Chapter 15

Dear Dave,

I will meet many guardian angels along this journey. I met one today.

I wrote that in my DearDave Word document on our first day at Rush. It was true; from the Fargo ICU to the Rush ICU, to rehab and beyond, strangers and loved ones emerged to walk beside us and help us forward through the crisis. One of the first angels we met was at Rush, and his name was Omar.

Dr. Omar Lateef was a specialist in pulmonary and critical care medicine, and now served as the chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center. I remember, that first day, we kept hearing from our resident and attending physicians about some guy named Omar.

“Omar is on his way in.”

“Omar is at home with his family, but he’s driving in from the suburbs.”

“You have to meet Omar; he really wants to talk to you.”

So, our whole family sat down in a private conference room and we met Omar.

From that first day at Rush, Omar took Dave—and all of us—under his wing. We did not know it from Fargo, but Omar had had his hand in everything from facilitating the air ambulance ride to getting Dave a room at Rush on the neuro-ICU floor. Omar reserved the family conference room where we could congregate and where the young niece and nephews (who were not allowed onto the floor of the neuro-ICU) could gather and run around and nap. Omar had a tray of sandwiches waiting for us at dinnertime. When the national press began to sniff around the hospital, hoping for a photo from the ER, Omar added security and made sure that our privacy was protected. Omar ensured that all of Dave’s paperwork was done quickly and that all the parties from the Fargo ER to the Rush cardiology department to the insurance companies were working fluidly and efficiently together. As he does for each one of his patients, Omar worked to get Dave the best possible care and all the tests he needed as quickly as they were medically advisable.

At one point Omar took me aside. “Do you have out-of-town family? Friends? I know that if my wife were in your situation, she would need her mom with her. There’s just something about her with her mom—it’s like some secret language I can’t understand. So you make sure you have whomever you need with you here. Does anyone need a hotel room?” Omar then pulled out his personal credit card, and I realized that he was offering to book the hotel room for us. The man’s generosity was automatic, unthinking. “Anything we can do for you guys, you are family. Dave is one of our own.”

Even just thinking about it now makes me want to cry all over again. Especially touching was how available Omar made himself as a friend and confidant, approachable in spite of his busy schedule and his demanding role as a leader at the hospital. His style was a special and rare blend of compassion and understanding mixed with irreverent humor and stubborn hope. A husband, a father of three, a doctor, and a significant figure in the hospital administration, Omar somehow knew every patient by name. Even more remarkable, he knew each patient’s family members by name. He commented on my brother-in-law Mike’s new haircut! I truly do not know when the guy slept or ate; he would check in at all hours. He would stop by the hospital room and pull me out and give me pep talks when he could read the fatigue and sadness and worry on my face after a long day.

Omar gave us hope when there was very little reason to cling to any. He believed that Dave’s brain could heal, and that Dave’s recovery could be nothing short of our wildest hopes. “This is all so new and shocking to you, but let me tell you: we see this all the time.” There was something deeply reassuring about hearing that from Omar. It was not some platitude or cliché coming from someone who, though well meaning, really did not know what they were talking about. Omar knew what he was talking about. It was all so new and shocking to me. I could not believe any of it was happening. But to hear that Omar and his doctors had seen other people go through experiences this earth-shattering—to hear that people could survive and even recover—that normalized it a bit.

“And when this is all over, you and Dave are going to take me and my wife out for dinner, OK? You’ll leave the baby at home, because it’s impossible to enjoy a restaurant with the kids, wait and you’ll see. So, no kids. How do cheeseburgers sound?” Omar smiled and I agreed. “It’s a deal.”

I remember something else Omar said in the very beginning. He was speaking to me as a friend rather than a doctor, and he told me: “Pray. Pray to whatever deity you believe in, or ask the universe, or meditate—however you think of prayer. I really believe it helps in ways we can’t explain.”

Once, when Omar went far out on a limb to help us in an insurance dispute that could have been catastrophic had it not gone our way, I asked him: “Why are you helping us so much? As busy as you are, how can you possibly devote this much time and energy and care to our one case like this?”

“Because I believe it’s the right thing to do, not only as a doctor, but as a human being,” Omar told me. “And I believe in God, so I want to do God’s work. I want to do the right thing for people.”

The topic of faith and prayer had come up in various ways in my conversations with Omar, and so finally one day I asked him the question that had been on my mind: “You talk about prayer and faith a lot, and I agree with you. What faith do you practice?” Whatever his faith walk was, I wanted to know, because I admired it. Omar was walking the walk of God’s love every single day of his life.

Omar told me that he had studied many different religions, and had even focused on theology as part of his schooling, but he himself identified as Muslim. So there we were, a Muslim and a Christian, sitting in the hospital room talking about faith and medicine, both of us pulling for Dave with the best resources we could bring to the difficult situation. I do not know if Omar was aware that he was treating not only Dave but Dave’s whole family.

All we could do at that point was fumble in the darkness of our fear and the unknown, but the support coming from Omar and others provided the shards of light that we needed in order to keep moving forward, one faltering step at a time.

So many of the words of comfort we would hear in those early days would come in the form of well-worn clichés:

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

“Take it day by day.”

“It’ll be a long road.”

“It will be a roller coaster; you have to take the highs with the lows.”

“Two steps forward, one step backward.”

As tiresome as it could be to hear these pat turns of phrase, there was a certain wisdom in their age-old truths. It would be a long road. It would be a marathon—but I could not really understand any of that right then. At that point we were still very much in the “sprint” phase. I was not thinking about conserving energy or digging in for the long haul, bracing myself for the cruel roller coaster that is traumatic brain injury. I was thinking about spending every minute with Dave and putting every drop of energy I had into his treatment and recovery. Telling him, hour after hour, where he was and that he was going to get better.

Did I truly believe, in the private places of my own heart, that Dave would in fact get better? I didn’t know. I am an information junkie and I like to study and seek answers, but in this situation, perhaps the hardest part was that there were no answers. Control was an illusion that had been shattered into a million tiny pieces the moment Dave lost consciousness on that plane.

We received so many notes of support in those early days, but there was one in particular that provided a lifeline for me. Lee Woodruff, married to ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff, had been through her own life-changing experience as the partner and caregiver to a traumatic-brain-injury patient. Bob nearly lost his life when his convoy drove over a roadside bomb while covering the Iraq War in 2006. I had gotten to know Lee a little over the years, first when I was working at ABC News, and then in the writing world we shared as authors in the New York area. Lee had reached out after the stroke through my sister, Emily, gently making herself available to talk—an open invitation with no pressure or expectations attached.

One Sunday night, I took Lee up on the offer. Dave was asleep in his ICU bed, and I did not have an apartment to go home to because we were in the process of moving and my whole bedroom was packed in boxes and bubble wrap. I was crashing on a friend’s couch for a couple of days. Curled up on that couch, I dialed Lee and I wept. We talked about how the phrase “Everything happens for a reason” fell painfully flat. We spoke about how scared I was to have a baby—I didn’t know how I could possibly take care of Dave and a newborn. We spoke about how unfair it all felt. We spoke about how the many unknowns were the cruelest part. Lee promised me that it would get better, somehow, some way.

“I know you can’t possibly see it right now, because it’s so new and horrible and it’s so scary, but I can promise you two things. Number one, it will be different. Life has changed, life will forever be different. But here’s number two: even though it will be different, it will be OK,” Lee said. “I promise you, somehow, it will be OK.”

I didn’t see how she could be correct, but I clung to her words. She was, after all, speaking with the insight and understanding of someone who had walked a path similar to my own. Someone who had scaled a similarly grueling peak and had made it to the summit, where things did begin to look manageable—albeit entirely altered—once more.

“Life will never look exactly the same as it did before. But as my Bob tells me: Who knows what it would have looked like and who would ever believe it could be perfect? What is perfect anyway? And who cares now? Those imaginary visions are only a film torture loop. Turn off the movie in your head called My Once and Glorious Life. We don’t get to take that particular footpath now. That one got shut down by an avalanche. As soon as we accept the fact that we got rerouted, we can move forward into the world with all the tools and love and friends and grace and hope and faith and beauty that we just got reminded are ours.”

I absorbed these words—crying and nodding. They brought both pain and hope. At one point, I asked: “Why are you doing this, Lee?” It was a Sunday night in early summer. Lee has four kids and a husband and a full career and a huge and happy life, and I could not believe she was taking an hour to talk to some weeping person she’d only met a couple of times in passing. “Why are you making this time for me?”

“I’m doing this because, though you might not believe me right now, someday your life will be good again. And someday, years from now, someone will need to hear from you about this moment. And so you’ll find yourself sitting on the couch at home on a Sunday night, speaking to someone who needs you, and you’ll tell this person that they can get through whatever it is that they are going through. That’s all part of the deal, OK?”

I agreed.

Lee said: “I am here as your friend to welcome you to the ‘Club of the Bad Thing.’ ”

It was a club I wanted no part of. Of course I wanted no part of it. Who would? But, there I was. And then, thinking back to Dave’s playlist of classic rock, the one I had played in the emergency room that first night in Fargo, I began to hear the tune to the Eagles’ hit “Hotel California.” You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.