Miles To Go Before I Sleep (16 page)

In Minnesota, I had to meet with more doctors than I ever knew existed. Every time I turned around, it seemed, I had to see another doctor.

Knowing that our destination was Minnesota, the American doctor in Germany referred me to a prominent neurosurgeon at the University of Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis. I saw him at least once a week for the first few months after the hijacking. He and other doctors wanted to keep a careful watch over the status of remaining bone fragments lodged in my brain. I had to have regular CAT scans to check on the location of these fragments and make sure there weren't any major changes.

My neurosurgeon reminded me of an old German grandfather: he was all business and very stubborn. I always had the feeling he was in a hurry to get my examination over with so he could move on to his next patient. He had no time for my questions about my treatment or condition. His bedside manner was “Why are you asking questions? Just listen to me,
I'm
the doctor.” He was set in his ways, a man who knew everything.

It was hard for me to question his approach. I'd always looked up to doctors as authority figures. As the patient, I thought my job was to accept and do what they told me. In time, I came to appreciate how human they are.

On one visit to see my doctor, maybe three months after the hijacking, I was wearing a wig to cover my bald head—and feeling pretty good. The doctor walked right up to me and said, “Boy do you look good!” He immediately began running his hands through my hair, without giving me a chance to take off my wig. He searched, in vain, for my scar.

Can't he tell that I'm wearing a wig?
I wondered.
Can't he feel the little net?

I looked over at Scott, and he had his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. The doctor wasn't giving up.

Finally, he said, “Where is your scar?”

“Doctor,” I laughed, “I'm wearing a wig!”

I took it off and my hair was just barely growing back—my scar was so obvious.

“Oh, well, your scar is looking pretty good,” he said, still stone-faced.

Scott and I cracked up with laughter as we got in the car to leave the hospital.

What troubled me more than my doctor's lack of humor was my sense of not being heard when I talked about my ongoing health concerns. For example, I kept telling him about a problem with my neck. Anytime I moved my neck forward, the whole left side of my body went numb. He put me through some painful x-rays to diagnose the problem, but came up with nothing. He and several other doctors said I'd just have to learn to live with the problem. They said I had a brain dysfunction.

My first doctor had a pessimistic view of my future. He was convinced that I would never be able to work or drive again, or be able to live by myself. “There's no way you can drive with your vision,” he said. Though he didn't even know what level I was reading at, he said, “You're not going to be able to read any faster than you do now. What you have right now is what you're going to get.”

I wanted to change doctors, but I didn't know if or when I should. It would take time and energy for another doctor to become familiarized with the pages and pages and piles of stuff on my case.
Was it worth the risk of leaving someone who knew my medical history?

I scheduled an appointment with an educational diagnostician at the University of Minnesota. I wanted to know what my strengths and weaknesses were.

The first test she gave me was the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale, Revised or WAIS-R. As an educational diagnostician, I'd taken the test before and administered a similar version to hundreds of children in testing for learning disabilities.

A learning disability is a very specific type of learning problem. Before a student can be considered learning disabled (LD), I as a school psychologist had to first rule out the possibility that the child's learning difficulty was not caused by a physical disability (such as deafness or blindness), and/or environmental, cultural, or emotional problems. Students had to have a significant gap between their intellectual scores and reading and/or math achievement to be considered LD. If there's no gap, it may just be that the child is a slow learner.

While ignorant teachers and parents believe LD stands for “Lazy and Dumb,” the great irony is that LD kids have higher than average intelligence.

Some LD experts believe that many brilliant historical figures, including Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Woodrow Wilson, Socrates, and Leonardo da Vinci, could probably be classified as LD, based on the problems they had with formal schooling.

I went through an extensive two-year training in my master's degree program to be able to administer the WAIS-R. I was completely familiar with all aspects of the test and its scoring.

Under these conditions, there is no way that I could take the WAIS-R and have the results be considered valid. “You really shouldn't give me this test,” I objected. “I've given this test many times. It's not going to be valid.”

“We'll just see how it comes out anyway,” the tester said.

I felt hurt and patronized. I felt she was treating me like a child—not as an equal. Yet I felt helpless to do anything about it.

I went ahead and took the test, hoping the evaluator would still pick up on some of my learning problems. I puzzled over many questions on the WAIS-R. I could tell that my responses to some of the questions were different than they would have been before I was shot.

As I studied the words and pictures on the page, I'd get a sudden flash of insight and think,
Oh my God, I just did something significant. I just did something that was pretty weird.

I looked up, hoping the evaluator had caught it too. Though evaluators are always supposed to observe persons taking a diagnostic test, my tester wasn't watching me. She was busy scoring my previous test. I felt terrible.

I also saw myself in her. As a school psychologist and diagnostician, I often did the same thing. While kids were taking one test, I was grading the previous one. I wondered if my students felt as frustrated as I now did because nobody was paying attention to them or their learning process.

This testing session was frustrating in other ways. I knew something was wrong with my memory and vision. I couldn't see the words clearly. I was also working at a very slow pace.

I actually did fairly well on parts of a memory test. I was given two words like
dog
and
house
, then asked to recall them. By visualizing a picture of a dog sitting on top of the house, I often answered correctly. I had taught students this mnemonic technique to sharpen their memory. Unfortunately, using the technique now allowed me to mask a deeper problem: I wasn't recalling words; I was remembering pictures—a completely different mental process.

I asked the evaluator to give me another memory test, but she didn't think it was necessary. I was very disappointed. At the end of the testing session, I still didn't know what grade level I was at in reading or math because she didn't test my reading or math comprehension.

Little things that I had always taken for granted were now, suddenly, huge obstacles. Since all of my clothes had been left in Egypt or lost on the plane, June Pflug took me shopping one day to buy some new clothes. It wasn't easy walking around the mall where we went. I had to hold on to my mother-in-law to keep from falling sometimes.

After going to a few stores, June saw a pair of pants that she thought might look good on me. I went into the dressing room to try them on but came out crying.

I couldn't tell what they looked like on me. I only saw pieces of the pants in the mirror.

I knew something was terribly wrong with my ability to process information. I didn't feel any less intelligent than I had before getting shot in the head, but I knew I was slower in understanding things. I thought a lot about my years of teaching learning disabled kids, hoping that, somehow, I could draw upon that knowledge to get a handle on my situation.

Before the hijacking, my second job after college was teaching special education classes to second, third, and fourth graders at Bowie Elementary School in Baytown, Texas. This job taught me a lot more about learning disabilities and the frustrations of LD kids.

LD kids were smart enough, but they had a hard time doing simple things such as finding their way to and from the bathroom. I had to take them by the hand and lead them to the bathroom time and again. After a few times, I'd say, “Okay, do you think you can find the bathroom by yourself?”

They would nod their little heads “yes,” so I'd let them try going alone. I remember what happened to little Beth one time. She was a skinny, little girl who was quite a bit slower than the rest. She suffered from a lot of diseases.

I let Beth go to the bathroom by herself one time, but twenty minutes later, she wasn't back. “Now where is Beth? How could she be in the bathroom for twenty minutes?” I was worried.

I went looking, but Beth wasn't in the bathroom. I started roaming the halls. When I found Beth, obviously lost, she was crying. “I couldn't find the bathroom,” she said. She'd been wandering the halls all that time, unable to find her way back to the classroom to tell me she was lost.

Sometimes I lost patience with my students. “Why aren't you listening?” I'd ask. “Why aren't you paying attention?”

Oh, the irony.

IN JANUARY 1986, LESS THAN TWO MONTHS after the hijacking, I flew down to Houston for the first time since Scott and I were married. I was still too scared to go on a plane by myself, so I arranged to fly to Dallas with Scott's sister Margaret, who had to travel to Dallas-Fort Worth on business. Barb Wilson would fly to Dallas, meet me there, and then we'd fly to Houston.

It was scary being on a plane again. I cried when I sat down in my seat. Almost immediately, I found myself staring at other passengers' laps to check for guns and grenades. Somehow, I managed to settle down after a while.