Hard Landing Ch. 06

Amazingly, the Afghan Army soldier they had picked up from the observation post had also lived and had successful surgery at Bagram for his appendicitis, in addition to treatment for his numerous other injuries he sustained in the crash.

Four days after she woke up, Dr. Hatcher was back to talk to Jo about her leg.

"We can try cadaver bone grafts, but the risks of infection or rejection aren't insignificant."

"If we do that, how likely am I to make a full recovery of my leg?"

"A full recovery? I'd say not likely at all, Chief. If the graft is successful, you're going to be in a wheelchair for months and then walking with crutches for months if not years, then probably a cane. You're just missing too much bone in the joint."

"What am I looking at if you just take it off?"

"Jo!" I gasped.

She squeezed my hand. "It's okay, Jill. I just need to hear all my options." She'd been calling me Jill since she woke up. In fact, she was using everyone's first name, even her dad's. I wasn't entirely certain she knew she was doing it. I felt a pang of loss every time she didn't call me her Blue Girl, but having her awake was salve enough.

"Well, the injury is entirely at your ankle. If we amputate, it would be mid-calf, below the main muscle. With the right prosthetics, you'd probably be seventy-five, eighty percent. You could walk, run, what have you. But the rehabilitation and getting used to the prosthetic is six months to a year."

"So, in six months I could be running, versus years with a cane?"

"Chief, you'll probably never run again on that foot. If we can save it, the ankle will be fused and non-mobile. Also, the bone is going to be too fragile. You'd likely break it if you tried to run on it."

She nodded and looked down at her foot for a while. Then turned to me and said, "It's going to be alright." I nodded at her. She squared her shoulders and huffed her breath out, the way she always did when facing a challenge.

"Take it off, doc."

~~ Ramstein Airbase, Germany, One Week Later ~~

"I can't believe how much it hurts!" Jo groaned.

Steve and Sara had taken Henry home the day before. Jo would be getting transferred to Walter Reed in Bethesda soon to start rehabilitation at the new amputee care center there. I was staying with her until then.

"I know, and I know it's confusing," Dr. Hatcher said, "It's called phantom limb pain. Your foot is gone, but your brain is telling you that the foot's still there and that it hurts. We can do some electro-stim on the muscles above the amputation and we're going to keep you on your pain med regime for now. But it's just going to take some time."

"Is there anything else we can do?" I asked. "Ice, maybe?"

"Well, this is going to sound weird, but you can massage her foot. That sometimes works."

"What do you mean? Her foot is gone."

"No, I mean massage that foot." she pointed to Jo's right leg. "The brain has some cross wiring and there anecdotal evident that scratching the left foot can ease an itch on the right foot and so on."

"You're shitting me," said Jo.

"I am not shitting you, Chief. Just something you can try. In the meantime, I'll see about getting you some electro-stim today. The incision is healing nicely. You should be ready to start working on your rehab at Reed as soon as your ribs have healed enough."

"Thanks, Karen." She'd heard her first name spoken somewhere and it was all she called her now.

"No problem, Chief. I'll see you tomorrow."

I sat down on the foot of the bed and pulled Jo's foot into my lap and started massaging it. She leaned back and sighed with relief.

"Jesus, I didn't know you were so good at that."

"I'm so hurt you forgot our night in Ocean City!" I teased.

She blushed. "Now that you say it, it's uh, coming back." Her face clouded up. "Sorry Jill, I'm having a lot of memory problems."

"Like what kind of problems?" I asked.

"I'm having trouble calling up memories until someone mentions them. I know you and I spent a lot of time together on the beach trip. But I can't remember any of it. I couldn't recall your giving me that... massage in OC. But as soon as you mentioned it, it all rushed back in, the whole night."

"Well maybe that means I need to tell you about stuff like the first time we cuddled and you bit my neck here." I reached up and touched the special spot on my neck. "Or the night I seduced you in the pool in Virginia Beach, or the next night when I wore the lace socks for you, or—"

"Stop, Jill! Jesus Christ, stop!" she hissed, her eyes darting from side to side. She'd turned bright red and was squirming on the bed.

"What? Jo, what is it?"

"It's like all those things are happening again to me right now!" She looked troubled.

"You don't want to remember?"

"Not all at once, sitting here in a hospital bed! And it's really disturbing that you can just... trigger me like that and it all floods in. It's like my brain isn't under my control." She gently reached up and touched the staples on the back of her head. With her short hair they'd hardly had to shave off much off when they'd performed the surgery on her and it was already almost back to her normal length. You couldn't even tell she had staples unless you looked at her head directly from behind.

"I'm sorry, I won't tease you again. But if you ever want help remembering something just ask and I'll help you."

"Thanks, Jill."

"Do you think that's related to the name thing?"

"What name thing?" She looked confused.

"You know how you used to only call people by their last names? Except your dad and Steve. And then me when you started calling me Blue. But now you call everyone by their first name as soon as you hear it. Like you call Dr. Hatcher Karen? Like how you call me Jill now?"

"I do? No, I don't... Do I? Wait..." She stared into the distance. "You're... you're..." I saw her try to form a "B" with her mouth, but it was as if she had something stuck in her throat. "You're my B... my B... Jill why... why can't I...? B... B... I can't say it!"

I could see her start to panic. She pointed at the water cup on her tray.

"That cup is blue! You're my B... my B... I've been calling you Jill. You're not my Jill! You're my B... my... Why can't I say it?!"

"Hey, hey, it's okay, I got you." I reached out to her and she grabbed onto me so tightly with her good arm my ribs creaked.

"The sky is blue! You're my B... My B...What's wrong with me?!" She started gasping for air and saying "B...! B...! B...!" over and over.

"Stop, Jo, stop. It's going to take some time. It's okay." She was breaking my heart.

"It's like I've lost you again! I don't have my B...! My B...! Damn it!"

"Hey. Hey, look at me!." She met my eyes, gasping for air. "You haven't lost me. I'm here and I'm yours now, whether you call me Blue or Jill or Doran or anything you have to call me. You're just having a little brain thing, okay? I'm here. I'm here."

She stared at me, her chest heaving.

"Here," I clicked the control to recline the bed. As she lay back panting and staring at me, I carefully stretched out alongside her and held out my arms.

"Can you move down and cuddle me?" She painfully tucked herself into the crook of my arm. I wrapped her up and said, "Do you remember when we had our fight in Fayetteville? Remember when we made up on the bus and then got into the bunk together? What you told me you wished you could do with me?"

She stiffened as I talked, then sniffled, then she started crying, her head against my chest. She grasped my shirt with her left hand, cast and all, and cried for all she was worth, sobbing as I held her.

It was what she had wanted to be able do that night on the bus. It was all I could do for her now. After she'd cried herself out, she drifted off to sleep with her head on my chest, whispering "I want my B..." to herself.

Later that afternoon I sat at the end of her bed, massaging her foot again while the counselor talked to her.

"The brain is a weird thing, Jo, it's just going to take time. Some of your brain will rewire itself and you'll get back to where you were. Some of it you'll just have to adapt to your brain's new way of doing things. Let's try this. Who am I?" She'd introduced herself as 'Dr. Samuels' when we had met her for the first time a few days earlier.

Jo looked up. "Dr. Samuels."

"Right. I'm Dr. Samuels."

"Yes. Dr. Samuels."

"Dr. Wendy Samuels."

"Dr. Sam... Dr. S... Wendy. Dr. S... Wendy." Jo looked at me with wild eyes. "F-u-u-u-c-k! I really am having a brain thing!" She laughed hysterically. It felt a little better than when she'd panicked this morning, but only a little.

"Why do you think you always called people by their last names before?"

Jo stopped laughing. "It was just something I picked up in the Army," she mumbled, looking down.

"Really?" She looked at me. "But you said she called everyone by their last name, even her friends, right?"

"Yes."

"Do you think it was some kind of defense mechanism, Jo?"

Jo wouldn't look up. "No. Maybe. I don't know."

"Brain injuries can lower inhibitions, so maybe you aren't trying to keep people at a distance quite so much and your brain is rebelling against its old way of doing things."

"Maybe. Maybe that's why I'm crying now."

"What do you mean, 'now'?" Wendy asked.

Jo sighed. "I never cried once from the day we buried my mom when I was fifteen until a couple of months ago. It was like I couldn't cry, even if I wanted to." She looked over at me. "But I'm crying all the time now. I cried a couple times in the months before the crash."

"So, you've had some issues well before your injury."

"Maybe."

"Well, with the likelihood of PTSD or traumatic memories, I'd have been recommending a therapist anyway for your treatment plan at Walter Reed, but it sounds like maybe you could have used one for a while."

Jo looked away from us. "Maybe."

The next day, I took her to visit her crew. Specialist Charles was being flown to Walter Reed to start rehabilitation and she'd asked to see Jo before she left. Sergeant Ehrens would soon be going to a hospital near the base at Ft. Bragg. As I pushed Jo's wheelchair down the hall, she was clearly nervous as she fidgeted with the blanket covering her legs.

I'd asked her several times if she wanted to go visit them, but each time she changed the subject as quickly as she had during our first dinner in Rehoboth Beach when I'd tried to talk about families or dating. But with Specialist Charles flying out the next day I wasn't going to let her put it off any longer.

I wheeled Jo into the room. There was a young woman in the bed with the head inclined so she could sit up, and a brawny looking man in a wheelchair talking to her. He had casts on both legs up to his hips.

"There's the Chief!" he said as the young woman smiled at us.

Jo burst into tears as I rolled her over to him.

"Whoa, hey Chief! It's okay! We're going to be okay!"

Jo leaned far over out of her chair, knocking the blanket off her lap, and embraced him tightly, still crying. He looked like he would have been less surprised if she'd jumped out of the chair and started tap dancing.

"I'm sorry, Billy. I'm sorry." She lifted her head and looked at the young woman. "Liz. I'm so sorry!"

Specialist Charles, Liz apparently, reached out and grabbed Jo's hand. "Chief, what are you sorry about? You got us down. You saved us."

"But... but Billy, your legs. Liz, you're... you're..."

Liz smiled, but there was a tremble in her lips. "Better paralyzed than dead, Chief. Besides, I'm gonna get all the best parking spots now."

Jo gasped out a laugh through her tears.

"Liz is right, Jo," said Sgt. Ehrens. "Nine pilots out of ten, we're all a smear on the mountain side. You're the one who got us down."

"I could've done it better. I could've—"

"Horseshit, Chief. My buddy on the FOB sent me pictures from the scene and the crash report. Those fuckers got rounds through the main hydraulic lines, the fuel line for Number Two and the transmission. Chief, you—"

"Jo," she interrupted.

"What?"

"You better call me Jo, Billy. I don't think that they're going to let me be a Chief anymore with this." She lifted the stump of her leg.

Liz said, "I'm happy to call you Jo if you want me to, but you'll always be our Chief, Chief. The Army can't ever take that away from us."

"That's a fact, Chief," agreed Billy, as Jo teared up again.

I eased myself out of the room.

Jo had been getting increasingly frustrated with her speech problem, and had stopped using names altogether when she could avoid it. Once when I was working on my laptop, out of the corner of my eye I caught her looking at me and whispering "B... B... B..." to herself. Then she'd looked out the window, balling her fists up in her lap.

It was too much loss, all at once. Her foot. Her friends, Eric Nguyen and Ben Jackson. Her career as an Army pilot. Now she felt like she'd lost at least a part of her Blue Girl. Again.

I stepped out into the hall to talk to Dr. Samuels after she had stopped by for one of her daily visits with Jo. After I explained my idea, she said, "I mean, I don't know if it'll work or not, but I don't think it could do any harm. So, if you want to try it, go ahead."

"Okay, thanks. I just feel like she needs a win. Do you know a place?"

She grinned at me. "I do! Let me call and see if I can hook you up." She pulled out her cell phone and was soon speaking German to someone on the other end. She wrapped up the call.

"Zwei Uhr? Danke, Bibi!" She hung up and said "Two o'clock tomorrow? I can swing by and take you."'

"Oh, I don't want to trouble you."

"Do you speak German?"

"Uh, no."

"Then you'd never find it and you wouldn't get what you want if you did. I could go myself. I'll pick you up out front of the hospital at one-thirty. Okay?"

"Dr. Samuels, you're a full-service counselor. Thanks."

When I first told Jo that I was leaving her for the afternoon, she was anxious. I'd been at her bedside since she'd woken up, working on my laptop during the day, showering in her bathroom and sleeping in the foldout chair next to her bed. Steve and Sara had gone shopping for extra clothes and toiletries for me before they'd left for home. It would be the first time she'd been without me for more than a few minutes since she'd come back to us. I tried to reassure her as much as I could before I left to meet Dr. Samuels in front of the hospital.

When I walked back in that evening, she glanced up from her dinner tray. "Hey Blue, welcome back," she said, then looked back down at her food.

She froze, then looked up at me again and whispered, "Blue Girl." Then she threw her fork in the air, pointed at me and yelled, "Blue Girl! Yes! You're my Blue Girl!"

I skipped over to her bed laughing, afraid she'd launch herself out of it towards me if I didn't. My plan had worked.

She wrapped her good arm around my neck and buried her face in my electric blue hair, freshly dyed that afternoon.

She was laughing, rocking me back and forth, yelling, "Blue! My Blue Girl!" until a nurse came in to see what was happening.

"What on earth is going on in here?" the nurse asked.

"My Blue Girl is here, Gloria! I can say it again! My Blue girl!"

I could tell the relief in her voice wasn't really about me having my hair back to the color she'd known. She'd suddenly, unexpectedly, gotten a little piece of herself back.

Gloria smiled at her. "Well, I've never seen someone this excited about their friend's new hairstyle before, but let's try and keep it to a low roar, okay Chief?"

"It's okay, Gloria! I got my Blue Girl back!"

~~ Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda Maryland, May ~~

It was our first full day at Walter Reed. We had arrived on an evening Air Force transport flight into Andrews AFB, and been shuttled to the medical center just before dinner. After dinner, Jo was given a tour of the facility as part of her orientation, then the staff had settled us in her suite.

The hospital had family suites for patients undergoing treatment, with a hospital bed in one bedroom, a tiny living area and a second, normal bedroom for family staying to support their loved ones. Jo had asked if I would stay with her.

That first night she'd insisted I help her out of the hospital bed and she'd painfully hopped into the other room with her arm around me. She'd slept with me curled up around her from the back that night, to the disapproval of the nursing staff the next morning, when they'd come to take her to meet with her treatment coordinator. Apparently, that meeting did not go well either.

Jo sat silently in her wheelchair, staring at the ground as the nurse rolled her back into our suite. She didn't say anything to the woman as she left.

She was fuming.

"Babe, what's wrong? Are you okay?"

"What the fuck is the point of having us make goals if they turn around and tell you that you can't do what you want!" she snarled.

"What do you mean? Talk to me, tell me what's happening."

"I had to meet with my treatment coordinator, and one of the things she wanted was for me to make goals for what I want to achieve here. Then she turns around and tells me to forget what I wanted. Then she tells me I can't handle my therapy sessions the way I want!"

"Okay, slow down. Let's take this one thing at a time. What goal did you want to set for yourself?"

She didn't say anything. She just grabbed the wheels and started spinning her chair around in place.

"Jo... Jo! C'mon, Jo, talk to me."

She finally snapped, "I told her I wanted to try to get a waiver to return to duty once I adapt to my prosthetic, okay?!" She looked at me then barked, "What?!"

"Jo, if that's what you want to try to do I'll support you. Has anyone ever been able to do that before?"

"Yes!"

"Really?" She started spinning her chair again. "Jo?"

"Not any pilots, no. Some intel weenies and staff officers have."

"Okay."

"It's so stupid! Lots of civilian pilots get medical waivers to fly with stuff like this!" She held up her leg.

"Well, so even if the Army won't let you fly, there are other flying jobs you could have, right?"

She looked away. "Please don't ever tell Steve this, but if I had to fly rich guys around so they can avoid traffic, I think I'd kill myself."

"What's the other problem, the one with your therapy sessions?" She stopped spinning and looked at her foot.

"They won't let you come with me," she whispered.

"What? What do you... wait, back up. You want me to go with you to therapy? I don't think that's how therapists work."

"Blue..." I waited patiently. "I know they're going to want me to talk about feelings and shit. And probably my Mom. Or what happened with Amy."

"Okay, and?"

She looked at me. "How am I supposed to do that without you? I can't do that with anyone! You're the first person in my life that's ever... I need you to come with me!"

"Why don't you try it for a while and see how it goes? I'll go with you and sit outside, okay?"

"It's not going to work!"

It did not work. After her third session the therapist came out to meet me.

"So, you're the infamous 'Blue Girl' who is the only thing Jo will talk about in sentences longer than a word or two. I'm Dr. Allen, it's nice to meet you." He was an older man, with a neatly trimmed beard and steel rimmed glasses.

"You too. Call me Jill, please. I take it it's not going well in there?"

"No, not really. I can't tell if it's trauma from the incident or something else. But anytime I try to get her to talk to me about anything other than the weather she shuts right down. Except for asking if you can come in. I take it you two are close?"