My Life, Deleted

My Life Deleted

a memoir

Scott Bolzan, Joan Bolzan
and Caitlin Rother

Dedication

To my loving family,
who gave me the will to move forward.

Contents

 

 

Chapter 1

T
HEY TELL ME
that the morning of December 17, 2008, started out just like any other.

I routinely arrived at my ninth-floor office in the Hayden Ferry Lakeside building at 5:00
A.M.
to beat the traffic and get a head start on the day. There, fueled by several cups of coffee from the break room, I would spend a couple hours of quiet time, going through emails as I watched the morning sunlight catch the water on Tempe Town Lake and brighten the Camelback and Superstition Mountains in the distance. With the economy in free fall and corporate executives realizing it was politically incorrect to fly around in private jets like they used to, I was also working to refocus my airplane management company, Legendary Jets, in new directions.

This was not the first time I'd been forced to make an adjustment in my business life—everything from a simple but different marketing tact to a major career shift—and I was sure it wouldn't be the last. After playing professional football for several years in my twenties, I'd become a financial planner and a pilot then went on to form an aviation charter company that flew corporate executives, entertainers, and organ transplant teams around the country. In less than a year my company had risen from obscurity to being chosen to fly the heart in for the first heart transplant surgery at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Arizona in October 2005.

I soon realized, however, that I wanted to return to my original plan to build relationships with repeat clients rather than always looking for the next new customer. So I sold the charter company in February 2008 and reorganized, retaining the jet management aspect of the business. In September, after the economy took the worst nosedive since the Great Depression, I adjusted once more by modifying my marketing approach to sell airplane trips by the hour—using “jet cards,” which worked like debit cards—figuring the market would rebound and jet management would become viable once again.

The new strategy seemed to be working, and things were looking up. One client was ready to buy a block of one hundred hours, possibly later that day. We'd already verbally agreed on many of the terms, and I was putting the finishing touches on my pitch to fit his particular needs. After working away for a couple of hours that morning, I was ready to head downstairs for some designer brew and a fresh blueberry muffin from the café in the building next door, which opened at 7:00
A.M
.

Joan, my wife and college sweetheart, was involved in marketing and sales for our company, but she worked mostly from home, which kept our twenty-four-year-old marriage healthy. I'd had to let my assistant, Robyn, go a couple of weeks earlier because of the recession, so our only remaining employee was our bookkeeper, Anita, who came in to the office twice a week and was due in at 9:00. That morning, with my hands full of boxes of paperwork and a bag of lemons from our tree to give her, I'd accidentally left my briefcase in the car. So as I was heading out for breakfast, I took the elevator down to the basement parking garage to retrieve my case. The quiet details of daily life.

With the long strap of my briefcase slung over my shoulder, I came back up to the first floor and was walking past the backlit neon blue glass wall when I decided to make a quick pit stop in the men's room. Most of the other people who worked in the twelve-story building didn't arrive until 8:00 or 9:00
A.M.
, so the entire floor was empty except for the lone security guard sitting at the opposite end of the building, near the entrance.

I pushed open the men's room door and almost immediately slipped on something greasy on the rectangular beige and gray floor tiles. Everything happened in slow motion as I felt my black leather shoes skid out from under me. As I was falling backward, my eyes ran up the beige wallpaper and cherrywood paneling to the big shiny mirror, and I saw my feet fly above my head.

I did my best to try and brace my fall behind me, but there wasn't much I could do. I don't remember hitting the floor, but my head and left shoulder took the brunt of the impact, splitting my scalp open like a ripe melon. Spanning two and a half inches across, the cut went down to the bone. Because the scalp is rich with blood vessels, the gash began to bleed profusely.

I have no idea how long I was unconscious or how many times I might have fallen again as I struggled to get up. There was nothing close for me to grab onto except the built-in metal trash receptacle, so I'm not sure how I actually managed to get to my feet, but I apparently hit my face on something in the process because I ended up with a red scrape across the bridge of my nose.

Somehow I finally managed to pull myself up from the slippery tiles and made it out the door around 7:30, where I ran into a woman heading into the ladies' room next door.

“I need help,” I told her groggily, promptly retreating into the men's room.

Startled by my bloody head wound as I walked away, the woman ran around the corner and into the lobby to fetch the security guard. Appearing a few moments later, he saw me trying to stop the bleeding with a wad of paper towels, my blood mixed in with the oily substance on the floor at my feet where I'd fallen.

“What is that on the floor?” I asked him. “What did I slip on?”

Later that morning I didn't remember if or how he responded, but I did remember that he brought more paper towels to slow the bleeding until the paramedics could take over. I also remembered him talking to the janitor, who came in after him.

“You had better clean that up,” he said, sending the custodian into the utility closet to get a mop.

I stumbled into the nearest stall and plunked down on one of the toilets, holding the towels against my head, until the paramedics showed up at 7:50. They laid me on a board, lifted me onto a gurney, hooked me up to an IV, and stabilized me before whisking me away, with the siren blaring. They categorized me as a Level I trauma patient, meaning I needed the most urgent level of care, and rushed me to Scottsdale Healthcare–Osborn, a hospital about eight miles and fifteen minutes away in commuter traffic.

I didn't know it yet, but I'd lost my life as I'd known it—my knowledge, my experiences, and even my identity—when my skull hit that tile floor. As I reeled with pain on the way to the hospital, I could almost feel the information draining away, leaving me in a foggy, disoriented haze. From that point on, my life was forever changed.

I was pulled out of the haze by the excruciating pain of someone feeling around with his fingers in the open wound in the back of my head. My shoulder hurt too but nowhere near as much. I was lying on a thin, stiff pad on a metal cart in the middle of a wide open room, with people milling around me, all wearing the same thing. I had no idea where I was or what was going on, only that I was sick and these people were trying to help me get better. For a big, tall man like me, it was difficult to get comfortable, especially with my feet hanging off the end of the cart. In fact, it hurt to move at all.

“You're in the emergency room,” a woman said to me. “Do you remember what happened?”

“I fell,” I said, stating one of the few things I could remember.

“What's your name?”

I knew what some words meant but not others, and what little I still knew was continuing to leave me. No matter how hard I tried to hold on to the information, it kept trickling away. I didn't recognize the word
name,
for example, let alone what
my
name was.

“I don't know,” I said. Later I would learn that she listed my name in the chart as “Peanut Butter 77,” the ER's own version of John Doe.

“Where do you hurt?” she asked.

“Here and here,” I said, pointing to the back of my head, then my shoulder.

The woman squeezed points along my arms and pressed down on my stomach and chest, asking, “Does it hurt here? Or here?”

“No,” I said.

“How bad is the pain on a scale from one to ten,
one
meaning it doesn't hurt too bad and
ten
being the worst pain you've ever felt?”

Building on what she said, I learned what
hurt
and
pain
meant. I still knew my numbers, and although I didn't remember what order they went in, I said “ten” because my head hurt a lot.

“You're at Scottsdale Healthcare,” she said. “The doctor and I are going to take good care of you, and we're going to figure out what's going on.”

I felt dizzy and sick to my stomach, and I didn't understand much of what she and the other people around me were saying. All I could do was try to piece one word and one concept together at a time and build on them, although this was very difficult because everything was so garbled. I was also having trouble retaining words I'd heard only minutes ago.

When a man pulled a bright light down into my face, burning my eyes, I figured this was the “doctor” the woman had mentioned, and, as she said, he was taking care of me. Using the same logic, I figured the women who had been taking information from me and helping me were the “nurses.”

The doctor rolled me onto my side. I felt a sharp prick of pain in the back of my head, and I heard a weird muffled clicking sound as he pushed something against my skull. I later learned he had given me an injection of lidocaine and stapled my wound closed.

One thing I was sure I remembered was dropping off my wife that morning for work at Scottsdale Healthcare's outpatient surgical center, so I informed one of the nurses. She called over there and spoke to someone who happened to know Joan, a former nurse who hadn't actually worked there in more than two years. Luckily, they still had a contact number for her and were able to catch her on the way to a charity event. The nurse told her that I had fallen and hit my head, so I was “a little confused,” then she walked over and handed me the wall phone next to my bed.

“It's your wife,” she said.

What's a wife?

I was confused because that concept had left me by now too, so I no longer knew what a wife was or what it meant to have one. It was clear that I was supposed to talk to her, though, so I did as I was told.

“Hello?” I said noncommittally.

“Hi, honey, how're you doing?” she said.

“I—am—in—the—hospital,” I said in a slow, robotic monotone. I was grasping for words, forgetting what I was trying to say as I was saying it, let alone what the question was. My head was really throbbing now, and I wanted the pain to stop. Maybe then I'd be able to think clearly.

“I'm going to be there in about twenty minutes,” she said.

“Okay.”

I drifted in and out while the ER staff, dressed in baggy blue pants and short-sleeved shirts, put a plastic patch around my finger and sticky patches on my chest, all of which attached to lines that hooked up to a machine.

“I'm going to take your blood pressure,” one of the nurses said.

I trusted she knew what she was doing.

“We're going to give you something for the pain,” another nurse said. As she put the clear liquid in the tube, I felt the pain subside a bit, but the relief didn't last long.

Next, a man called a “tech” wheeled me down the hall, explaining, “We're going to take pictures of your head and neck.”

He helped move me from my bed onto a table that pulled me inside a big open machine shaped like a semicircle with a hole in the middle. Once I was inside it, he instructed me to lie still. I kept my eyes open while the table moved into the tube as it clicked and whirred.

From there they wheeled me to another room nearby, where they put the head of my bed against the wall. After getting some more pain medication, I felt a brief euphoria and calmness, which made it even harder to think or listen to the nurses. It was a fight just to keep my eyelids open because they were getting so heavy. So I gave in to the sensation and let it take me and pull me down into sleep.

I continued to drift in and out of consciousness as I lay in my corner. I didn't speak unless I was asked a direct question. I just listened and tried to absorb information, not wanting to say the wrong thing. As uncomfortable as the bed was, I was afraid to move in case I fell again. I also felt scared and confused about why everyone but me seemed to know what was going on.

Why don't I know anything, and why can't I remember anything?
What happens now?

A little after 9:00
A.M.,
I heard a tap, tap, tapping that was getting louder when a pretty blond woman turned the corner and walked toward me. I noticed that she was dressed differently than the nurses, wearing a long-sleeved gray sweater covered with tiny pearls and sequins that caught the light, black pants, a black jacket with furry cuffs, and the shoes that made that tapping sound.

“Hi, honey,” she said, which gave me a clue that I belonged to her somehow. Her tone of voice was different—more personal—than that of the nurses. From her frown and tight lips, I could see that she was upset. Still, she leaned in, gave me a hug and a kiss on the lips, enveloping me with a strange but comforting warmth. I inhaled a sweet scent, noting that she smelled much better than the other women who were taking care of me. But more important, she seemed more attentive and affectionate. I wondered who this woman was; she seemed so troubled on my behalf.

One of the other nurses who came over to talk to her at my bedside unknowingly supplied me with some answers. “You must be Jelly,” she said, jokingly to explain the Peanut Butter name.

“Oh, I'm Joan, his wife,” the blonde replied, trying to smile through her concern.

As I heard Joan call herself my “wife,” I could tell that she too felt she was something more important to me and I to her. Hopefully in time I would piece that together as well.

The two women chatted, throwing around medical terminology that was foreign to me, but it was clear that they, at least, spoke the same language. I slowly began to pick up on some simple names of things and their meanings.