Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [100]
Kobrine weighed his options and then made his decision. He replaced the bone flap and stitched up Brady’s head. After a brief stop in the recovery room, the press secretary was sent to the intensive care unit on the hospital’s fourth floor.
Sarah Brady stayed at her husband’s side all through the night. Several visitors came by, including Richard Allen, Brady’s friend and fellow commuter. Allen, whose wife, Pat, joined him at the hospital, was devastated by the press secretary’s condition. Blood seeped through the bandages on Brady’s head, which had swollen to the size of a basketball. The left side of his friend’s body twitched uncontrollably. Allen and his wife both hugged Sarah Brady, who then leaned over her husband and, calling him by his nickname, whispered in his ear, “Bear! Bear! It’s Dick and Pat—they’re here, Bear!”
Allen took Brady’s right hand in his own. He was stunned when the wounded press secretary squeezed back so hard it hurt. Emotion swept over him; for the first time that day, tears streamed down Allen’s face.
* * *
HOUR BY HOUR, the president’s condition improved. As if to keep his small audience entertained, he continued writing notes. In a barely legible chicken scratch, he quoted Winston Churchill’s famous line about how there was “nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” And in his innocent, movie-star way, he flirted with the nurses. A little after 11:30, he wrote to Denise Sullivan, “Does Nancy know about us?” Sullivan, a hazel-eyed thirty-four-year-old, laughed. She tried to put the note in her pocket, but a gruff Secret Service agent snatched it from her hands.
When the night shift began, two new nurses, Marisa Mize and Joanne Bell, took over the president’s care. While Bell monitored Reagan’s vital signs and updated his chart, Mize sat at the right side of his bed and held his hand. A few minutes after taking her seat, she saw that phlegm had become stuck in the president’s throat. Anxious and uncomfortable, he clutched at his breathing tube. After Mize patted his head and told him it was okay to be scared, she persuaded him to let go of the tube. Just as the other nurses did, she told him to let the machine breathe for him. And she, too, promised to stay with him.
“I’m going to hold your hand and not leave you,” she said.
Reagan gripped her right hand and didn’t let go. He wouldn’t take his eyes off her. His lids would droop and then shut, only to snap open again a moment later.
“Go to sleep,” Mize told him again and again. “I’m right here. I haven’t left.”
After finishing his latest surgery, Ben Aaron returned, still wearing his blood-tinged scrubs. He reviewed Reagan’s chart, talked for a moment with a nurse and another doctor, and then said something the president couldn’t quite make out.
Suddenly Reagan seemed frantic. “What did he mean ‘this is it’?” he wrote to Mize. “Will I like it?”
Mize could see that the president was frightened by whatever he thought Aaron had said. She guessed that Reagan believed that “this is it” meant that something terrible was about to happen.
“No, no, you are fine,” Mize said. “They are going to remove your breathing tube soon.”
Aaron told Zimmerman he was going to take a nap; he lay down on a nearby cot and fell instantly asleep. Zimmerman, too anxious to sleep, guzzled his sixth cup of coffee.
A few minutes later, Reagan struggled with the tube again. Calmly, Mize took his hand. “You have to let this machine breathe for you,” she reminded him.
Hoping to distract the president, Mize began talking a bit about herself. She told Reagan that she was from southern California