Rhapsody In Blue

Priscilla Sue Wood, 1967

The title of this blog is “Memoirs of the Brain Damaged” and is based on the title of a 1965 book by Oscar Levant called “Memoirs of an Amnesiac,” which I thought was a very funny and appropriate title for my posts. I had seen Levant on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show, which he had taken over after Steve Allen had created NBC’s late night talk show. Actually, at that time I only got to watch the late night shows during the summer, or whenever I had no school the next day, because I usually had to be in bed by ten. But when I was in the 7th grade Jack Paar left the Tonight Show because of its grueling schedule – at that time it was on 105 minutes (1 3/4 hours), five nights each week – for a weekly Friday prime-time hour at 9pm (Central time). There I got to see him with guests like Levant, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cospy, Woody Allen, Cliff Arquette (Charlie Weaver), and many other.

What I wanted to write today is about my first girlfriend Priscilla Sue Wood. We met just before my junior year in school, where we were both in the band at South Garland High School. She was a sophomore who played flute and she had an older sister, Winifred, who played piano. A year and a half earlier, spring of 1964, Winifred had performed at a band concert in our school playing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. One of the records I had played and loved as a child was Gershwin’s Rhapsody, that my parents owned that was on three sides of two 78rpm records – it is a 15 minute song that had to be split onto three sides. I had purchased a copy of that music and tried to learn how to play it every day for many years from the time I had taken piano lessons in the fourth grade.

I had dated a few times before 1966, but that was before I could drive and my parents had to take us wherever my “date” and I wanted to go, so that had only happened two or three times. By the time I met Prissy I had my drivers license and we could do what we wanted. I was even allowed to drive our 1959 Chevy Impala (the family’s first automobile to come with air-conditioning!). We dated throughout my junior year and then I got the opportunity to attend a summer seminar st SMU called the John Von Neumann Mathematics Seminar for Secondary Students, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It was a six week long program that required us to live on campus, so Prissy and I drifted apart. We had pretty much started breaking up even before that, but being gone through all of June and half of July put the end to our relationship.

A year later I went to college at SMU, but left after just one semester to go to East Texas State University in Commerce. Like her sister, she probably went to SMU – their mother worked there and so they got much reduced tuition. I never saw her again or even spoke to her. I did hear a few things, mostly from my mother who would tell me about her being mentioned in the newspaper. Prissy married someone who shared her musical skills and they worked with Fred Waring’s Philadelphians and at Burt Reynolds’ dinner theatre in Jupiter, Florida. Her husband died young, but I have no way now of finding Prissy – I don’t even know what her late husband’s name was.

I am hoping someone who reads this blog may know how I can get in touch with her, or can suggest how I might find her.

The happiest day of my life

First, some notes. It has been nearly two months since my last post. There is nothing wrong. I simply ran out of things about which to write. Then I tried to write a couple of weeks ago, but had problems with my computer. And since I can no longer remember how to deal with computer problems, I was stuck. Finally I texted Evan and he found what I needed by searching Google, so hopefully now things are working properly.

Second, Ellie Jade is scheduled to arrive just a week from tomorrow. Mirjam looks like she is wearing a basketball and Evan is thrilled to death in anticipation. So are Jean and I, planning all the ways we will be helping to raise our first grandchild.

But the happiest day of my life – so far – was this past Sunday. I finally got to meet Maria Reyna Paculba, the girl who started my journey through what has been the best two-and-a-half years in my life! After I had moved home from having being in the hospital for two months and then living at the Centre for Neuro Skills for another seven months, Jean gave me a lot of papers that had accumulated over those months, including the Dallas Police report of the accident. From that report I had the name and address of the driver of the car that hit me. On February 24, 2014, I finally wrote her a short letter to tell her that I was doing well and really wanted to meet her. Here is what I wrote:

Maria,

This is Patrick Spreng. I don’t know if you remember me, but I would like to meet you (again). I am the guy you hit with your car on November 1, 2012, and I am now well along on the road to recovery. I only want to meet you and let you know how wonderfully my life is going since that day!

Is there any way you could call me or email me, so we can set up a way to meet and go over “old times”?

I hope to hear from you very soon!

Although it took her fourteen months to get the courage to respond, last Wednesday she emailed me in response to that letter, expressing a willingness to meet me. Sunday the four of us – Jean and I along with Maria and her husband Ruel – had lunch together at La Madeleine, and it was wonderful!

We talked for nearly three hours. When she first saw me, she said, “You look so thinner!” because over the past thirty months I have lost more than ninety pounds! She told me about the incident from her perspective, not being able to see the group of pedestrians because of the sun in her eyes, seeing Alyson Abel Mills extend her hands in surprise. Then she jumped out of her car, ran up to me, found no pulse or any breathing, and immediately began giving me CPR. I also leared that there was a second nurse in the car with her, both of whom had just gotten off work at UT Southwestern, and both of whom worked to give me CPR. Maria also described how difficult it had been for these past two-and-a-half years thinking about what happened to us with anguish.

After the ambulance had taken me to Parkland’s Emergency Room, She had tried to find out what my status was, but the people she spoke with at Parkland would not give her any information – HIPAA security rules prevented that, and she did not even know my name. She says she did hear someone call me “Patrick” while she was trying to save my life, but Parkland would give her no help at all. She did find out from talking to her automobile insurance agent that I was seriously injured, but was still alive and in recovery.

From the emails I had sent her since last Wednesday, she learned about my blog and had read all of it to learn about my development and recovery, but I did go over with her some details that I have not shared here, mostly about my continued recovery and how my life has improved considerably, even to where it is considerably better than before we had first met. I have said this here before, but not only have I lost a lot of weight – I now weigh about what I weighed forty years ago – but I am much more happy and even my wife says I’m a “nicer person.”

One thing that Maria said, that really makes me happy, is she now thinks that “somehow we were meant to be together in some way.” So now we are and will continue to be together.

Air-conditioning

My parents moved to Garland from Dallas in late 1947. In 1940 the population of Garland was only 2,233. Today it is more than 100 times that size – 226,876 in 2010. Air conditioning is what has allowed Texas and the south to become the haven for all those families who have been freezing in the north to migrate to the south over most of the past forty years. Before the widespread use of air conditioning, few people wanted to live all year long in the south.

When I was in grade school about the only buildings that were air conditioned were at the State Fair of Texas. Since my father worked there during each fair (usually late September through the end of October), I spent days there every year as a child. Even that late in the year it could be very hot and we would always head for the Automobile Building where it was always cold. My father, who worked in downtown Dallas at the Federal Reserve Bank, has shown me photos from the 1950s where all the windows were open and every office worker’s desk had a ceiling fan above it. In the 1970s after those offices had been air conditioned, all those fans were removed and sold to people to use in their homes. Our house today, which was built in 1961, was the first place I lived where we had central air-conditioning. At the time it was built, only businesses and stores used ceiling fans. Now we have one in every room of the house!

Big Town Mall, located just off of U.S. 80 E. and Loop 12 in Mesquite, Texas, was constructed in 1959 and was the first enclosed, air-conditioned shopping mall in the Southwest. It was about a ten mile drive from our home, and was a frequent shopping destination for our family. I remember we parked at the entrance to Montgomery Ward where my father would buy us bags of movie-theater-style popcorn to carry as we walked around the mall. About that same time we bought our first air-conditioned car, a 1959 Chevrolet Impala (see the photo above). I remember there were billboards along the highways into downtown Dallas selling after-market air-conditioners that could be retrofitted to cars built without them. No, you probably cannot find a car built with it.

The first school I attended that was fully air-conditioned was my high school – South Garland – which opened in 1964. I had gone through kindergarten, grade school and junior high without the luxury of air conditioning.

Now when we leave our air-conditioned house in our air-conditioned car, we don’t go anywhere that isn’t also air-conditioned. You cannot live in Texas today without that wonderful invention.

 

Lists

Toroweap Overlook at the Grand Canyon

Probably the worst injury I have from my brain injury is memory loss. I can still remember things about my childhood and most of the years after that, but I cannot remember much about the five or ten years before the accident. I cannot remember anything about the work that I did in my five years at Callier Center. I cannot remember names, places, US states, cities, TV or movie actors, countries, and lots of things like that.

Through my rehab I have been learning many ways to help me remember. For instance to remember the state of Illinois, where I lived when I worked at State Farm Insurance, I can remember the city of Chicago, a city I have visited several times in my life, both from work and from family vacations (see photo above – not Chicago, but from a vacation.). And when I think of Chicago I can easily remember its state, Illinois. So when I want to remember that state I just think of Chicago. Another tool I have been using are lists. Fortunately I have been doing that most of my life.

As a child I made lists of what teachers I had for each class each year, especially after I got to junior high and high school, where I had multiple teachers each day. Like most boys – and probably girls, too – I kept lists of the people I dated or wanted to date, including when we went out, where we went and of course a rating system for each girl. At first I did this in a printed calender, but eventually bought a “little black book” to keep records of that. I don’t have that list any longer because just before Jean and I were married, I destroyed my black book.

But I kept making lists. About our vacations and the places I traveled for work, all the cars I have owned, all the places I worked, my salaries, the places I have lived, the cell phones I have owned, my bank and credit card accounts, recipes, musical instruments and stereo equipment I have owned, hurricanes I have lived through – eight, many of the people I worked with, went to school with, and from my college fraternity. And for some of these lists I kept pretty good details. For instance my list of cars also has the make, model, year manufactured, dates purchased and sold, whether they were new or used, purchased or leased, paint colors, engine size, cylinders, horse power, even the EPA estimated rating when available, where I bought it and how I disposed of it – sold, traded in, or handed down to my son Evan or my brother-in-law Bill.

Early on I used paper and pencil to make these lists, but in the 1970’s when I started working with computers, I used those to keep my lists. In the 80’s I started using personal computers and in 2003 I got my first smartphone, which I have been using ever since.

All of that was long before my brain injury, so it was easy for me to continue doing that. While I was at the Centre for Neuro Skills (CNS), even though it took me six months before I could remember enough to use my phone, I kept lists of my therapists, neuro rehab specialists, roommates, even the meds I was taking. I also made lists of thing I needed to remember like US states, countries around the world that were in the news, all my bills, my medical accounts – Blue Cross, COBRA, Medicare, Social Security, Fidelity (the holder of my five retirement funds – Oncor, John Hancock, Sabre, Nielsen, Hewlett-Packard), unemployment, and of course the ACA Marketplace (obamacare)!

So as you can see I was prepared for brain damage long before it ever happened. There area still may things I have trouble remembering, but now I have plenty of resources I created throughout my life to aid in my recovery.

Waiting to adopt

In my lifetime I have been fortunate enough to have visited 38 states in the US and have lived in seven. I have also been to Canada, Mexico (three times), the US Virgin Islands, The Bahamas and Great Britain – England, Wales and Scotland.

In 1983 Jean and I, having been married for eleven years, were ready to begin the process of adopting a child. Jean knew that the best place for us to do that was at Hope Cottage. Adoption was starting to be a more difficult process because the stigma of having a child out of wedlock was more acceptable in this country so more unwed girls were deciding to keep those children. The number of children available at Hope Cottage was shrinking so fast that, whenever they would announce when they were accepting applications on a first-come, first-served basis, people wanting to adopt would line up outside their door several days before hand, hoping to get a chance to adopt. By 1983 they ended that process and began just taking applications during certain times of the year and then do a random selection from those for the twenty or so couples they would select for the coming year.

We submitted our request and began waiting to see if we would, as I put it, “win the adoption lottery.” We learned that the selection would be made sometime in June of 1984, which was the same time that we had been planning our vacation to the British Isles. I had been planning that trip for over a year. Each payday I would walk over to the bank and purchase a hundred dollars or so of American Express travelers checks in British pounds in preparation for that trip. There was also a book store near my office where I would buy travel books that I used to plan where we would and what we wanted do see and do – my parents had been on guided tours all over the world, but I wanted to do it myself. That’s why we were going to the UK, where they spoke English!

So in late May we flew to JFK in New York City and on to Heathrow near London. From there we rented a car, loaded our luggage and set out to learn how to drive on the left side of the road. Our first stop was in Guildford at a small shopping area. The first thing I learned was that I should have brought some cash in pounds, because I had to pay to park the car. I left Jean in the car while I walked into a store to find where I could cash one of my travelers checks. I was not successful and finally went back to the car and we left. Our next stop was in Winchester to see the cathedral, where I did manage to get some pounds to pay for parking.

Over the next four weeks we saw Stonehenge, Dartmoor National Park, Tintagel Castle, Oxford, Blenheim and Kensington Palaces, Portmeirion village, Sherwood Forest, York, Fountains Abbey, Beatrix Potter’s home in Near Sawrey, Cumbria, Loch Ness (we saw no monsters), Inverness, the Isle of Skye and Edinburgh. After a week in Scotland we turned in our car and took a train back to London, where we spent our final week using the “Tube,” London’s underground transit system, to take in the whole of the city. All along the way we stayed at bed-and-breakfast lodging in private homes, guest houses, small hotels, farm houses and even a castle from the 15th century.

When we finally returned home, we found waiting for us the letter from Hope Cottage accepting us into their adoption program which resulted in us receiving Evan two and a half years later. He was thirteen days old when we went to Hope Cottage to get him. He is now 27 and will turn 28 in little over a month.

The next few days: the prequel

Shortly after my previous post about how I became brain damaged, received the following response from Alyson Abel Mills, a co-worker of mine at Callier, who was walking across Inwood Road when I was hit by that car. Here is her memory of that morning:

“You and I were crossing the street from the bus stop. As always, we had pushed the button for the cross walk sign[al] and waited. We didn’t start crossing until the light changed. You and I were talking so we were walking close together. I know you were on my outside (right side) and think you were a few feet in front of me. The next thing I remember was you being hit by the car which came from behind us, turning left [northeast] onto Inwood from UTSW [Southwestern Medical Ave.].

“You bounced off of the car and landed on your side (right side?). Blood started coming from your head and your eyes were kind of flicking around, not focused. A number of people had stopped, were calling 911 and taking care of you. There was more than one nurse there [including Maria Reyna Paculba, who was driving the car] so I stepped away so they could help you.

“They had safely turned you to your back and were giving you CPR. Jim Latham [my boss] was on the other side of Inwood and safely crossed when he could. I got your cell phone and tried to call your wife. I think I first called your mom but eventually called your wife. The ambulance came and took you, and Jim got your things.

“People from Callier were outside and standing with me. I talked to the cops on the scene who, frankly, were complete jerks. I ended up calling the boss of one of them and complaining.

“That’s pretty much all I remember off the top of my head.”

At this point I am posting the text of the police report that was filed:

“Unit [Ms. Paculba] was turning from eastbound 5600 Southwestern Medical Dr. [sic] to northbound 1700 Inwood Rd. Driver of unit 1 stated that she was blinded by the sun as she turned and collided with the pedestrian [me] who was walking eastbound in the crosswalk. Witness Able was walking beside the pedestrian and witnessed the crash. Witness Fox, who was traveling northbound on Inwood in front of unit 1, stated she witnessed the crash through her rear view mirror.”

The next few days

Zale-Lipshy

The first memory I have from the accident (see previous entry for what happened) was almost two months after November 1, 2012. I can remember just a little before I was hit, and then my mind is a blank from the time I got off the bus to walk across Inwood Road until late December, just before Christmas 2012.

I have learned some of what happened to me during that time from my wife, my son, and others I have spoken with since then:

Jean (my wife) says that Nana (my mother Vesta Spreng) called her around 8 am. She had just received a call from someone at Callier Center, where I worked, to say that I had been hit by a car and a co-worker had my phone. They had probably called Nana because that was the first person they found on my phone. Jean repeatedly tried to call my phone, but nobody answered. Jean says she did not know what to do so she called Father Lawrence, pastor at Christ The Redeemer Anglican Church. About 8:30 Judy Lewis at Callier finally answered my phone. Judy said the ambulance had taken me to Parkland Hospital ER. The next thing Jean did was call Evan (our son, aged 25, who was driving to work at that time) and tell him that I was at Parkland and to meet her at their emergency room.

Jean says that after learning what had happened to me, she was in no condition to drive herself to the hospital, so she asked our neighbor Marsha to drive her to Parkland Hospital’s ER. When they arrived Evan was already there and had spoken with me briefly before I was taken to the x-ray room. Evan told Jean that I hadn’t spoken much. He said a doctor had asked me a few questions: I did know Evan’s name and who he was, but I was confused about other questions: I did not know where I was (I thought I was in Garland, my home town) or what day it was or who was the president (this was just five days before the November 6 election). The doctor who had been asking me these questions also said that I would probably be able to return home after staying at Parkland a few days for “observation.”

Jim and Dave (my boss and co-worker from Callier) came to the see me at some point Thursday morning and they were told I was going to be fine. Jean and Evan went to lunch (about 3 pm) while I was cleaned up and moved to Parkland’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

Friday night I was moved from ICU to the 5th floor at Parkland. There I was asked “Are you in pain?” Emphatically I answered “NO – I’VE GOT FEELINGS”, which probably meant “YES.” Mostly I just wanted to sleep, but they wouldn’t let me. Saturday morning my mother (Nana) and sister Sande came to see me, and I was getting worse. I was very agitated. That is also when they moved me back to ICU. The doctors (led by Kim Rickert, M.D., an expert neurosurgeon at UT Southwestern Medical Cente) soon realized that my brain was swelling too much and that surgery was necessary to relieve the pressure. Jean and Evan were then asked to sign dozens of forms to approve the surgery, which could either put me into a vegetative state or (more likely) leave me with a traumatic brain injury with unknown damage to my brain. According to Wikipedia, TBI [surgery] can cause a host of physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral effects, and outcome can range from complete recovery to permanent disability or death.

I was taken to the operating room at 7 pm Saturday. My family was told that it should take an hour and a half. I came out of surgery three hours later. The left side of my skull was removed from just above my left ear to the top center of my head, from my forehead to just behind my ear. The doctor who did the cutting of my skull told my family they had never seen a skull as thick and hard as mine. They even had to rig a stronger tool, because the one they normally used couldn’t cut through mine.

Again, according to Wikipedia, depending on the injury, treatment required may be minimal or may include interventions such as medications, emergency surgery or surgery years later. Physical therapy, speech therapy, recreation therapy, occupational therapy and vision therapy may be employed for rehabilitation. I need all of the above forms of therapy, which required me to be moved from Parkland to the therapy center Zale-Lipshy. On January 2, 2013 I was moved from Zale-Lipshy to the Centre For Neuro Skills, where I spent the next eleven months undergoing daily rehabilitation for each of those needs. Even today I am still going to part-time rehab on an outpatient basis.