Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [13]
“Nice to see you,” Gabby said. “Thanks so much for coming.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Things We Have in Common
From the moment we met, Gabby and I were good at talking to each other frankly. We both come from families of straight shooters. Our parents, my brother, Gabby’s sister—they all say it as they see it. There’s not much tiptoeing. If you’re annoying, you hear about it. If you’re complaining, you’re reminded to quiet down; things could be worse.
But all of us changed a little after Gabby was injured. We all saw the great pain she was in, and the awful frustration she felt, living without language. The natural impulse was to feel sorry for her, of course, to think about all she had lost. But early on, I made a decision to try hard to resist that, and I asked others to do the same. I’d warn people to leave their long faces at the door when visiting Gabby at the rehab hospital in Houston. I even posted rules, one of which was “No crying.”
I also tried to cheer up Gabby when she was down. The woman I’d fallen in love with years earlier was the most positive person I’d ever met, and I wanted her to hold on tight to that piece of herself. To help her, I realized, I’d have to talk her through it.
During our courtship and marriage, I’d say Gabby did 60 or 70 percent of the talking when we were together. She had a lot to say. Now I was handling 95 percent of every conversation. But rather than give her upbeat pep talks over and over, sometimes it helped if I just told her about stories in the news or about life outside the hospital. I’d also give her the details of my day, good or bad. Though words failed her, Gabby still could understand pretty much everything I said.
One evening in early April, three months after she was injured, I got to the hospital after a couple days in Florida, where I was training for the shuttle mission. I immediately saw that Gabby was depressed. The reason: She’d been having difficulty making it to the bathroom in time after she’d gotten into bed for the night. There had been close calls.
Getting her off the mattress was something of an ordeal then. The nurse had to help her sit up, a slow process given that Gabby could hardly move her right side. Then the nurse had to find Gabby’s helmet and carefully strap it on her head. Gabby couldn’t go anywhere without a helmet, even if she was just getting into or out of her wheelchair, because if she fell, she might hit the part of her head where her skull had been removed. A fall could be deadly.
All of this maneuvering meant that it was a while before Gabby would finally get on her way. So, just as a precaution, the nurses had been putting her in adult pull-ups before she went to bed.
“Last night, Gabby didn’t make it to the bathroom in time, and she’s upset about it,” one of the nurses told me when I arrived.
I walked over to Gabby and sat down. “Awful. Awful,” she said. She was agitated. She felt humiliated.
I understood that she didn’t like having to wear those pull-ups, and being so dependent on others. Anyone in a hospital setting loses a measure of dignity, and Gabby was in for a long stay. It was clear that this latest trip to the bathroom was an episode that spooked her. She knew she had waited too long to alert the nurse that she needed to go, and she feared it would happen again.
I didn’t want Gabby to sit around feeling depressed. So I told her a story about my long, tough day of training at the Kennedy Space Center. My story was partly for entertainment value, and partly because, well, I thought I could offer her perspective.
My crew and I had been inside space shuttle Endeavour for what we call TCDT: Terminal Countdown Test. “This is where we practice the launch count,” I explained to Gabby. “We’re on the launchpad, in the space shuttle, and the test takes us all the way up to the moment when the engines start.”
When we get suited up to fly into space—or when we do this countdown test—we spend nearly six hours in what NASA calls “launch and entry suits.” Those are