Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (13 page)

Guarding Dana would also prove to be a challenge. When it soon became evident that moving from one hotel to another to avoid the paparazzi was pointless, Becky Lewis moved out of her own apartment and turned it over to Dana and Will. Lewis also arranged for two different rental cars to be available each day, so that Dana would never arrive and depart the hospital in the same vehicle.

Dana was far too preoccupied to deal with the demands of a ravenous press. Not only had she been trying to absorb the medical details of her husband’s condition, but she had been spending hours by his bedside simply holding his motionless, unfeeling hand and singing to him. And whatever strength she had left she devoted to making things as normal as possible for their son.

The effect all this was having on Will was obvious. In the be- ginning he was terrified of the big machines that Daddy was hooked up to and the whooshing and beeping sounds they made. In the hospital playroom just a few doors down, he kept falling off the toy horse and yelling that he had broken his neck.

“Well, your neck is OK, but Dad’s neck is not,” Dana told him. She later recalled that Will “had this fear, as small children do, that he would catch his father’s illness or that I would get sick.”

Over the course of those few days, it fell to Dana to try to allay her son’s anxieties, while holding her own in check. “You see,” she told Will as she led him into Chris’s room, “Daddy is just lying

down, that’s all. All these machines are good guys—they’re help- ing Daddy to breathe.”

Reassured, Will went back to the Omni Hotel and did some- thing he never dared to do during all those Water Babies classes back in Mt. Kisco. With Matthew and Alexandra looking proudly on, he jumped from the side of the hotel pool without having to be coaxed. “It was amazing,” Dana told Chris later. “Once he con- quered the fear of your being in the ICU, the other stuff must have seemed small to him. He wasn’t afraid of the water anymore. He was suddenly this brave little guy who couldn’t wait to jump out as far as he could and to duck his head beneath the surface. He’d come up for air smiling away.”

After four days of relative silence, Dana gave the green light to a press conference. Dr. Jane was no stranger to television; he was one of the featured surgeons on the Learning Channel se- ries
The Operation.
Stepping before TV cameras on the morning of Wednesday, May 31, Jane told the world that Chris “currently has no movement or spontaneous respiration.” Although the spinal cord had not actually been severed, Jane explained, an op- eration would soon be required to “stabilize the upper spine.” There was an added complication: Chris was now suffering from pneumonia, and no surgery could be performed until his lungs cleared up. Beyond that, Jane added, “it is premature to specu- late about his long-term prognosis.”

Representing Chris’s extended family, Ben Reeve stepped for- ward to extend thanks for “expressions of goodwill from so many people.” (In the end, Chris would receive more than 400,000 let- ters of support from around the globe.) “We do not know what

lies ahead,” Ben said. “It means everything to Christopher to have all your thoughts and good wishes.”

The grim news spawned headlines that ran the gamut from lurid to merely shocking. While the
Washington Post
announced “RIDING ACCIDENT PARALYZES ACTOR CHRISTO-

PHER REEVE,” the full-page headlines in the
New York Post
went from “VIGIL FOR SUPERMAN: FAMILY GATHERS AS MYSTERY DEEPENS OVER STRICKEN ACTOR” to“SU- PERMAN PARALYZED: HE MAY NEVER WALK AGAIN.”

The New York
Daily News
blared “BROKEN DREAMS: OUT- LOOK GRIM FOR SUPERMAN STAR.” The title of
People
magazine’s cover story waxed more poetic: “FALLEN RIDER— AN ACCIDENT LEAVES CHRISTOPHER REEVE FIGHT- ING FOR HIS LIFE.”

The family and hospital staff did what they could to protect Dana from the news accounts, but it quickly became evident that the effort was futile. News reports on Chris’s condition flashed on every TV screen in the hospital, not to mention the front-page stories with headlines like “SUPERMAN’S FIGHT FOR LIFE” and “HOPE SLIM FOR SUPERMAN” that were springing up everywhere. “There was no escaping it,” Dana said, “but that was OK. It was nice to know people cared, and I was just too busy dealing with more important things to really dissect everything that was being written.”

Dana made sure Chris was shielded from all the mayhem that was going on outside his room. It was frightening enough that he now faced an operation for which there was only a 50 per- cent chance of survival. “I’m so worried about his state of mind,”

Dana confided to one of Chris’s doctors. “I know he’s terrified and depressed—God, he has every right to be—but I don’t want that to hurt his chances of pulling through this.”

Dana did what she could to lift his spirits, ushering friends and relatives in (the staff was told to weed out imposters by asking visitors if they knew Dana’s nickname for Chris—“Toph”), read- ing from the thousands of letters of support, and of course bring- ing Will by to tell Daddy about the day’s events. But when he woke up alone after midnight, Chris was left to imagine the worst. All Dana could think of to do was to bring in a bed and sleep alongside him in the room—“so that when he wakes up, I’ll be right there.”

“They were very clearly a
team,
” Dr. Nadkarni said, adding that neither displayed “the sense of entitlement” common to many celebrity patients. “The way she would clap her hand on his shoul- der, the way he was always looking at her whenever she was in the room—it was really something.”

One morning Dana had stepped away for a few minutes, when, without warning, a doctor wearing a yellow surgical gown, glasses, and a blue scrub hat burst into the room and announced in a thick Russian accent that he was the hospital’s chief proctologist. Then, snapping a surgical glove on his hand with a theatrical flourish, he announced that he was there to give Chris an immediate rec- tal exam.

“I’m just goink to haff to, just go down, hold on . . .”

It was only then that, catching a closer look at the face beneath the glasses, Chris realized that the “chief proctologist” was his old buddy Robin Williams. As Chris wept with laughter—it was the first time he had laughed since winding up in the hospital—Dana

and Robin’s wife, Marsha, poked their heads into the room. No one knew better than Dana the powerful effect Robin’s special brand of manic humor had on Chris. It was her idea for Williams to visit in the days before the operation, and that the visit be a complete surprise.

After Chris had stopped laughing, the two friends talked. “So,” Williams asked, half in jest, “what’s going on?”

“Well, there’s a big debate going on,” Chris mouthed, “about whether or not to pull the plug.”

“Yeah?” Williams said.

“But then I saw Dana and Will,” Chris struggled to explain, “so I decided to stick around.”

Williams tried to remain upbeat, but he also wanted his pal from the days at Juilliard to know that he was there for him. “Chris,” he said, “you know I’ll do anything for you, man. Any- thing.” On one other occasion, recalled hospital administrator Becky Lewis, Robin’s mood turned serious. “Is my friend,” Williams asked John Jane, “going to be OK, Doctor?” Otherwise, Williams devoted himself to keeping up his friend’s spirits. When basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal sent Chris a pair of his size twenty-two sneakers, Robin hung them up on Chris’s IV stand and began praying “to the god of Shaq’s shoes.”

Dana’s strategy worked. Robin Williams’s visit gave Chris re- newed confidence that he could not only survive but, as Chris later said, “live a life that was worth living.”

The kids were a big part of that realization, as well. What- ever thoughts of suicide lingered, they were finally dispelled when Dana sent all three of Chris’s children in to see him. “The minute they all came in,” Chris remembered, “and I could see

the love and feel the love and know that we were still a family and that we’re great, and how lucky we all are that my brain is on straight, that thought vanished—and it has never come back.”

While Chris lay facedown on the operating table for more than eight hours, Dana kept herself busy with Will in a hospital playroom. When Chris finally emerged from surgery, Dana was shocked at what she saw. His face was bruised and swollen, his eyes reddened slits. The doctors explained that this was the nat- ural result of trauma resulting from the surgery, and that in less than a day his face would return to normal. This time Dana, who had somehow managed to remain stoic even while everyone around her dissolved in tears, was visibly shaken.

She was not the only one. As soon as he could mouth the words, Chris said to Dr. Jane, “I want to thank you for giving me life.” Tears were streaming down the surgeon’s face when he left the room.

Her husband’s battered appearance was not the only thing that pushed Dana over the edge. Will was to turn three the day after his father’s surgery, and Dana busied herself ordering the cake, hiring the clown, wrapping presents, and blowing up balloons for the lit- tle boy’s birthday party at the nearby Boar’s Head Inn. By this time, the UVA staff—Becky Lewis, Drs. Jane, Henson, and Nadkarni as well as the nurses and orderlies—were like family to Will, and they brought along other children Will’s age to help him celebrate.

“Will had a wonderful time,” one of the nurses said. “It was great to see his little face light up when he opened his gifts. But when he opened the ones Dana said were from Daddy, you

know, everyone’s heart just sort of sank. He’d just come out of surgery and it was still touch and go.” Dana “must have been worried out of her mind, but she never let on for one second. You couldn’t help but have enormous respect for her.”

Dana videotaped the party for Chris, and when he had re- covered sufficiently from the operation, she thought she’d sur- prise him with it. But when he saw strangers singing “Happy Birthday” to his son, Chris began weeping. “It’s hard to watch,” he mouthed to Dana. “Very hard . . .”

“She was absolutely remarkable from Day One,” recalled Dr. Jane. “Dana was
constant
. She played an optimistic, supportive role and was absolutely loving towards him one hundred percent of the time.”

Yet over the next few weeks, Chris would endure many dark nights of the soul. He would awake around 2
A
.
M
. when his seda- tive wore off, and remain alert for the next five hours—time to dwell on the horror of being trapped inside his body, and of the magnitude of the “colossally stupid” mistake he felt he had made. “I’m an idiot, a fool,” he thought to himself. “Look what I’ve done to myself, to Dana, to my whole family.” This was, Chris later admitted, the realization of a fear he had harbored for years—that someday the headlines would read “SUPERMAN HIT BY BUS.” Now it was really happening, only the headlines were “SUPERMAN IS PARALYZED.”

Dana tried her best to help Chris cope with the “demon hours,” as he called them. But there was no way she could be with Chris twenty-four hours a day and at the same time care for Will. Nor could she always be on hand to assist her husband when he was faced with a real medical emergency.

One of the things Chris came to fear most was the “pop- off”—when the hose providing him with life-sustaining oxygen simply popped off the ventilator. Once that happens, the patient can survive on his own for no more than three or four minutes. Not able to move or cry out, Chris prayed that the nurses on duty were paying attention to the alarm that sounded and would rush in to reconnect him. Later, while undergoing rehabilitation at an- other facility, Chris would have his worst experience with a pop- off when a security guard heard the alarm, came in, and then left to get a nurse—wasting precious moments when he could sim- ply have switched on the light and reconnected the hose to the machine.

“The alarm is sounding on my vent,” Chris remembered, “and I’m making this clicking noise with my throat—clk, clk, clk—and the security guy comes in and asks, ‘Are you all right, Mr. Reeve?’ The vent is screaming, and I’m clicking. All he needed to do was put the hose back in place, but I guess his in- structions were that his job was security, so he goes off to get a nurse.”

That time Chris was gripped by panic as he began to lose con- sciousness—“I thrashed around . . . I was like a tuna fish landed in a boat, rolling around with the hook still in my mouth”—all before a nurse sprinted to his rescue.

Dana took it upon herself to check on the connections per- sonally—to make sure the nurses had taped the hose securely to the ventilator, and that they were able to respond quickly if an alarm went off. “She was his guardian and protector from the very start,” said one staff member. “Dana was never rude or over- bearing, but she was on top of every detail when it came to

Christopher’s care. She asked lots of questions, and didn’t stop until she was satisfied with answers.”

Nor was anyone more perturbed than Dana when one news- paper suggested that a suicidal Chris had somehow been re- sponsible for disconnecting the ventilator hose himself. “God,” she said when she was shown the story. “Just what is it about the word ‘paralyzed’ that these people don’t understand?”

Once he was out of bed and in a wheelchair, Dana could wheel Chris down the corridor to what she called the “mail- room,” the little office the hospital had set up just for her. There, family members sorted through thousands of cards and letters, picking out the ones to read to Chris as he lay in bed. One of those that meant the most to Chris was from his old friend Kate Hepburn. In her typically cryptic fashion, Hepburn had simply written, “Let me know if I can do anything—My golly what a mess.” It was enough for Chris. “I know how much she cares,” he said. “It’s probably overwhelming for her.”

Although Dana had every right to be overwhelmed, she re- fused to allow that to happen. When hospital officials offered the services of a massage therapist on the staff, Dana declined. “I’m afraid if I let go,” she told Becky Lewis, “I’ll just cry and cry and never stop.” Dana “knew she was in a perfect storm,” Lewis said, “and she was determined to keep sailing forward.”