Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve (14 page)

It was just after five one morning, and as three physical ther- apists slowly maneuvered Chris into his wheelchair, he was once again turning those agonizing “what if ?” thoughts over and over in his mind—“What if I had gone sailing instead? What if I’d kept my hands free and not let them get tangled up in the reins? What if I hadn’t leaned so far forward in the saddle?”

Before he could ask where he was going, Chris was being pushed down the hall and into an elevator. Moments later the elevator doors opened, and there was Dana, standing by the win- dow. “Hi, babe,” she said, pointing to the view. “Pretty, don’t you think?” Suddenly, they were alone—not a nurse or aide in sight. Dana took her husband’s unfeeling hand in hers, and together they stared, silently, as the sun rose over the Virginia countryside. These precious moments would help Chris as he came to the realization that, after the operation, he could still feel nothing be- low his shoulders. In addition to not being able to move his legs, arms, or hands, Chris could not breathe on his own, or control

bladder and bowel movements.

So for the next five weeks, Chris would begin to learn what it was like to have to rely on others for virtually everything. Someone would have to feed him, bathe him, shave him, comb his hair, brush his teeth, and dress him. He would need people to help him urinate and defecate, and then to dispose of his waste. These were painful, often humiliating and even degrading aspects of his new life, but Chris realized he had no choice but to face them and move on.

In the meantime, only those few hours each night when he could manage some sleep provided him with some form of es- cape. It was then that he dreamt he was sailing to Nantucket, or flying solo across the Atlantic, or skiing down a mountainside— or gliding over a fence astride Buck. Or making love to Dana. The last Wednesday in June, Chris had come far enough to leave the hospital for the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, New Jersey. Just forty minutes west of Manhattan,

Kessler was one of the country’s premier rehabilitation centers for those suffering from severe spinal cord injuries.

Dana had gone ahead to prepare the way. She arranged for Chris to have a private room—room 118, one of the largest and nicest the institute had to offer. Security guards in dark suits and sunglasses had also been provided by the institute to protect their star patient. Dana had put up a poster of the space shuttle
Dis- covery
lifting off the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. “We found nothing is impossible” was scrawled across the top of the poster, along with signatures of each and every NASA astronaut.

Before they left, Dana thanked everyone at the University of Virginia Medical Center for all they had done for Chris. “She was so gracious and grateful and just delightful,” Dr. Nadkarni said. “We were all very dazzled by her.”

Once Chris was settled in at Kessler, Dana drove herself home to Bedford. She had been gone for six weeks, but it seemed like an eternity. As she got out of the car and walked up the drive toward the front door, Dana choked back the tears. There were the steps that Chris used to take three at a time. There was the lawn where father-and-son games of tag always ended with Daddy tossing Will up in the air and then playfully rolling in the grass.

“It was almost too much to take—just realizing that these things probably weren’t ever going to happen again,” she later said of that moment. But then, Dana spotted the butterfly house Chris had given her for her birthday. The wildflower seeds that Dana had given up on so long ago had exploded into a riot of purples, pinks, and blues. “Oh, you have got to be kidding!” she said, wiping away

a tear. The wildflowers were more than merely beautiful; they had not only survived adversity—they were flourishing.

Dana got on the phone right away and called her husband at Kessler. A nurse put the call on speaker phone. “You remember the butterfly house you bought me for my birthday—and those wildflower seeds?” she asked.

“Sure,” Chris replied.

“Well, the wildflowers are out of control! Wildflowers gone wild.”

“You’re kidding,” Chris said. “Gee . . .”

“And there are butterflies
everywhere
.” For a moment, there was just silence between them. “We both knew what it meant,” Dana later said of the butterfly house and the wildflowers. “It wasn’t just about seeds and wildflowers and butterflies. It was a real sign of something we both needed so much at that moment. It was a real sign of hope.”

—Chris

—Jamaican hospital aide “Juice” Miller to Chris whenever Dana walked into the room

—Chris

—Will

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ana leaned over to wipe the spaghetti sauce off Will’s chin. They had said good night to Chris at six-thirty—his pre- scribed bedtime during recovery—and now they were sitting at a front window table in West Orange’s Eagle Rock Diner. “It was

fun seeing Daddy today, wasn’t it?” she asked. “Yes,” Will nodded emphatically. “It was.”

They had no way of knowing that, back at Kessler, doctors and nurses were scrambling in a frantic effort to save Chris’s life. This time, he had suffered a reaction to a new spinal cord regeneration drug and gone into anaphylactic shock. His breathing stopped, and for a few moments Chris was floating above his body, watching as everyone worked over what appeared to be his lifeless form—the classic out-of-body experience.

Then one of the doctors administered epinephrine, and Chris was suddenly jolted back into his body. Gasping for breath, he was

lifted onto a stretcher and taken by ambulance to St. Barnabas Hospital in nearby Livingstone.

“Look!” Will yelled to his mother, pointing out the restaurant window. “An ambulance!”

“Yes, that’s an ambulance all right,” Dana said, wincing as the sound of the siren pierced the night air. “Now finish your din- ner.” It was only when she returned to Kessler to check up on Chris before going home to Bedford that she learned that the am- bulance that had sped by the restaurant was carrying her husband. Rushing to St. Barnabas, Dana was taken to intensive care.

There, she saw Glenn “Juice” Miller, one of Chris’s favorite phys- ical therapy aides, sitting at her husband’s bedside. Nicknamed Juice by the Kessler staff because of his talent for whipping up phenomenal tropical fruit smoothies in a blender, Miller had been badly shaken by Chris’s brush with death. When Dana arrived, they were both overcome with emotion. “It was a close call,” he told her in a thick Jamaican accent. “A real close call.”

Incredibly, Chris, determined to be able to withstand the drug that might repair damage to his spine, asked to be given a second dose. He promptly began to go into shock again, and was quickly brought back with yet another injection of epinephrine.

Just a few days earlier, Chris and Dana had toasted the eighth anniversary of their first meeting in Williamstown with fruit juice. “We really had no idea,” she said, “of what Chris still faced.”

There would soon be other medical emergencies, as Chris learned just how all-pervasive a spinal cord injury could be. Bed- sores were a constant problem; one eventually grew to the size of a fist and penetrated to the bone. There were times when a kink in his catheter or a bowel obstruction sent his blood pressure soar-

ing, bringing him perilously close to a heart attack or stroke. His sweat glands no longer worked properly, so just a few too many minutes in the sun could result in heatstroke.

Beyond the poking and prodding by doctors, the endless tests, and the hours upon hours of physical therapy, even the most quo- tidian tasks suddenly seemed daunting. Eating, for example, was something that would be virtually impossible for the next five months. Having developed an overly strong olfactory sense—not unusual in the case of spinal cord injuries—Chris was sickened by the smell of practically all food. When Dana surprised him with Chinese takeout, he was so nauseated by the smell that, Dana later recalled, “I had to eat it in the bathroom.” Until his departure later that year, Chris remained on a feeding tube im- planted directly into his stomach.

Being moved from the bed to his wheelchair yielded new anx- ieties for Chris. When Juice and the other aides tried to coax him into his new $40,000 wheelchair for the first time—a maneuver that involved unhooking him from the ventilator on his bed and hooking him up to the one on the chair—he was gripped by fear. He could not shake the idea that somehow the transfer might not work—that he would black out before he could be reattached to the ventilator on the chair.

No matter what Dana said to try to reassure him, Chris was inconsolable. That he should suddenly become so upset about something so innocuous baffled her—until she realized that he was still feeling the effects of having almost died from anaphy- lactic shock. “That’s what this is all about,” she told the doc- tors. “Chris feels even more vulnerable now than he did after the accident.”

Eventually, Dana and Juice would coax Chris into the Quickie P300 model wheelchair, which Chris could control by either blowing into or sipping from a plastic straw. Within a few weeks, he would be zooming through the hallways at Kessler, sending or- derlies and doctors alike scattering as he learned to maneuver the vehicle with a few puffs of air.

In the meantime, there were other phobias to overcome. The idea of showering—of placing himself in a situation where he might be helpless to avoid drowning—terrified Chris. One night, he finally relented. But he would only shower if Dana was on hand to make sure nothing went wrong.

“So,” Dana announced playfully as she entered the room. “Tonight’s the big night!” Juice did the heavy lifting, transferring Chris from the wheelchair into a hammocklike net that would suspend his body under the shower.

Seeing that her husband was still terrified, Dana, fully clothed, stepped inside the shower stall with him. “I want us to take a shower together as much as you do,” she cracked, standing out of the spray so that only the bottoms of her pant legs would get wet. “But this is ridiculous!”