers of these warnings just didn’t know who her husband was, and so Cherie ignored them.
She discovered the fifth floor had a whirlpool bath. Could Steve use it?
“Oh, no,” said a nurse. “No one uses that. I’ve been here six years, and even I don’t know how to operate it.”
But her new friend Tex agreed to help her. In the whirlpool room they removed Steve’s hospital gown and disconnected his catheter. Together they shifted his limp body to the whirlpool’s electric lift and lowered him into the warm, surging water. A lightness came into his face.
After Tex’s coaching, Cherie took Steve to the whirlpool alone. She did this not just for the massage effect but for hygiene. In the big tub she could wash him thoroughly.
Without help, it took Cherie about thirty minutes to transfer Steve from his bed to the wheelchair. Moving him was like hefting a 110-pound rag doll with hollow cheeks and shrunken temples. Cherie took great care not to scrape Steve’s skin—his emaciation made his ribs, hips and tailbone protrude—because of the deadly potential of infections.
They visited the whirlpool several times a week. Cherie knew Steve had used a whirlpool in high school, after wrestling and football practice, and she hoped the pulsing water would reawaken memories of being strong and whole.
Cherie began each day brushing Steve’s teeth, combing his hair, and shaving him with his electric razor. Then she undressed him, changed his diaper and gave him a sponge bath. Typically, Steve’s diarrhea stained the sheets during this process, but Cherie had learned where the supply closet was, and she helped herself. She changed Steve’s sheets and hospital gown daily, much more frequently than the staff was able to. If the nurses were aware of Cherie’s pilferage, they didn’t seem to care.
In her soft, musical voice, Cherie kept up a lighthearted banter all day long.
She read aloud from books, newspapers and magazines. Between six each morning and midnight, there was hardly enough time to get everything done.
Every day, like clockwork, the social worker pushed the forms in front of Cherie and asked her to sign. Every day, she refused.
“No,” she said, always polite. “We’re going home. I’ve been with him since we were eighteen. Wherever I go, he goes.”
Cherie wasn’t sure when it had happened, but she knew that somehow she and her husband had merged fully into each other. They now shared a single life.
IT SEEMED THAT STEVE was coming around. He became agitated more frequently, and he opened his eyes, although he stared unseeingly.
“Those are just reflexes,” the doctor explained to her. “They’re spastic movements. They don’t mean anything.”
“No,” she countered. “They’re responses.”
She was confident they — that was the right pronoun — were coming out of the coma, because she knew something the doctor didn’t know. Steve was communicating with her.
It began simply and naturally. Because the right side of Steve’s body was paralyzed, Cherie held his left hand and asked a question. The first time he squeezed her hand, she was ecstatic.
But maybe the squeeze was just an unconscious spasm. She needed to find out. So she taught Steve a code. One squeeze meant yes, two, no. He responded as though he understood perfectly. Then she changed the rules: hold up one finger to say yes, two to say no. She wanted to make it harder for him to say no, because yes! was the only thing that could save them.
Again he responded perfectly. Steve was still in there.
The doctor was dismissive. Cherie had to accept reality, he insisted. The husband she had known was gone. Steve couldn’t return home, ever. Even if he recovered the ability to breathe again on his own—which the doctor thought highly improbable—Steve had lost the swallowing reflex. He would always have to be fed through a tube.
At this pronouncement, Cherie bought an eyedropper at the hospital gift shop for ninety cents. She moved Steve’s jaw open and closed. When she trickled the first few drops of water down his throat he gulped. Steve could swallow. Within a few days she was giving him half a cup of water a day by eyedropper. The process took four hours, but she didn’t mind. This was his ticket home.
She repeated the eyedropper regimen with baby food, starting with applesauce. Soon Steve was also swallowing half a cup of food each day. That process also took four hours. Four hours for his water, four hours for his food. Cherie talked the whole time.
In spite of this unquestionable improvement, the woman from Hot Springs, Montana, ached to hear one word of encouragement from someone on the hospital staff.
Then one day, as he swept around Steve’s bed, a janitor addressed her.
“Hey, his color looks good today,” he said.
“Oh, do you really think so?”
“Yeah, it really does.”
The janitor then removed a flask of whiskey from his hip pocket and threw back a slug.
One day Cherie slipped into the physical therapy room in the hospital’s basement and observed an athletic young Army captain in a T-shirt and shorts leading a group in exercises. His class was an exotic sight. Eight of a dozen pupils were bearded and wore long robes, their heads covered by woven skullcaps.
Patients lay on hard rubber mats, grunting and struggling, as a team of muscular therapists helped them. The captain barked commands like a drill instructor. Gruff men’s voices reverberated around the room, some burred with foreign accents.
At the first opportunity, she took the captain aside and told him about her Airborne Ranger husband upstairs. It was a high-pressure sales pitch. Major Rodgers needed to get out of his soft bed, and he needed to hear deep men’s voices, and he needed to do some hard work and hurt a little bit.
“I’d like to bring him down from the fifth floor for your class,” said Cherie.
“The fifth floor?” said the captain. “That’s the head unit.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Cherie.
“Well, I don’t have any way to get him down here,” said the captain.
“I’ll bring him down,” said Cherie.
The captain looked at her for a moment, and then shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, sure, bring him down.”
When Cherie wheeled Steve in the next morning, the captain’s jaw dropped.
“Oh, oh,” he stammered. “That’s your husband?”
“Yes, you already signed us in, remember?” said Cherie.
“But you didn’t tell me he’s in a coma.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“But he’s not ambulatory. He’s not awake and alert to follow instructions,” protested the captain.
“I’m moving every joint on his body five hundred times a day,” said Cherie. “He’s used to guys’ voices. He likes to hear guys shouting orders. He needs this.”
The other patients—their long robes in rustic hues of brown, gray and blue—all stared disbelievingly at the newcomer. Steve wore special white silk hose to keep his blood from clotting. With his rugged face and patch over his blind left eye, he looked like a badass pirate.
The captain was quick on the uptake.
“Well, you already got him down here,” he said, leaning over the new student. “Steve! Steve! Major Rodgers!” shouted the captain. “We need to work with you. So what we’re going to do is put you on this mat. This is PT at its finest!”
Cherie saw Steve brighten. She could tell the hard mat felt good to him. The exercises felt good.
Cherie learned that the robed men were wounded Afghan freedom fighters, mujahedeen—holy warriors—from the CIA-backed war with the Soviet Union.
After the class, the captain approached Steve, “We can work with you, sir,” he said. He turned to Cherie. “Bring him down every day.”
AS TIME WENT BY, Steve kept his eyes open longer, but his blink reflex was still gone. Cherie scrounged extra eye drops from the supply cabinet and flooded his eyes to keep the corneas from drying out and blinding him completely. To fatten him, she switched to a high-calorie liquid formula. The nurses accepted that he was eating, but they told her the feeding tube couldn’t come out until his weight topped a hundred and twenty pounds. Cherie prodded the staff each day to weigh Steve. Finally a nurse slung him into the canvas scale and found that his weight had skyrocketed to one-twenty-four.
“Okay,” Cherie proclaimed, “the feeding tube comes out!”
It looked gawdawful, green and moldy.
“Whoever put this in did it wrong,” said the nurse. “It’s too long. He probably wasn’t getting much benefit out of it anyway.”
Steve was trying to talk. In response to Cherie’s questions and statements he emitted grunts. He seemed to be experimenting with forming words.
Tex started calling Steve “the Lazarus man.”
Anecdotes of his recovery circulated throughout the hospital, and staff began popping in to see for themselves.
“We were taking bets on how long you would stay,” a nurse called Goldie confided to Cherie one day.
“What do you mean?”
“Most spouses don’t last four days before the depression drives them off,” explained the African American woman whose nickname derived from her bleached hair.
Cherie answered with the refrain now familiar to Goldie and everyone else on staff: “When I leave he’ll come with me.”
For the first time, Cherie sensed that she was believed.
The two women stood on either side of Steve one day as he lay comatose.
“Tell you my story,” Goldie volunteered. “I used to be married.”
She recounted how she once worked as a night shift nurse to put her husband through medical school. She came home unexpectedly one night, found him in bed with another woman, and slipped quietly away without saying anything. Next night, she fixed him a gourmet meal and got him drunk.
“When he passed out I glued his dick to his belly,” said Goldie. “Used a whole tube of Super Glue. He had to have surgery.”
The women roared.
Steve winced, then smirked, and the women laughed louder.
STEVE DIDN'T EXACTLY WAKE UP from his coma, the way it happens in the movies. Rather, he floated back to the surface. In a journal her sister Charlene (“Chuck”) brought to her, Cherie recorded her husband’s metamorphosis from what the doctors labeled a vegetative state to a human being who was once again able to eat solid food, move his body, and communicate.
The last journal entry is dated December 1, 1984.
Steve is really talking. I have a hard time understanding it sometimes, but when I remind him to please speak more slowly and clearly he really tries… he wants to know why we’ve been here for so long... He still has his gentle way and same sense of humor. We have so much fun together. He will talk about the kids and want to know everything.
Four days before Christmas 1984, the Rodgers family was finally reunited. They moved in with Cherie’s parents in Minneapolis, where Earl worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Cherie nursed Steve around the clock. Miraculous as his recovery was, for much of that time, developmentally, he lagged behind his toddler son. Far from resenting the extra work, Cherie relished her husband’s fighting spirit and every tiny triumph of his journey back.
Eight-year-old Nicole taught her father how to read and write. She used the same books and flashcards he had purchased for her when she was four years old. Steve struggled, but Nicole was infinitely patient with him.
“Oh, that’s great, Dad!” Cherie often heard her daughter chirp.
The patient awakens: Steve and Cherie at Walter Reed Hospital in October 1984.
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