Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [135]
Once she was home with me in League City, Gabby settled in very nicely and pretty happily. She was soon able to walk around the house unassisted. We’d also walk slowly around the neighborhood, and Gabby made it her mission to bend over and pick up every speck of trash she came upon. She was used to trying to make a difference in the world. Though her abilities were now limited, she was doing what she could.
Gabby was eager to contribute to the housework, too, by washing dishes, watering the plants, and doing the laundry. She strove to be self-sufficient.
One day, Kristy was the home nurse on duty and she saw Gabby struggling to fold laundry with her left hand. Gabby’s right hand, as usual, sat limp.
“Let me help,” Kristy offered.
At first Gabby rebuffed her, but then Gabby said, “Kristy, left hand.”
Kristy agreed to use only her left hand to fold the laundry. And so that’s how it went, the two of them using two hands between them to get the laundry folded.
Gabby didn’t mind that the piece of her bullet-scarred skull was in the freezer. In fact, when we’d have friends over, she’d sometimes walk to the freezer, pull it out, and show them. Some visitors were intrigued. Others were squeamish; one nearly fainted. Gabby got a kick out of seeing people’s reactions. (Hospital staffers in Tucson had also given me Gabby’s bloody hair, which was shaved off on January 8. The hair was in my backpack for a couple of days, but it was soaked with blood and started to smell. I threw it in a trash can in Tucson and it is now somewhere in an Arizona landfill.)
All of us in Gabby’s life kept getting indications that she understood pretty much everything and that her long-term memory was clear. Traveling in the car one day with Leslie, one of Gabby’s nurses, and two Capitol Police officers, we listened to the radio and played “Name That Tune.” We heard three songs, and Gabby got them all right. The first was AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” The second was “Only the Good Die Young” by Billy Joel. She was the only person in the car able to identify the band that performed the third song, “Amanda.” The band was Boston.
Such positive signs of Gabby’s cognitive strengths and sharp recall were tempered, however, by the frustrating moments between us, when she struggled to express herself. Sometimes, Gabby would try to communicate with me, saying the same word repeatedly, and I wouldn’t understand her point. She’d try again, and I’d still be lost. A few times, she was so discouraged that she put her head down on the table. On one especially frustrating day, I had to leave for an appointment. As I headed for the door I promised Gabby: “Listen, I’m going to think about what you were saying to me all day, and we’ll get back to it when I get home tonight. We’ll figure it out.”
Sometimes, Gabby was able to find her way to the right word on her own. One morning I said to Gabby, “What would you like to do today?”
She responded, “Hospital.”
I was surprised. “Why would you want to go to the hospital?”
She closed her eyes and thought for a long time, trying to pull out the appropriate word, and then she said, “Nursing home.”
She wanted to see my ninety-five-year-old grandmother in the nursing home where she lives, not far from our house. Whenever Gabby visited Houston, she had always tried to see my grandmother. So we got in the car and headed over there. My grandmother, who has some dementia, did most of the talking, and Gabby was happy to listen.
Sometimes, the communication failures between Gabby and me would last for hours, but then we’d finally figure it out and it was as if we’d struck gold. We felt like screaming “Eureka!”
One day, for instance, Gabby kept saying to me, “Block of time.”
I didn’t know what she was trying to tell me. “Block of time,” she said again. It went on like that for thirty minutes and I never understood her. Eventually, we had to give up.
Then, the next day, I said to her, “Hey, Gabby, I