Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [5]
Meanwhile, on the personal front, Gabby and I hoped that 2011 would be the year we finally could have a child together. Gabby knew it would have been tough to be pregnant or give birth during an election year. Her schedule was too crazy. She didn’t get enough sleep. We wouldn’t have enough time together. So our strategy had been to wait until the election was over.
Gabby, who turned forty in 2010, was in great health and her doctors assumed she could get pregnant naturally. The problem wasn’t her, it was me. I was a divorced father of two teenaged daughters when I married Gabby in 2007, and surgery to reverse my vasectomy hadn’t worked. So Gabby and I enrolled in a program where my sperm was harvested directly from me and mixed with eggs that were harvested from Gabby, who’d been taking fertility drugs. Our doctor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center said our chances for success were better than 40 percent.
We hoped Gabby would be pregnant by Valentine’s Day. We couldn’t have fathomed that instead she’d be in a hospital, trying to say the names of simple objects.
And yet, when Gabby and I look back at the week before she was shot, we see certain moments that foreshadowed the life we’re now living.
Gabby and I had gone to Rome for four days just before New Year’s, touring the country with Gabby’s parents, Gloria and Spencer. They’re terrific traveling companions; they love art and food and meeting people from other cultures. Gloria, as a gifted painter and longtime art conservator and historian, was like our own private tour guide for the trip. It was a short but lovely vacation. We saw the Pope at midnight mass. We toured museums. We ate at great restaurants.
Spencer, who has had degenerative disc injuries in his back, was mostly in a wheelchair in those days, and it usually fell to me to push him wherever we were going in Rome. That wasn’t easy. He weighs about 250 pounds and the streets and sidewalks weren’t exactly smooth. At one point we visited a spot near the Coliseum where the Romans used to hold chariot races, and Gabby got a kick out of watching me push her father around. “It’s like my dad is the chariot and you’re filling in for the horses,” she said, laughing.
After Gabby’s injury, when I’d push her in her wheelchair, I’d sometimes think of that trip to Italy, and I was grateful that Gabby is less than half her father’s weight. “Remember how I had to push your dad up those hills in Rome?” I’d say to her. “In comparison, pushing you is a breeze.”
Gabby and I have a lot of nice memories of Rome, including just relaxing in bed together in our room in the small hotel. It was pretty romantic. The window was open, with the sounds of Italy rising from the streets below, and we found ourselves talking about what our marriage would look like in the year ahead, and in the years after that.
“Our lives are so full now,” I said at one point. “Just finding time to be together takes all this scheduling. Adding a baby to the mix is going to increase the magnitude of everything.”
But Gabby was undaunted by the prospect of motherhood. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “We’ll find solutions. I’m not worried. I’m excited.”
That’s how Gabby had run her entire life. I’d learned not to doubt her ability