Miles To Go Before I Sleep (14 page)

I was in Germany for about a week. I spent most of that time sleeping, hobbling around the hallways, and slowly starting to realize what I'd been through.

The first days and weeks after the hijacking were hard on my family and friends back home. They felt helpless to do anything but pray for me in those dark hours of the hijacking. I couldn't be reached by telephone for about a week after I was shot.

On Friday afternoon, November 29, my parents got two pieces of news: a letter I'd written from Cairo, telling them about my upcoming trip to Greece and Thanksgiving plans (including a picture of me riding on a camel near the Pyramids) and a phone call informing them of my transfer to Germany.

Then, one day, a phone rang at the nurse's station of the VA hospital. A nurse at the switchboard interrogated the caller asking to speak to me. “Are you a relative?” the nurse said.

“Yeah, this is her sister Barbara,” Barb said.

The nurse came to get me out of bed. I got up, dizzy, and she motioned for me to come over to the phone. “Its your sister Barbara,” the nurse said.

I don't have a sister named Barbara
, I thought to myself.
Who could this be?

I put the receiver to my ear and heard a familiar voice.

“Hello, Jackie?”

“Barb?”

It was my friend Barbara Wilson. She told the nurse that she was my sister because the hospital was only allowing me to receive calls from immediate family members. I was glad that Barb had exercised a little ingenuity to get around the bureaucracy.

I met Barb shortly after I started teaching special education in the Baytown School district, a few minutes west of Pasadena, Texas, the Houston suburb where I grew up. Barbara was also a teacher, and the two of us hit it off immediately. We hung out with the same crowd, went to the same parties, took trips together, and got to be like sisters to each other.

It was five o'clock in the morning Texas time when Barb found out what hospital I was in. She still didn't know how badly I was hurt and wanted to hear my voice. Barb was thrilled when the nurse said I was walking down the hall to get the phone.

“I thought,
God! She can walk!”
Barb later recalled. “I didn't think Jackie would be able to get out of bed because of the head injuries. It was so good to know she could get around on her own.”

For the first few minutes on the phone, we both just cried. Then there was a long silence. We didn't need words to communicate our feelings or how much it meant to hear each other's voices again.

When we finally started talking, I told Barb about my out-of-body experience. I also talked about my vision problems and how I thought they would clear up when I got a new pair of contact lenses.

It was so good to hear Barb's voice. She and her husband, Wayne, wanted to fly to Germany to visit and support me. But the doctors said I'd be leaving in a few days anyway, so I didn't think it was worth the expense. Barb told me that she and Wayne, along with my parents, my friend Debbie Reno, and others had held an around-the-clock vigil for me in the hours and days during and after the hijacking.

Simply talking to Barb gave me a big boost. I didn't feel quite so alone anymore. At least not for a while.

After about a week in Germany, doctors thought I was ready to go home. Before leaving the hospital, a woman gave me a scarf to put over my bald head. Scott put some makeup on my face. I couldn't keep from laughing while he put it on. The makeup looked kind of blotchy, but at that point I really didn't care.

Scott and I flew back to the United States. The government flew me in a huge, old, dark green army transport plane. The plane carried medical equipment and other sick passengers from the VA hospital in Landstuhl. Again, I was lying flat on my back. A kind serviceman came back to visit and check on me, and snuck me some fruit juices.

It felt good to be going back to the states. But the prospect of living in a new place and making new friends was scary.

Our plan was to return to the United States so that I could get the best possible medical care. We still hoped to return to Cairo to teach, yet we didn't know if or when that would happen.

In Germany, Scott called one of our friends at CAC. Scott asked him to get the key to our apartment and pick up about two hundred dollars in cash that we had saved up. Scott directed the friend to take the money and give it to the caretakers of our building, the Egyptian family living in the elevator shaft.

AFTER AN ELEVEN-HOUR FLIGHT from Germany to the United States, we touched down at Andrews Air Force base in Washington, D.C. It was early December 1985, the first time we'd been back on American soil for four months. Reporters were waiting at the airport to accost us. Fortunately, military and airport officials kept them a safe distance away from us, pressed up against a restraining fence.

It was the first time Scott and I started realizing that we were going to be living in the spotlight for a while. Scott did not trust the media, especially after our experience with the reporter in Germany who lied to us. The way Scott saw it, the media was interested in only one thing: exploiting me. “My whole purpose was to shield you from the media,” Scott said, “to be there for you and to keep the media away.” I just agreed. I didn't care. We were still relatively protected, however, because we were in the U.S. military's hands.

We spent our first night back home in a Washington, D.C. hospital near the airport. It was the first night since the hijacking that Scott and I laid down on a bed together and just held each other tight.

The next day, we took off again for the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. We landed at about ten o'clock that night. I was immediately whisked from the plane on a stretcher and carried into an ambulance waiting to take me to the University of Minnesota Hospital.

In the ambulance, paramedics started hooking me up to a heart monitoring machine. I thought this was strange, because I hadn't been hooked up to any machines for two weeks. I told them I didn't think it was necessary, but they insisted on going by the book. They put an oxygen mask over my face and hooked up the heart monitor.

On the way to the hospital, the song “Penny Lane” by the Beatles came over the radio. It brought a smile to my face. This was the first time I really felt like I was back in the states again.

A hungry pack of reporters lay in wait for us at the airport. They followed us to the University of Minnesota Hospital. Camera crews and reporters with their lights had staked out the building, in anticipation of my arrival. Though security tried to protect us from the unwanted exposure, a clever few managed to sneak into the hospital's underground parking garage before the doors shut.

On stepping out of the ambulance, Scott found himself looking down the lens of an enormous television camera. Scott was enraged that the hospital's security staff had done such a poor job of keeping the media away. He told the cameraman to back off, and when he didn't, Scott gave him a push and he fell to the ground. The media left us alone for the rest of our visit at the hospital.

I was exhausted by the long trip. I thought we'd just stop in to rest at the hospital for a few minutes and then be sent home.

A neurosurgeon came into my room to explain my situation. “I have to do some tests,” he said.

“Can't we just go home and do the tests tomorrow? I'm really tired.”

“What will it look like if you come in and I send you home right away?” the doctor said.

I was angry that he was more concerned about public relations than how I was feeling. But I was so exhausted that I didn't have much fight in me. I was ready to agree to anything. Besides, he was the doctor after all. What was one more night after everything we'd been through?

The doctor left to take care of some other business, and Scott and I were alone. “You have the power to tell him what you want to do. He's going to listen to you,” Scott said.

For two hours, I went through a bunch of neurological tests. I was not discharged until about 1
A.M
. I was absolutely exhausted. I couldn't put out that kind of energy. I was barely awake while he did the tests.

Scott and I went straight from the hospital to his parents' house. Of course, everyone in the Pflug family wanted to visit. They were gathered around the kitchen table. I could tell they really wanted to talk to us and find out how we were. I wanted to make a good impression on Scott's family, but I was so tired. It was hard for me to say that I just wanted to go to sleep.

Mr. and Mrs. Pflug showed me the room in their basement that Scott and I were going to be staying in—the same room that Scott grew up in. It felt really good to finally crawl into bed and put my head down on the pillow.

I slept very late the next morning. Scott was already up and dressed when I straggled into the kitchen and sat down at the table with him.

“I don't know what all this means,” I said. “I don't know what to do with my life. I don't know what's going to happen now.”

“I don't know either, honey,” Scott said. He was just as confused as I was. “Maybe we weren't supposed to be over there. I just don't know,” he said.

We were looking forward to some quiet time to sort through it all, but newspaper reporters practically had the house surrounded. They wanted to get interviews with me for their papers. They took pictures of us through the windows of the Pflugs' house. Every two seconds, the phone rang. It was some reporter working on a story about the hijacking. Scott took the calls and sent them away empty-handed, as I instructed him.

I was trying to weed through it all, but it didn't make any sense.

I had lots of trouble seeing things. Objects in my visual field were floating all over the place: buildings, people, cars, letters and words on a page—everything was floating.

For the first few days, I thought that this problem would be corrected when I got the new pair of contact lenses my parents were sending to Minnesota. My old pair was destroyed when the plane caught fire, and I didn't have a spare pair of glasses. So I was walking around practically blind. My vision is normally 20/400 without correction.

I was excited when my new pair of contacts finally arrived. But when I put them on, I was shocked. I could only see parts of people's faces and bodies! When I tried to read, I could only see parts of each word in a sentence. And I could only read half the letter in each word. A simple written phrase such as “By the way” looked something like “y e y.”

With my visual problems, navigating around the Pflugs' house took a major effort. I was always bumping into things around the house—chairs, tables, countertops, walls—because I couldn't judge how far away these objects were from me. Sometimes, when I got lazy and didn't bother to move my head to compensate for my vision loss, I'd get into more trouble.

One time when I went to reach for a bar of soap in the bathroom and didn't look underneath where I was reaching, I hit my curling iron and burned my arm. I had bruises on my left side and shoulder from reaching for something and then smashing into a shelf or other solid object.

Why was I having such problems seeing properly?

I reported my symptoms to my neurologist, hoping he'd be able to tell me what was wrong. He explained that my brain was still swollen from the bullet wound and that this was causing the visual abnormalities.

That Christmas, 1985, my parents flew up from Houston to spend the holidays with Scott and me. It was an emotional reunion. I was tired and worn down, but so glad to see my parents. One of the first things I did was to let my parents feel the soft spot in my head.

Mom was worried that I might bump my exposed head. If anything hit me in the head, it could kill me. It would have gone right into my brain. “You've got to get a plate in your head,” she kept telling me.

My problems seemed to build and build. I started to get angry without any obvious reason. My emotions were all over the place: I went from feeling as high as a kite—giggling and laughing uncontrollably—to the depths of despair. And I didn't understand why.