Iron Heart: The True Story of How I Came Back From the Dead (4 page)

My parents don’t look the same to me. Their gestures are twitchy, nervous, awkward. Their blue eyes are bloodshot and puffy from sleepless nights. Dad’s brown hair is going gray from stress. Mom’s makeup is usually smudged from wiping away tears. They seem unsure how to approach me, what to say, how to act. They must be asking themselves, “Is that really our son lying there?”

As their only child, I was blessed by their generous attention. When I went to preschool, my parents would take turns during the week dropping me off in the mornings. I remember sitting at the window of that small school, madly bawling as I watched them get in their cars to leave for work. Every day we would go through this same routine, even though I knew that they would return in several hours.

I feel like that toddler now, waiting for them to rescue me, to take me home. They don’t realize it, but they are bringing me back to life in a way that the most powerful medicine could never do. But will their devotion be strong enough to keep me alive? I can only hope that it does. It sounds selfish, but I can’t imagine how life would be for them without me. We’ve always been best friends.

I have my mom’s facial features and blonde hair and my dad’s traits of hard work and self-discipline, but I also inherited their positive, outgoing outlook.

My dad was born in 1958 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a small town near Pittsburgh in the western part of the state. He was the youngest and scrappiest of seven children. His father was a concrete subcontractor in the construction industry. In 1962, my grandfather moved his family to Accokeek, Maryland, for better business opportunities in pouring concrete. Accokeek is a small town on the Potomac River located on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. At the time, it primarily consisted of sprawling horse farms and working-class people. My dad lived there for three years before his family moved to Oxon Hill, closer to the nation’s capital.

My mom, born a year after my dad in Kansas City, Missouri, was the oldest of five children. Her father was a lieutenant in the Air Force and her family moved around a lot. When he made colonel, he was transferred to the Pentagon and moved to Oxon Hill with his family.

In the summer of 1970, my dad watched a moving van pull into the driveway across the street from his home, and that is when he saw my mom for the first time. She was moving into her family’s new house. He thought she was the cutest girl he had ever seen. They were both eleven years old.

The town was small and their neighborhood was full of kids, so everyone hung out together, doing typical childhood stuff like softball, dodgeball, swimming, riding bikes, bowling, watching movies.

At thirteen, they were going steady, which continued through junior high and high school. During summers, she worked part-time after school at a day care center. My dad worked in the family construction business with his father and brothers. Weekends for the Boyle clan were spent at the beach at Ocean City, Maryland.

After graduation, Mom headed to college at Salisbury University, which was two hours away. Dad stayed with the family business, so he would drive down every weekend for visits. After four years, Mom graduated with a degree in business administration and began working for the U.S. Government at Bolling Air Force Base in Southwest Washington, D.C.

Two years later, they married. Not long afterward, I was born, on April 27, 1986, at 3:10 a.m. I weighed ten pounds, ten ounces, and I was twenty-two inches long. Dad always teased me about how my feet were hanging out of the newborn’s bed because I was such a big baby. The same day I was born, NBC News was doing a special segment called “Healthy Babies” and they brought the cameras up to the maternity ward and filmed me being held by my mom.

I imagine that I was destined to like the water because at six weeks, my parents dipped my tiny toes into the Atlantic. When I was ten, our family spent two weeks in Oahu. Our hotel was near the famous Waikiki beach. From our balcony, I could see Diamondhead. There were many surfers riding the waves. I said to my parents, “Let’s go swimming!” I rented a bodyboard and my dad went with a surfboard, which I thought was cool. I watched him paddle out about two hundred yards in the water to join the surfers. It was only his second time on a surfboard, but he was determined to sample the Hawaiian surf.

My dad and I were always involved in sports—hitting baseballs at the local batting cage, playing tennis, one-on-one basketball, going to the golf driving range, running, riding bikes, swimming, playing catch with the football. Whatever kind of activity we did, there was always a hint of competition. He was really fit from all the heavy lifting that he did at work. I always wanted to have his big arms and shoulders.

My parents didn’t idly sit at home. We took day trips to the capital and Baltimore for visits to the museums, zoos, and art galleries. Music was always a big deal in our house too, and my dad’s record collection was impressive. I would spend hours sitting in front of the turntable and cassette player listening to Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Foghat, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, INXS, Rod Stewart, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, The Cure, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Marley and the Wailers, The Beastie Boys, The Gap Band, and Prince.

When I was in second grade, we moved to the small town of Welcome in the rural part of southern Maryland because my parents liked its tranquility. Welcome’s claim to fame is that it’s part of Charles County. In April of 1865, John Wilkes Booth escaped through the county after shooting president Abraham Lincoln. He was on his way to Virginia. With its Civil War heritage and picturesque beauty, Welcome is an ideal place to raise a family. It’s only two minutes from the Potomac River. Our home sits on a big hill in the woods.

Meanwhile, my father’s family concrete business was doing well. He worked on projects at the U.S. Capitol, Redskins Stadium, the MCI Center, Whitehurst Freeway, Union Station, and the FDR Memorial. Because of his job, my mom and I rarely got to see him except on weekends. So he made a big decision: he left the family business and joined forces with another concrete firm close to home. New housing developments were booming in southern Maryland.

My mom also transferred from the Air Force to work for the Navy at the Patuxent River Naval Base in the next county.

Then, the first big tragedy struck our family. It was 1992. We were spending the weekend in Ocean City. Dad looked thin, unhealthy. When he was wearing a bathing suit, his ribs were prominently showing; he had lost a lot of weight. He was always muscular, so this seemed odd. He was thirty-three years old. A week later, he went to the family doctor, thinking he had ruptured a hernia on a job site. His physician ran some tests, then recommended he see a urologist. Two days later, the urologist told him that there was a strong possibility he had a cancerous tumor in his right testicle and that he would need immediate surgery to remove it. Back then, whenever the word
cancer
was used, it meant an automatic death sentence. Only the year before, his father had died from prostate cancer. Now I was going to lose my dad, too.

I avoided my dad when he came home from the hospital, because I thought he was going to leave me forever. I was just six years old. On the fourth day, he got out of bed for the first time. He could barely stand up, let alone walk, but he somehow made it to the bottom of the stairs, hunched over and holding onto the banister for support with both hands. He was in agony, looking like a crippled ninety-year-old man. He saw me at the top of the stairs looking down. He could see that I was frightened. As our eyes met, he let go of the railing, stood straight up, and smiled, letting me know that I could count on him.

Now it’s my turn, in this bed, in Room 19, to show that same kind of strength. I have to let my parents know that I’m not going anywhere, either.

W
hen my parents come back for the afternoon visiting hour, I need to let them know how much I love them. With enough concentration and effort, I can blink, but that’s not enough. I have to try something else. Then it dawns on me: I can smile. That would be perfect! But how am I going to get my facial muscles to cooperate?

I try to find awareness in my lips but they are numb. I keep searching for sensation, a slight twitch or quiver. Fifteen minutes go by, and I’m sweating terribly, my body seems on fire. Finally, I’m able to purse my lips. I’m growing weak from the strain, but I can’t give up.

I press my lips together to get the nerves in my lips and mouth active again. I feel blood rushing through the area. I repeat the puckering, but I’m starting to feel nauseous. Yet I won’t stop until I have created a smile.

I focus attention on the tiny muscles behind my lips, but there’s no motion from the start. This is going to be an even bigger challenge. I always took the ability to smile for granted. I go back to the kissing motion, trying to loosen the muscles.

I have to take a break. I stare at the ceiling, trying to gather inspiration, anything that will help me succeed. I think about the reaction my parents will have when they see me smiling. I return to the kissing motion, and out of nowhere I feel like I’m zapped with a thousand volts of electricity. My body goes into a violent seizure. The machines in my room begin to blare. Several nurses hurry to my side.

After several minutes, my body is finally released from this horror spell. The room is spinning. Foam spews from my mouth. I can barely see. The machines’ alarms have quieted and returned to their normal beeping and pinging. I hear the nurses ask one another what could have caused my seizure. One suggests that they need to check with a neurologist to see if I have brain damage. As she runs out of the room to find him, the other four nurses stay with me. One nervously gives me an injection. She holds the needle very cautiously, hoping that I don’t start shaking again because that could pose a risk of breaking the needle off in a vein.

I lie there on my side, breathing hard. The nurses are gently rubbing my forehead and softly dabbing off the sweat with a small damp towel. My dad’s voice from earlier replays constantly in my head: “I know how tired you are, but please don’t give up.”

I stubbornly seek out sensations in my lips once more, trying to strengthen them to create a simple smile. Even if I have another seizure, I will keep trying. I push my lips together and release them. I do this several times before I’m zapped again, my body flailing about. There’s a sudden sharp pain in my groin, and the arm restraints loosen from all the wild motion. The nurses struggle to keep me flat on the bed. My body continues to convulse and the room starts to turn dark, when I see the nurse come back with the neurologist and an ICU doctor. They join the nurses in helping to calm me down, while they analyze the situation. When I go limp, the nurses rush to strap my arms down to the bed, this time binding them more tightly.

One of the nurses notices that the sheets by my legs are wet. She pulls off the cover to see what happened. “Oh dear,” I hear her say, “Brian just wet the bed. There’s urine everywhere. His thrashing must have dislodged the catheter when he was having his seizure. Aw, poor guy, that must have really hurt!”

As the nurses roll me about on the bed, switching the sheets and giving me a new gown, I listen to the neurologist tell the ICU doctor that he’s worried about possible brain damage. He thinks I need an MRI, X-rays, and brain scans so they can figure out what’s wrong.

The nurses quickly gather all my machines and IVs and rapidly wheel me out of the room. They push me down the hallways at a much faster pace than usual. I watch the ceiling lights flicker past. I’m wheeled into the radiology department, where I first encountered the perfumed woman.

While waiting to be shoved into the big white machine, I try to move my lips. They are sore. I concentrate on lip puckering. It’s so difficult. I flex my cheeks a little bit, but there is no movement. I also try to move my eyes around, just to get everything working together. The eyelids flutter at first, and then surprisingly they break free from their frozenstraight-ahead position.

I keep moving my lips back and forth, flexing, squeezing, relaxing, until I sense another seizure about to commence. My body is thrown into a bucking spasm and the nurses rush over to my bed. A flurry of hands struggles to calm my body down. This seizure only lasts about thirty seconds. I watch the nurses wipe sweat from their faces.

I’m back in Room 19. A nurse injects me with some kind of medication in a new IV that she has just inserted into my left forearm. A second nurse takes blood from my other forearm. I feel like a human dartboard.

I move my tongue around the inside of my mouth. For the first time, I feel some sensation in my jaw and cheeks. Determined, I try twitching, but nothing. Only after the tenth time am I finally able to generate a response, and that’s all it takes to fuel the next attempt, and then the next. I keep at it. One, two, three, four, five ... and then I have to rest. The muscles in my face are rapidly tiring from all the activity. My face feels like it has a cramp.

I rest for a little while, and then my body tenses up.
Please not again, not now!
My body explodes in a wild fit of tossing, but this time I try to stay rigid. My teeth grind and foam churns in my mouth.
Stay focused
, I keep thinking.
Just let it pass and run its course
. The seizure soon subsides and I’m finally released from its powerful hold. I’m drenched in a cold sweat.

This episode drains my last remaining energy. All I can do now is take a long breather, conserving strength for my parents’ arrival.

I close my eyes and begin to daydream. I’m a little boy again, out in the front yard in the driveway on a warm spring day. My dad just got home from work, and I run out to see him and give him a hug. I’m happy to see him. After he goes in the house to say hello to my mom, he comes back outside and we throw the football. “Go long, Brian. Go all the way out past the tree in the middle of the driveway,” he yells as I toss the ball to him and start to run down the driveway. I get to the end of the driveway, and as soon as I turn around, the ball lands right between my hands.

“Good throw, Dad, but watch this!” I throw it back to him and watch him standing there, as he is getting ready to catch it. We throw it back and forth, as the sun starts going down behind the trees, casting shadows along the driveway.

I open my eyes, reflecting on the memory. But something about my face feels different. There’s tightness around my cheeks and mouth. Could I be doing what I think I’m doing? I remember that feeling! I haven’t felt this in ages. I’m finally smiling! I can’t believe it! Tears fill my eyes with a sense of accomplishment.

I hear footsteps outside my room. My mom and dad enter, both of them wearing a sad look of despair. My dad sees me first. The stress in his face immediately disappears when he notices me smiling. “JoAnne, look! Look!” he shouts. “He’s smiling—can you believe it?”

Several nurses rush in, wondering what’s wrong. I watch their jaws drop.

Mom and Dad walk toward me, not saying anything. They’re gleaming with happiness. Both stare in amazement. I continue looking up at them, smiling.

The smile is everything I hoped it would be. It is so much more than a common facial gesture that I had once taken for granted; it is a defining gesture, a pure expression of love that has brought my parents and me out of the depths of the deepest darkness.