The Vow: The True Events That Inspired the Movie (7 page)

She was sedated and couldn’t talk because of all the tubes, but I was desperate to receive some kind of communication from her. I got up out of the wheelchair again and grabbed my wife’s hand.

“It’s me, babe,” I said softly. “If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.” Due to the plethora of other, more urgent injuries, we didn’t yet know that the cool, white hand I held so gingerly was broken. I saw no reaction on her face after I spoke to her . . . but she squeezed.

A flicker of hope flared up inside me. Krickitt was still in there. Somewhere under all those wires and tubes my wife still lived. It was the first sign of life that we didn’t need a machine to measure. While it was seemingly just a small thing, I was ecstatic.

The doctors weren’t as excited as I was by Krickitt’s response. From their point of view, it was still much more likely that she would die than live.

It wasn’t long before Krickitt’s parents and her brother Jamey arrived from Phoenix. Like many others, they had spent the agonizing hours of the previous night crying and praying for a miracle. But once they arrived, Gus and Mary Pappas were incredibly calm, even at the sight of their daughter covered with tubes and wires, her face distorted almost beyond recognition.

Finally my brother Kelly arrived. He had been level-headed enough to wait until after sunrise to make the trip from Roswell when the roads had thawed. The family circle was complete.

As is usually the case, the visiting hours in the intensive care recovery area were strictly limited. Only immediate family members were supposed to be allowed, and only for thirty minutes at a time. Yet the doctors let us all come and go whenever we wanted to. If any of us had been thinking clearly, we would have wondered why. What we didn’t know was that Krickitt’s doctors had told the staff to let anybody in at any time, since she would be dead within hours.

The doctors spent a lot of time that day explaining Krickitt’s situation to us. We learned that there were two major problems, one of which made the other more serious. The first and most dangerous issue was the swelling in her brain. This swelling constricted the flow of blood to her brain cells, and they were starved for the nutrients and oxygen that the blood normally brought in. The second concern was that her blood pressure was dangerously low. Even without any other complications, low pressure would have reduced the blood flow to the organs, especially the brain, eventually resulting in damage due to a lack of oxygen. The bottom line was that swelling plus low blood pressure was a double whammy. We didn’t need anyone to explain that constricted blood vessels and weak blood flow are a deadly combination.

Because Krickitt had lived this long already, the doctors were actually beginning to think she might survive after all, despite so much evidence to the contrary. Earlier in the morning we had gotten a sign she wasn’t paralyzed when she had wiggled her fingers and toes. Still, the doctors said, every minute the brain had insufficient oxygen increased the chances she would have permanent brain damage. The pressure on her brain had gone down for awhile, but then it spiked up again without warning. They estimated it would take between twenty-four and forty-eight hours for the swelling to go back down and the oxygen supply to be completely restored. By that time, if she were still alive, my wife would be in a permanent vegetative state.

We had learned how to read the various monitors in the room, and we spent the next part of the day watching the numbers go up and down. Though we knew what they meant, we were helpless to do anything for Krickitt. Mere numbers on a screen were the indicators of life and death, and there was absolutely nothing any of us could do but sit and watch them change, hoping they would move in the right direction.

Due to all the stress and drama of the past twenty-four hours, it took us awhile to remember that we weren’t really helpless at all. We had forgotten that God’s miracles are a prayer away. We all knew that prayers aren’t always answered the way we want, but we hadn’t even made an effort to ask God for what we wanted in an organized way.

Soon Jamey, Mary and Gus, Curtis and Wendy Jones, a few other friends, and I found the hospital’s chapel. Jamey, who worked with Campus Crusade for Christ at the University of California at Irvine, began the impromptu prayer service. “God, you’ve said that if we come to you in prayer, you would hear us and grant our request. We ask you to touch Krickitt with your healing hand so that the pressure on her brain will go down . . .” We prayed specifically for the pressure on Krickitt’s brain to go down. We prayed for a miracle, asking God to relieve the pressure in time to save her.

It turned out that others were praying for Krickitt too. Her friend Lisa contacted old college friends and coworkers in California and asked them to spend their Thanksgiving in prayer for their friend. Jamey’s wife Gretchen, who was expecting a baby and was unable to be with us under her doctor’s orders, called a network of Campus Crusade staffers and asked them to pray for a healing miracle. Those people called others, who called others, and by the end of the day people as far away as Russia were praying for Krickitt.

We prayed for about twenty minutes, and then we went back to the ICU. My eyes automatically went to the readouts on the monitors we had been watching for so long. The numbers were better. The pressure on Krickitt’s brain was going down, and it just kept going. Nurses were in and out of the room every few minutes, and finally a nurse called for a doctor because she was afraid the monitor probe had slipped out of place. She didn’t think the numbers she saw could be accurate. The doctor checked the probe, but it was fine. However, even though the pressure on Krickitt’s brain continued to lessen, her blood pressure was still critically low.

People had been calling and visiting all day, wanting to see how Krickitt was doing. Not long after we returned from the chapel our pastor, Fred Maldonado, arrived. We told him what had been happening, and he led all of us to the chapel again to pray that Krickitt’s blood pressure would go up.

When we got back to Krickitt’s room, we saw that her blood pressure was on a steady rise. When a nurse came in and saw the new blood pressure reading, her jaw dropped. She looked at me and pointed to the readout. She was speechless for a moment.

“Look at that pressure,” she said finally. We
were
looking. It was impossible to take our eyes off of it. It was headed straight toward the normal range.

As the hours passed, Krickitt gradually became more alert. Her vital signs were approaching normal, and it became clear that she was going to get at least some of her basic functions back.

Over the next few days I did my best to rest up and get some of my own strength back. I couldn’t yet stand up straight due to the injuries to my ribs and back, but several times a day I would slowly make my way to Krickitt’s room. She continued to improve, and on the Monday after Thanksgiving, five days after the accident, she was moved from the ICU to acute care and taken off life support.

Even though Krickitt was fairly alert on rare occasions, she was technically still in a coma. Among the many things I learned during those days, I was surprised to discover that there are fifteen separate levels of coma on the scale they had her classified on, and the least serious ones include states where the patient is actually alert enough to move around and talk a little. That was the case with Krickitt. She slept most of the day, but since the life support tubes had been removed from her throat, I knew there was a possibility that she might talk. I had been desperate for the sound of her voice ever since I had screamed for her in the seconds after the wreck. There had been so many times when I had thought I would never hear it again. I had even been having dreams that she was talking to me, I wanted to hear her voice so badly.

With the doctor’s permission, I was feeding Krickitt some ice chips. When I touched a small piece to her lips, she would eat it from my fingers. Her lips weren’t so purple anymore. They were very pale and dry, but I could feel their warmth and the whisper of her breath on my skin.

After feeding Krickitt a few chips, I put my face inches from hers.

“I love you, Krickitt,” I said softly.

“I love you too.”

I couldn’t believe it! My wife had not only spoken, but she had said the words I had most wanted to hear. My Krickitt was back. Just hearing those words made me know things would be fine.

4

LESSON IN HEARTBREAK

T
he doctors thought Krickitt’s declaration of love to me was just a reflexive response. They claimed she likely didn’t understand what either of us was saying; her brain just knew that “I love you too” was the default response to “I love you.” From a medical standpoint I knew that was true. But for a man who was desperate to get his wife back, those words gave me hope. They were yet another step on the road back for us, even though there was still no way to know how fully she would recover.

In the rare instances when Krickitt’s eyes were open, they were frozen in a doll-like stare. She looked at things without any flicker of recognition, and it was obvious she had no idea what was going on. Part of the short-term solution for her recovery ended up being very simple. After wondering about her lack of focus, her dad suddenly realized that she probably couldn’t see well. Her contacts had been taken out after the wreck, and nobody had thought to put her glasses on her. Once we did, we saw an immediate difference. She was a lot more aware of her surroundings during the moments she was awake. The first thing she focused on was a plate of Jell-O across the room, and it caused her to became more animated than she had been up to that point. I was overjoyed when she began to focus more on me when I talked to her. It was a tiny victory that moved us closer to the day when I would have my Krickitt back.

Krickitt soon started sitting up, then standing, then taking a few shuffling steps across the room and back with me on one side and an attendant on the other. However, even with the help, she was barely able to lift her feet off the floor. Her right foot was dragging and her wrist was curled up. It was obvious she had neurological damage. It was difficult to watch such an accomplished gymnast struggle so much just to put one foot in front of the other. But the fact that she could move at all was a sign that she would likely regain her balance and coordination enough so that she could walk on her own again one day. She knew how to walk; she just wasn’t strong enough to do it yet.

As Krickitt painstakingly took tiny steps, I would encourage her. When I spoke she would look at me. “I love you, Krickitt,” I would say as I looked into her eyes.

“I love you too,” she said time and again with no vocal inflection or facial expression. I kept hoping to see or hear my old Krickitt, but she wasn’t there yet.

It wasn’t long before she was allowed to eat pudding and other soft foods. As she was unable to feed herself at that point, I would feed her while she sat propped up in the bed. Sometimes she would look at me or at the food, but much of the time she simply stared straight ahead at the wall.

The next step for Krickitt would be a rehabilitation program. Krickitt’s doctors had been discussing the options of where we could take her for the long process of getting her body and mind back to where it had been before the wreck, or at least as close to it as possible. Restoring people with brain injuries to their maximum potential is an intense, highly specialized, expensive process, and the doctors wanted to make sure they sent Krickitt to the best place for someone with her injuries. The good news was that one of the best possible places, Barrow Neurological Institute, was at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. Since Krickitt’s parents lived in Phoenix, this was an optimal choice. But this good news was tempered with some possible bad news. We were told it was not likely our health insurance provider would allow Krickitt to be moved out of New Mexico for her rehabilitation.

As any husband would be, I was incensed that my wife wasn’t going to get the best possible care due to what I considered to be a ridiculous health care regulation. “Fine,” I said. “Then they can pay for me and for her parents to move to Albuquerque, and they can pay our rent while we’re there.” Our social worker must have been a lot more diplomatic with the insurance company than I was, because in spite of the dire predictions, our insurance carrier quickly gave us permission to go out of state.

Unfortunately, we soon discovered we weren’t going to be able to get Krickitt into the program at Barrow. Instead, arrangements were made for her to be admitted to a head injury rehab program called Rehab Without Walls in Mesa, Arizona. Some doctors who had previously worked at Barrow had started the program, so we knew it would be good, but it wasn’t what we had hoped and prayed for. Nevertheless, ten days after the accident, I boarded an air ambulance bound for Mesa with my wife and two medical attendants.