A Horse with No Name Pt. 01

I was beginning to get annoyed by Dr. Colson's bedside manner. I didn't think that using the name Benjamin Franklin instead of John Doe was all that funny, and I certainly didn't find any humor in my situation. I looked at the three doctors standing by my bed, one white, one Indian and one African American and suddenly I had to look at my hand to see what color I was. At the time, what struck me most odd about that wasn't that I was white, that didn't seem all that important. I was struck more by the fact that I recognized that one of the doctors was Indian and the other was an African American. How did I remember those classifications when I couldn't even remember my name?

"How are you feeling today, Mr. Franklin?" Dr. Benni asked. No smile.

"Other than I don't know who the hell I am or what happened to me, I am just dandy," I wrote.

Dr. Colson stepped back from the bed, and Dr. Benni examined me. He removed the bandage from my head and checked his handiwork, and then he used a little flashlight to look into my eyes. The doctor did this without speaking. When he was done checking me over, he said, "Everything looks good. I am hoping for a full recovery."

Suddenly, I felt my spirits lift. "You mean I am going to recover my memory?" I wrote.

"Oh... I didn't say that. I just meant that your head injury is healing nicely. Dr. Patterson will assess the long-term effect of your TBI," Dr. Benni said.

I turned to look at Dr. Patterson and waited to see what he had to say. When he spoke, Dr. Patterson had a deep voice that felt almost reassuring. "Mr. Franklin, to assess the damage done I will need to do some tests. The first test will be a quick assessment of your motor skills, and we will follow that with a question and answer session to determine the extent of the loss of your memory and other cognitive skills. Do you understand what I am telling you?"

"I think so," I wrote on my notepad.

Dr. Patterson pulled down the sheet that was covering me and asked me to sit on the edge of the bed. I needed some assistance to sit up, but I managed it.

"Okay, then let's get started, "Dr. Patterson said. "Can you tell me your height and weight?"

I thought about that for a minute and wrote, "I have no idea about either."

Dr. Patterson looked over his shoulder and waved at a nurse that I had not seen enter the room. The nurse and Dr. Patterson helped me to stand so they could get my weight. The scale registered 187 pounds. The nurse pulled up a bar on the back of the scale and used it to measure my height. I was six feet two inches tall. After the weigh-in, I sat back down on the bed.

"Now move your right arm and hold it straight out from your side." Dr. Patterson instructed me.

I did as instructed and then Dr. Patterson said, "Now close your eyes and bring you right hand in and touch the tip of your nose.

I had no problem performing this move, but when Dr. Patterson told me to make the same move with my left arm, I was unable to execute it. I had a great deal of difficulty just trying to stretch my arm out from my side, and then I couldn't find my nose, even with my eyes opened. Dr. Patterson had me do several similar movements with my arms, and I was able to do them with my right arm but not my left. The results were pretty much the same with my legs. I could perform the commands with my right leg but had problems with my left leg.

When he finished, Dr. Patterson picked up his laptop computer and typed in several notes before addressing me again.

"Now I am going to ask you several questions, and I want you to try and speak your answers and only write them down if you can't make yourself understood. Are you ready?"

I nodded my head, and Dr. Patterson said, "What? I can't hear you."

It took me three tries before I was able to make a sound. "Ahs," was the best I could do.

"Good. What is your name?"

I thought about that for a minute before replying. "Ehahmin Ankln."

"Benjamin Franklin? Is that your real name?" He asked.

"Ah ont ink so," I said.

"Do you know where you are?"

"Oss pa il."

"What city are you in?"

"Od wick burr?"

"Are you trying to say Brodricksburg?"

"Ahs."

For the next half hour, Dr. Patterson asked me at least a hundred questions about myself that I was unable to answer and several other questions about what I could remember since I woke up in the hospital. Answering the doctor's questions was difficult, but I did the best I could, and I only had to write my answers for him a few times.

At that point, we took a short break while Dr. Patterson typed notes into his laptop.

"Okay now we are going to test your cognitive skills," Dr. Patterson said. "We'll start by testing your math skills."

Dr. Patterson started with elementary math problems, and they got progressively more complicated as we went along. The math exercises didn't present me with any difficulties. I was able to handle all of them with ease.

After the math, Dr. Patterson presented me with several riddles. I had little difficulty solving them but had a hard time giving my answers verbally and had to revert to writing them down. The next several questions seemed to be a history test. My results on the history exercise were mixed. Some questions I answered quickly and others I didn't have a clue. I had no idea of the relative difficulty of the questions Dr. Patterson asked me. I also wondered if I had ever known the answers to the questions I wasn't able to answer.

There were more questions about other topics and every once in a while Dr. Patterson would throw in a question about my personal history and every time I drew a blank.

When Dr. Patterson finished his questions, the three doctors left my room saying that they needed to confer and that they would be back to talk to me shortly.

Shortly, they said. The doctors were gone at least an hour and a half. I suspected that they slipped out to lunch. I wish I could have gone with them as I was left to eat hospital food.

The three doctors returned to my room a little after one o'clock, and Dr. Patterson was the first to speak. "We have reviewed the results of our tests and the news is good and bad but mostly good.

"It appears that the trauma to your head and the injury to your brain affected your long-term memory causing your focal retrograde amnesia. Your TBI has also affected the motor skills on the left side of your body. However, there seems to be very little if any damage to your cognitive skills and you don't seem to be suffering any short-term or anterograde memory impairment problems. That simply means that you don't seem to be having any problems creating new memories." Then Dr. Patterson reviewed the questions he asked me and my answers pointing out that my math and problem-solving skills were intact and I was able to recall several historical facts as well as the names of cities, states, and countries.

"Osz aht ean I ill ecove a ah enory?" I said.

Dr. Patterson looked at me for a moment then said, "Recovery your memory? No. You may recover some memory fragments, but they probably won't make any sense to you."

"En wha is a gut ews?"

"The good news is that we believe that with physical therapy we can restore most if not all of your left side motor skills. With speech therapy you should be able to speak normally in a few weeks," Dr. Patterson said.

I was getting frustrated and couldn't seem to form the words I wanted to say, so I wrote them down. "If I can remember history and names of places and I can do math, why is it that I can't remember who I am or where I am from?"

"I am afraid that I can't give you a definitive answer to that question. The way the human brain reacts to an injury like the one you sustained can vary widely. If you think about your brain as if it was a computer system, your injury would be equivalent to damaging a portion of the computer's hard drive. Anything stored on that part of the drive is gone forever. The upside of this is that once we find out who you are, you can begin to rebuild your memories. It won't be the same, but at least you can learn who you were and begin your life again from there."

How was I going to find out who I was? I didn't even know where to start. The more I thought about my situation, the more depressed I got. I was facing the real possibility that I would never know who I was before my injury.

"Tomorrow morning, you will be moved to our rehab wing of the hospital to begin your physical therapy and then speech therapy in the afternoon," Dr. Colson said.

"Do you have any questions?" Dr. Patterson asked.

Suddenly a question popped into my head that worried me. "How am I going to pay for all this?" I wrote. "The surgery, the hospital care, speech and physical therapy."

"We were not going to let you die just because you may not be able to pay your hospital bill. That may happen in other hospitals in other cities, but not in Brodricksburg. Hopefully, when you find out who you are it will turn out that you have health insurance and they will pay us," Dr. Colson said.

When the doctors left, I tried to go to sleep, hoping I would wake to find that my memory had returned. It didn't work.

Chapter 4 - Sister Mary Kathryn

Lieutenant Hanratty and Captain Hobbs were in my new room in the hospital's rehab center by nine o'clock the next morning, asking if I had remembered anything.

"I don't remember anything new, and it looks like I never will," I wrote on my pad. "I wish I could be more helpful, but I guess we may never know who did this to me or why."

"We need to keep trying because whoever did this to you wanted you dead and they are still out there. If your attackers find out you are still alive you may still be in danger," Captain Hobbs said.

I guess Hobbs didn't think that I had enough worries. I was about to state my concerns when the nurse came in to change my bandage and check my temperature.

"I understand that he is going to start physical therapy today," Lieutenant Hanratty said to the nurse.

"Sister Mary Kathryn will be in at ten o'clock to start his therapy," The nurse said. Then to me, she said, "You'll like Kate."

Hanratty and Hobbs hung around my room for a few more minutes, and before they left Hobbs said, "Other than us, only the doctors and a couple of the nurses assigned to you know what happened to you and that you don't know who you are, and we would like to keep it that way. One or the other of us will check back with you in the morning."

At ten o'clock, a tall attractive woman dressed in white hospital scrubs came into my room. She was almost six feet tall with shoulder-length blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her eyes were blue, and when she looked at me, it felt like she could see right into my soul. She had an athletic build but still managed to look very feminine.

She looked at me and said, "Mr. Franklin?"

I didn't respond. I guess I hadn't yet identified with the name and I was still staring at her wondering who she was.

"Are you Mr. Franklin?"

That got my attention, and I tried to speak. "Ahs."

"What?"

I wrote, "I guess that's my name, at least for today," and showed her my notepad.

I guess she thought I was a smart ass because she gave me a dirty look. Just then the nurse that had been in my room earlier returned. "I see you've met Sister Mary Kathryn," the nurse said to me.

Sister Mary Kathryn looked at the nurse and laughed. "I wish you'd stop that," she said.

I wrote, "You're my physical therapist?"

"That's right. Can't you talk?"

"Not very well." I wrote.

From that point on Sister, Mary Kathryn was all business. She started working on my left side making me push against her with my arm and then my leg. It was stressful and tiring, and my leg began to hurt before she finished.

During my workout, Sister Mary Kathryn asked me some questions about myself, and I had to make up the answers I wrote down for her so that I wouldn't have to tell her the truth about my condition. I think I might have contradicted myself a couple of times and I felt that she was beginning to dislike me. Halfway through the workout, other than to give me commands, she stopped talking to me altogether.

When we finished the session, Sister Mary Kathryn asked, "Have you been using the bathroom in your room?"

"No, the nurse keeps making me use a bedpan," I wrote.

"From now on use the bathroom. If you need help getting out of bed and walking to the bathroom, press the call button, and one of the nurses will help you. I want you getting out of bed and moving."

I nodded my head to show I understood.

It was about an hour later when I did go to use the bathroom. When I finished, I stood at the sink to wash my hands and looked into a mirror for the first time since waking in the hospital. I stared at my face in the mirror and started to cry. The reflection I saw was a person I did not know. How could I not recognize my own face?

Over the next two weeks, my life in the hospital fell into a routine. Each morning either Lieutenant Hanratty or Captain Hobbs would stop in and ask if I remembered anything new, to no avail. At ten o'clock, Sister Mary Kathryn would get me, take me down to the physical therapy room and work me until my body ached. I tried to improve my relationship with her, but anytime I tried to talk to her she seemed to get annoyed.

When I tried to speak, her name would come out, "Ister Ary Atrin," and she would give me a cold stare and just say, "What?"

I was beginning to believe that the nurse who told me I would like Sister Mary Kathryn was joking.

It was the beginning of the third week of my therapy when the situation changed. Neither Hobbs nor Hanratty had been in that morning before Sister Mary Kathryn came to get me for PT. After an hour of PT, I was exhausted, and when Sister Mary Kathryn returned me to my room, Hobbs was waiting for me with Dr. Colson.

Sister Mary Kathryn greeted Captain Hobbs and told him to say hi to Carrie for her.

Captain Hobbs said, "I will," and then waited for the therapist to leave before he spoke to me.

"Any change today?"

"No," I said. My speech therapy was finally making progress, so I was able to answer most questions without using a notepad.

"How was your PT today?" Hobbs asked.

"Attila the Nun had me walking up and down stairs all morning," I said.

"Attila the Nun?" Hobbs said.

"Yes, Sister Mary Kathryn."

"Who's Sister Mary Kathryn?" Hobbs asked.

"My physical terrorist," I managed to say without laughing.

"I didn't know you had nuns working at the hospital as physical therapists," Hobbs said to Dr. Colson.

Dr. Colson was laughing. "We don't. Kate is Mr. Franklin's therapist. Nurse Anderson calls her Sister Mary Kathryn because she says that Kate reminds her of a Sister Mary Kathryn, who was one of the nuns at her Catholic high school."

"She's not a nun?" I said. "No wonder she always seemed annoyed when I call her Sister Mary Kathryn."

Now Hobbs and Dr. Colson were both laughing, but I wasn't. Captain Hobbs said, "No, she is not a nun. Her name is Kate O'Brien. She is one of my wife's best friends."

I was going to have to try and explain all this to Ms. O'Brien and try to improve my relationship with her if I could.

When Dr. Colson left the room, I sat down in the lounge chair in my room, and Hobbs pulled over another chair and sat in front of me.

"Just thought I should bring you up to speed on where our investigation stands," Hobbs said. "I brought in the forensic pathologist from the State Police lab..."

"Wait a minute. I am not dead, why would you need a pathologist?" I said.

"The pathologist came to look at what little evidence we have and talk to your doctors," Hobbs said. "We needed his assessment of the facts that we have established so far. We conclude that you were transported to the farm field just outside of town against your will. There were bruises on your wrists and ankles that indicated that your hands and feet were bound. There were also traces of glue, probably from duct tape around your mouth.

"Although the snow storm that night obliterated any tracks in the field that could lead us to the actual spot where you were dumped, and subsequent searches of the area haven't turned up any evidence, we have been able to piece together the most likely scenario of what happened that night.

"We know from the doctor's report in the ER that you had two head injuries. In addition to the blow that caused your amnesia, the doctor that examined you in the ER found some bruising and an abrasion on the back of your head that was determined to be several hours old. Your attacker or attackers subdued you with a blow to the back of your head. We believe that you were then bound and gagged and probably put into the trunk of a car and driven to that farm field. You were then carried out into the field and either forced to strip off all of your clothes or your attackers did it for you. At that point, you were struck on the head with a blunt object and left for dead."

"How can you be sure that I wasn't naked when I they put in the trunk of the car?" I asked.

"Well, the doctors and the pathologist agree that if you had been naked for more than a few minutes before you regained consciousness, you never would have survived. You were too near death from hypothermia for it to have happened any other way."

I thought about what Hobbs had told me, but I didn't know what to do with the information. All I could do was wonder why someone wanted me dead.

"We believe that you were abducted from someplace probably several hours from here," Hobbs said. "That's based on the fact that your first injury was several hours old and the way you were left. Whoever did this wanted you dead, and they didn't want your body found."

"If they didn't want me found, why didn't they bury me?" I asked.

"We believe that the snow storm changed their plans," Hobbs said. "They were probably afraid to keep driving in the snow storm, but the ground was frozen so they couldn't bury you. They left you in the irrigation ditch in the middle of the field hoping that your body wouldn't be found until spring and that we wouldn't be able to identify your body.

"Things didn't go according to their plan. We now believe that whoever did this has no idea that you are still alive. We think they believe that you are dead and that we haven't found your body yet."

Hobbs was quiet for a moment and then said, "I sent your picture, fingerprints, and DNA to the FBI and every state police organization in the country hoping that we would be able to get an identity for you. They compared the information I sent against their missing person reports, and we haven't had a single hit. We even tried Canada and had no response. No police agencies are looking for you, and apparently, no one has reported you as missing."

"My attacker or attackers think I am dead; I have no idea of who I am, and no one is looking for me? I guess maybe I am dead," I said. "At least the person I used to be no longer exists."

"Don't give up Ben," Hobbs said. "We will find out who you are and who did this to you."

This time Hobbs' promise sounded reassuring rather than threatening.

Chapter 5 - Kate O'Brien

The next day before Ms. O'Brien arrived to take me to PT, I was thinking about what I was going to say to her. Although my speech had improved, I still had trouble making myself understood.

I knew as soon as Kate O'Brien walked into my room that morning that something had changed. Kate had a friendly smile on her face as she said, "How are you this morning Mr. Franklin?"

"I am fine," I said. "I was wondering if we could talk for a minute before we go downstairs to the therapy room."

"That's not necessary," Kate said.

"Not necessary? What do you mean?"