Taking My Life Back Read online

  The challenges they faced turned out to be too much, despite their depth of skill. They could save my life, but my legs were so ruinously shredded that it was doubtful both could be saved. Even if they could be repaired to some degree, it would require numerous surgeries over time. As for my general injuries, my body was riddled with bits of bomb shrapnel. The nails, nuts, and bolts packed in the bombs that hadn’t landed on the street had ended up inside everyone within range. Some of the bits that tore into my flesh could be teased back out through weeks of surgeries, but to this day I still carry others in places where their retrieval is too risky to justify yet another operation.

  I had no sense of time. I had simply felt the doctors and the operating room drift away. I passed through a weird form of nothingness . . . and then opened my eyes again.

  −2−

  Arms of Love and the Terrorist Down the Hall

  It felt like only a few minutes had passed, as if I had nodded off for a quick nap. But the first person I saw when I opened my eyes was my mother. This was strange, since I was in Boston and she lived in Texas. But it was such a relief to see her that I didn’t worry about the time jump. There she was, escorting me into the world for a second time.

  There was a breathing tube down my throat, which left me no way to talk. Mom began by softly assuring me that she loved me and she would stay with me, and then she explained that she was in Boston because someone had set off bombs at the marathon but that I was going to survive this and so was Noah. She told me that in the confusion after the attacks, he had been taken to a different hospital, Boston Medical, but he was expected to make a full recovery and be released soon.

  On the day of the attacks, Mom and Dad had been in the process of moving into a new house in Houston. They were at Home Depot when they got the call from the hospital. The nurse only told them that I had an “ankle injury.” But when they asked to speak with me and were told I was in the ICU, they knew the news was much worse than that.

  They scrambled to pick up Allie, my youngest sister, from school and place her with a friend, and then they hurried off to fight rush-hour traffic and make the last flight to Boston. Dad planned to stay with Noah at Boston Medical, where he would remain for a few days since there was no medical reason to move him to my hospital. It was already packed with its share of the more than two hundred victims.

  When I say my dad was staying with Noah, I am referring to Tim Gregory, the wonderful guy Mom married three years after she and my biological father divorced. Tim adopted my two sisters and me the following year, when I was fourteen, and gave me an authentic experience of a father’s love. Later they had their daughter Alexandria, whom we call Allie, who was waiting back in Houston. Tim taught me that it isn’t a father’s biology that matters; it’s the depth of his concern and his steadfast presence.

  While he planned on staying with Noah, Mom was determined to remain with me around the clock. Noah had been sedated and was sleeping when they first got to town, so Dad had insisted on coming with her to see me before he went to be with Noah.

  I kept gesturing toward my legs, which I couldn’t see. The pain made it feel as if they were both gone. I couldn’t lift myself up enough to look, and Mom couldn’t convince me they were there. She finally used her phone to take a photo of them and showed me the remains of my legs to assure me I still had them for the time being.

  Her plan sort of worked. There was the photo, clear enough, and apparently those two masses of torn and stapled flesh were my legs. What I didn’t know yet was that my legs, as I knew them, existed now only in the old normal.

  The old normal was in the past. The old normal had blown away on that first bomb’s blast wave. Of course, with the old normal gone, that would seem to imply a new normal was lurking around nearby. Lying there, I had no idea what this new normal could possibly be. Surely it looked better than those two masses of what were supposed to be my legs.

  The main power of that photo was to reveal the stark truth about my son’s survival. Everything embedded in me would have been inflicted on Noah if my legs and torso hadn’t been between him and the bomb. So the injuries in Mom’s photo were a mirror image of what would have been done to his little body. Right where my shredded legs took so much of the blast was where his back and his head would have been directly exposed.

  At that moment, lying there in that hospital bed, the first real awareness of my overall situation came to me. It was terrifying, to say the least, but I was thankful that Mom and Dad were there to surround me with their love once again. I could feel the beauty of it even above the pain. And as I look back on it now, it’s also clear that my true journey of recovery began at that moment.

  I had survived. Noah was going to be okay. For us, the Grim Reaper had slipped out of the room and moved on. But I would find out that an eight-year-old boy named Martin Richards had been killed, and his mother and seven-year-old sister were fighting to recover. Several other people had also been killed and hundreds more injured. Some were struggling to overcome their injuries right there with me on the same floor at that same moment. It seems to me that the sum total of pain and fear in Boston’s hospital wards during those days can never be fathomed.

  I didn’t have to know their names to feel for them. Many, like me, had nearly died but became survivors when they felt just enough strength returning to keep them in their body and in this world. No doubt every one of us was doing our own version of wondering how we could cope with this and go back to living.

  I was mostly out of it for the next three or four days, with additional surgeries and strong pain medication. It was only on Saturday, five days after the explosions, that I was lucid enough for Mom to let me know that Noah had been released from the hospital and that he and Dad would soon be at my bedside for a visit. I could have screamed with delight if I had the power. Instead, I sighed with deep relief.

  This felt like a repeat of the first thoughts my mom and I had shared when I briefly woke up the first time. After I had tried a little sign language, with poor results, Mom found some paper and a pencil. She gave them to me, and I used my undamaged right hand to write my first words in shaky letters: God is not finished with me yet.

  After that I scrawled, Angels were all around us.

  Mom still has that note.

  During the first three days, while I was in a state that amounted to a chemically induced coma, my left leg had been fitted with an external device called a fixator. This is a lightweight steel frame that surrounds the leg. For the next two days, after I woke up, I was still out much of the time. But after that it was time to deal with recovering while awake. Talk about fun! A fixator is attached by long screws that penetrate the flesh and continue into the bone. My remaining leg bones were so shattered that the fixator was needed simply to hold them in place. I had been warned that it would take months to know if the device had been effective. Boy, when you listen to news like that while metal pins are burrowed through your muscles and into your bones, it darkens your view of the immediate future. Your only choice is to play the long game.

  Mom got permission to set up a cot next to my bed, and even though the room was deliberately kept very cold because the pain medication I was on made me so hot, she wouldn’t leave me. I was in that hospital room for thirty-nine days before being transferred to Houston for an additional seventeen days of hospitalization, and she stayed the whole time.

  At first, she kept a hotel room as a place to store her things, change clothes, and grab a shower, although most of the time she used the shower in my room. She seldom left my side, and throughout my stay I repeatedly witnessed how vital it is to have a personal advocate when you are incapacitated. They can be lifesavers, even in simple ways such as insisting that no one touches you without using fresh gloves or washing their hands in your presence before doing so. Once, when a staff member was bending over me to adjust my pillows under my legs, she bumped the fixator and a wave of pain shot through my entire body. My mother then decreed that no
body would adjust my pillows but her. Thank you, Mom.

  I was grateful for my own survival and especially for Noah and his good condition, but I had a hard time maintaining my gratitude. My level of pain was too severe. The fixator rods felt like rows of knife blades penetrating my flesh. I was kept on a cocktail of pain meds and antibiotics, but the goal was for me to remain as awake as I could while still having some pain relief. It would have been too dangerous to keep me under for as long as the device was in place.

  I can say that throughout that hospital ward, the staff all seemed to have an extra measure of seriousness about their duties and concern for their patients. This attack, after all, had happened in their hometown. Some of them may have known one or more of the victims, since there were hundreds, and they were now working in packed conditions because of the sudden flood of the injured. I could tell by their remarks that this thing was intensely personal to all of them.

  For me, this provided a degree of emotional relief, because they felt themselves to be in the same boat with us. Their need for us to recover was partly born of their own need to do whatever was possible to set things right.

  On day five after the attack, two FBI agents in dark suits arrived at my bedside. It felt as if someone else’s movie had been spliced into my life.

  They apologized for approaching me so soon but told me I was a victim of an organized terror attack and that nobody knew how many more attackers might still be out there. They told me one attacker had been killed trying to evade capture early in the morning of day four and that his younger brother had been caught after a shootout late that night. He had been shot several times but was alive and in custody.

  Then they informed me that the surviving Boston bomber was, at that very moment (take a deep breath with me here . . .), a patient in this same hospital. Right there on my floor.

  Students of irony will savor that one; the stranger who had killed several innocent people and shredded hundreds more—some with grotesque losses of limbs—was now under medical care just down the hall from my room and the rooms of many of his other victims. I instantly gained new appreciation for what people mean when they use the phrase, “you can’t make this stuff up.”

  Intellectually, I understood. Nobody needed to explain to me that the injured suspect had the right to be restored to some degree of health before being put on trial. I didn’t have to be told that his bullet wounds were likely similar to the shrapnel wounds so many of us suffered from, and therefore it was logical for him to be treated here because of the high quality and experience levels of the doctors and staff. I got it. I knew.

  Still. A perpetrator whose deliberate actions had caused so much heartache to peaceful strangers was being tended to by some of the same people helping me. I could walk down the hall and look him in the face, if I still had legs that worked.

  So the devil was in the house. Boy, did that news ever cast a pall over the room. The air began to feel hot and stuffy. I already had a fever, courtesy of all the inflamed and infected injury sites, and with this intensely frustrating news my temperature seemed to spike.

  Along with a deep feeling of anxiety came a strong impulse to get up and move, pace the room, walk the halls, run out of the building with my mom in tow, and—even though the new normal made it impossible—grab Noah and take us all back home to Texas.

  The impulse strengthened, became a yearning to put as much distance as I possibly could between me and my family and the killer who had brought so much evil to this city and who was now only a few yards away.

  It took concentrated effort to stay focused and maintain a conversation with the agents. Somehow the news made my physical pain worse. And right then, everything hurt. Large areas of my legs were covered with wide bands of stitches. Several inches of the fibula bone had been blown away from my left leg. The surgeons had taken strips of skin off of my outer left thigh to cover blast holes in my lower leg.

  I had missed the killer’s arrival to the hospital because I had mostly slept through the day before, when the police had brought him in. I later learned they had completely locked down the hospital for the day in order to stabilize the security situation. My mom was caught outside for many hours and couldn’t get past the guards. By the time I awoke on Saturday, she had been admitted back in. Now she hovered protectively while the men questioned me.

  It didn’t take long for the agents to realize I didn’t have much information, although one of the bombers must have passed within a few feet of me when he placed the bomb on the ground behind us. The agents let me know I would likely have more visits with them as time went on. Then they moved on to the next victim. They had their work cut out for them. With so many victims in the hospitals to see, the agents were going to be around for a long time.

  As for me, their questions told me a lot about the attacks and caused a strong sense-memory to overcome me. In it, I was a freshman in high school, sitting in business management class and watching the horror of the 9/11 attacks in New York City. And while this attack in Boston was smaller, that made no difference to the dead and wounded. It was cut from the same bloody cloth.

  With the FBI agents gone and the brutal reality of this thing sinking in, I cried for all of us—for Noah, for my mom and dad, for every living soul in range of those cowardly devices. I felt overwhelmed with grief for the dead, for their families, and for the injured children most of all. They had been introduced to far too much of the world’s evil too early in life.

  Noah’s relatively mild injuries made him among the luckiest kids out there that day. Yes, this is a surreal definition of the word luck, but I was glad enough to take it.

  However, then as now, I don’t know why God spared us. I honestly have felt a deep sense of guilt wash over me many times. It was certainly not that we were recipients of grace because we deserved it more than others. I have never been comfortable with any implication that, in a situation such as this, the worst victims are somehow less favored by the Lord.

  Before the explosions, the marathon had seemed to threaten nothing worse than blisters and pulled muscles. It hadn’t even occurred to me to pray for our safety that day or for the safety of thousands of spectators and runners. I suppose the greatest impact of terror is that it is unexpected.

  Mom often prayed with me in the hospital. The shared devotion time was a deep bonding experience for us. Despair was scratching hard at my door. Life had become one big waiting game and any type of future was so uncertain.

  During those times, we often referenced a song called “Help Me Find It,” by the Sidewalk Prophets. In the song they talk about being still for the moment and the importance of letting God take the lead. Being still was one of the hardest things for me to accept. Before the marathon, my life had been nonstop. For me, it was like I went from going a hundred miles an hour to screeching to a complete halt. And because of this, I would often find myself listening to this song over and over. But as hard as everything was, its powerful words gave me an important reminder: no matter what was in store, I would never have to face it alone.

  I truly do believe that. After all, my son, Noah, is a living, breathing example that miracles do exist. Who am I to question anything else? I have learned to be grateful for even the smallest of victories. Gratitude became an enduring attitude for me at the moment my mom and dad arrived to stand up for me and my precious son, bearing the news that Noah had survived and would recover and that they were there for me.

  −3−

  Piece by Piece

  Noah was in his hospital bed for five days before my dad could take him out of there and bring him to the hotel. On the sixth day, after I had been out of my drug-induced unconsciousness for twenty-four hours and had a chance to clear my head of the anesthetics, Dad brought him to see me.

  I felt strangely nervous ahead of the visit, wondering if my injuries would upset him. Mom helped me prepare as well as we could, putting my dingy “hospital hair” in a ponytail and covering the gruesome device on my left
leg with a blanket. I sat up in bed and prepared my best mom smile, so eager to see my son again.

  I already knew the blast had left Noah with a bone-deep gash in his right calf, which was all stitched up but much too sore for walking on. But the surprise was that he arrived in a little red wagon Dad had bought for the purpose. He pulled it into the room with Noah riding in it. Noah’s eyes lit up the moment he saw me, and instantly my anxieties disappeared. Better yet, in spite of my worries over the impact my injuries might have on him, at first he showed no reaction to them at all. He was just overjoyed to see his mom.

  As for me, I was flabbergasted. As if the moment wasn’t already perfect, Noah was so excited that he got up out of the wagon in spite of his row of painful stitches (and oh, could I empathize) and stepped over to my bedside.

  I have never had a more welcome hug or felt more grateful to receive one. To be allowed to return to life with my little boy was beautiful beyond description. To have him there in my arms, knowing we had a future together—at least some sort of future together—was perfection. It made no difference that I was at a loss as to how to begin working it out. All I could think was, I’ll take it.

  Noah wore a distinctive blue FBI jacket, which Dad explained had been given to him while they were on their way to see me. They ran into an FBI agent waiting at the elevator and quickly learned he was one of the guys who had caught the other bomber. He was on the floor because of the new resident down the hall. When he learned that Noah was one of that bomber’s victims, he gave him his jacket as a sign of brotherhood. This made the jacket too cool for words, and Noah beamed in it.