Barbara's Journey

At Hell's Gate

A mother's very worst nightmare was about to begin ...

I emerged from my shower to hear the familiar “oh-oh” of an ICQ message. My sister had just come online from her home in Arizona. Clad in my robe and a towel fashioned into a turban over my wet hair, I rushed over to the keyboard to respond. We chatted about this and that; not much was going on for either of us that day.

The doorbell rang and I almost jumped out of my skin. Who would be visiting me in the middle of the day? I peered out a window toward the parking area to see a white car parked behind my Mirage. Lights flashing, red and blue…a police car.

Fear gripped me as I recalled spending sprees from months earlier. I had made good on most of the checks, but there were still two or three outstanding.

The doorbell shrieked over and over and eventually stopped. I stood, frozen, for a few minutes, then tiptoed over to the window. The white patrol car was still there. I could see a female officer standing by the open car door, talking on the radio. She glanced toward my car, probably reciting my license plate number over the wire.

Well, that wouldn’t get her very far. The vehicle was not registered to me. I was convinced that once she got that information, she would leave, assuming I was not home. But that’s not how it went down.

The officer returned to the doorbell, persisting until I finally yanked the door open. She saw me in my robe and turban and said, “I’m sorry to get you out of your shower, but you need to call this detective in Madison.” She offered a slip of paper with a name and phone number printed neatly on it.

“It’s about your daughter,” she continued. “She is in the hospital and it’s serious. I can come in and sit with you while you make the call, if you like.”

“What happened?” I asked quickly. “Has she been in an accident?”

She responded, “I don’t have details, but she is in critical condition at University Hospital.”

Then I remembered my hassle of the previous day with the phone company…they had disabled my phone for long distance effective that morning. “I can’t call Madison,” I said. “My phone bill is overdue, so I can only make local calls, no long distance.”

The officer offered me her cell phone. I couldn’t dial the number, so she took the slip of paper, punched the keys in proper sequence and handed the phone back to me.

“I regret having to tell you this,” came the voice over the line. “Your daughter attempted to take her life with a handgun.”

“A…what? …gun? It can’t be! My daughter hates guns. When did this happen? Is she…?”

“She is in surgery,” the detective responded. “But it’s very serious. It is likely she won’t make it. You should get to Madison as soon as you can. The 911 call came in at about ten-thirty this morning. I left the hospital at one o’clock and she was still in surgery.”

I began pacing, talking in fragmented sentences about how my daughter has suffered from depression for almost a decade, about how we had tried to get help for her on numerous occasions, but were unable to get effective treatment for her. I told the officer that she would never have a gun, that someone must have brought the gun to her apartment. I asked where the gun had come from, if they had traced it. I begged the officer to call the hospital for me to inquire about my daughter’s condition.

“Please try to calm down, Barbara,” the officer said. “Is that your car out there?”

“Yes, it is,” I responded. “But I can’t drive to Madison today. The car is not registered. Can I drive it like that?”

“I would,” the officer replied. “But it might be best if you could have someone drive you. You really are in no state of mind to drive. Do you have a friend who can take you to Madison?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll call Charlene. She can drive me.”

I dialed Char’s number. Busy. I tried again. Still busy. The officer offered to go to Char’s house and tell her I needed her.

I got dressed and waited. The phone rang. It was the police officer, calling to inform me that Char was not home but that her husband had promised to have her call me as soon as she arrived home.

I sat, then paced, tried to calm myself but was soon pacing again; I was a bundle of nerves for the entire afternoon as I waited. I had years before given up on God as anything more than myth, but on that afternoon in February of 2000, I prayed for the first time in three decades.

My daughter survived surgery and was resting in a curtained cubicle in the Trauma and Life Support Center of University Hospital by seven o’clock that evening. I had arrived at the hospital shortly before she was brought up after surgery. The trauma surgeon met with me in the chaplain’s office.

“We need you to identify her,” he said. “We believe it is your daughter, but we must have formal identification before we can be certain.”

I had a brief moment of hope that it was all a mistake, that it was not my daughter after all. “She is tall and slim,” I said. “She has long red hair.”

“There is no hair,” he responded. “And her face is not recognizable. You must be prepared for what you will see. It is very bad, and you need to know that before you go in. Just keep in mind that all the physical damage can be repaired. We can fix her face, so her appearance should not be your main concern. It’s brain damage that we need to be concerned about.”

I cannot find words to describe what I was feeling at that time. I was in shock, but I understood that my daughter lay in coma, severely disfigured from a gunshot wound to the head, and that she was on a ventilator and her condition was critical but stable.

The bullet had been lodged in her brain above her left eyebrow and I was told that it had actually been relatively easy to remove. Brain damage from the injury itself was not thought to be significant; however, potential damage from brain swelling that could be expected over the next few days was a major concern.

I was somehow able to function that evening, able to ask the right questions and give appropriate responses to questions asked of me. But the entire evening had a surreal kind of quality. It didn’t feel like reality at all; I felt as though I was standing in a corner of the chaplain’s office quietly observing myself interact with him and the various surgeons as they arrived one or two at a time, made their statements, and left.

Throughout the day, I had used my computer to place long-distance calls to my cousin Kathy, as she had always been close to my daughter, but I had been able to do no more than leave messages on her answering machine to the effect that my daughter was in trouble and was at University Hospital.

Alone in the chaplain’s office, I attempted once again to reach Kathy by phone. I had no way of knowing that she had arrived home, had listened to my phone messages, and was at that moment in the hospital, one floor below me, where she was being told by emergency room staff that “no patient by that name has been admitted to this hospital.”

The reason for that, of course, was that positive identification had not yet been made, because I had been unable to enter my daughter’s room. I had tried several times to do so, accompanied by the hospital chaplain, but each time my legs felt like rubber and my heart raced to where I was certain I was about to have a heart attack.

It was well after midnight before I finally spoke with Kathy on the phone, and I told her I was about to see my daughter for the first time since she had been admitted to the Trauma and Life Support Center. At Kathy’s insistence, I waited for her, and we went in together at three o’clock in the morning.

She looked like an alien being, with her predominant feature being bulging purple-black eyelids. Her head was enormously swollen, her shattered skull wrapped in gauze. They had been unable to open her eyelids due to the swelling, but I was told that she no longer had eyes, that “the orbs simply could not have survived the trauma.”

Somehow, though, I knew better. The doctors were going on what they knew from similar traumas, but what they didn’t know was that I had been praying and receiving answers. When they said her eyes were gone, I knew they were wrong, though it is impossible for me to explain how I knew. I have since referred to it as a voice in my head saying not to worry, but it wasn’t really a voice - it was just a serene imparting of knowledge.

Three days later, the chief ophthalmology surgeon came to her room and was able to open her eyelids.

“Well, it’s quite amazing that her eyes have survived,” he said. “But the line of fire was straight up, directly behind her eyes, and the optic nerves cross in the middle. Her optic nerves have been shattered. She is totally blind.” I knew he was mistaken, but I said nothing.

Four days after her injury, my daughter suffered a brain bleed. It required emergency surgery and, if the injury itself had not damaged her brain, the bleed and the accompanying extremely high cranial pressures were certain to cause significant permanent brain damage.

I listened calmly to the neurosurgeon as he informed me that my daughter had absolutely no chance at life. He said that if she survived, she would be “apathetic, blind, deaf, mute, and so brain-damaged that she will never again have cognition of who, what, or where she is.”

Again, I knew better - somehow.

Two weeks after the injury, doctors suggested I remove life support, and I agreed to do so. My daughter and I had spoken previously about the issue of life support, so I knew that she would not want to be kept alive by machine. I told God that I would accept her dying if it was His will. However, I told Him in no uncertain terms that if it was His will that she live, it had to be a life worth living, that I would never accept her surviving to a life without joy, a life of apathy.

With the ventilator off, doctors expected her to die within minutes. However, the minutes that she breathed on her own became hours, hours became days, days became weeks.

The weeks have now stretched to over a year and a half, and she is still recovering. She has full cognition, is not blind, is not deaf, and once surgery is done on her face, she will be able to speak. She communicates by writing and by a modified form of sign language which she has taught herself since her injury - quite an accomplishment for one who was never expected to have cognition of who, what, or where she is. She has all memories except of the shooting itself, several days leading up to it, and the subsequent weeks in coma. She has her sense of humor and a mischievous sparkle in her eyes! She is learning to walk again. However, she has yet to have reconstructive surgery.

Because she had been predominantly depressed, my daughter had always been treated as unipolar, even after she began to show manic symptoms. She was not depressed at the time of the shooting. I knew she was manic at times. Her friends had seen it, too. But since her symptoms were not those of classic mania, her psychiatrist never noticed and, because she was legally an adult, I had no voice in regard to her treatment.

So now she sits almost two years later, pleading again for proper medical intervention. She waits for surgeries that were promised many months ago. “We can fix her face,” they said. But so far, that has not happened for her.

I am doing what I can to advocate on her behalf, and I will admit that patience has never been one of my virtues. Her case is in the hands of surgeons with phenomenal skills and expertise, and I know she will get her surgeries in time. But I also know all too well that persons with mental disorders are often held liable for their illness. And that prompts me to ask: Could it be that my daughter is no surgeon’s priority for reconstructive surgeries only because her injury was self-inflicted? Could this be stigma rearing its ugly head once again?

Published 2000, reviewed Feb 13, 2008