washingtonpost.com
Love's Long Road to Recovery
Md. Man Chronicles Wife's 'Miraculous' Path From Brain Injury
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 14, 2005; Page A01
Maria Pattakos doesn't remember the walk she took that morning in October. She cannot recall crossing the street in the bright sunshine, or seeing the big, white pickup truck that suddenly seemed to loom from out of nowhere.
She doesn't recollect pushing the baby stroller from the truck's path at the last second, and has no memory of being flung into the air, losing her hat and sunglasses, and smashing down to the macadam, splintering her ribs and collarbone and fracturing her skull.
Four months later, she has trouble remembering what day of the week it is.
So her husband has been writing it all down.
The first days after the accident were a blur of pain, tears and prayer as his wife lay unconscious in intensive care at Suburban Hospital. On the fifth day after the accident, Arion Pattakos, 71, started writing. His story opens on Sunday, Oct. 17.
"This is day five," he begins. "I decided to keep a log starting today to, well, record your status and mine. . . . I am proud of your deed but devastated emotionally, given what happened to you."
Arion Pattakos's "log" is an account of his wife's accident, and all that has happened since, with the hope that someday she might know what she has missed, and what both of them have endured.
As he writes, seasons change, holidays and birthdays come and go, world events unfold. "We are all waiting for you to join us," he notes.
It is a chronicle of one couple's encounter with a catastrophe: "Sweetheart, I am scared," he writes on a bleak day in late October. "Why have our lives turned to such a horrible path? . . . I sometimes see myself curled into a little ball in our bedroom on the rug. I . . . wither away and decompose into a pile of dust. A puff of wind comes and just . . . blows me away."
And it is a love letter, written over more than 120 days, by a retired Army colonel to his wife of 23 years. He is bereft, and helpless. "Mary . . . you are everything to me and my ability to survive without you is not very good. So, help me live by coming back to me."
Maria Pattakos, 60, known as Mary, remains in the brain injury program of National Rehabilitation Hospital in Northwest Washington, where she was transferred from Suburban Hospital.
She has made what her husband calls a "miraculous" return from the twilight state in which she lived for weeks after the accident -- attached to hospital life-support systems, unable to walk, or talk, or even squeeze his hand.
She walks on her own, if unsteadily at times. She breathes and eats on her own, engages in conversation, and shows sparks of humor. Yet she has trouble focusing, remembering people's names and recalling where she is.
Her brain still is struggling to handle the avalanche of data that a healthy brain can process daily, and it might be many months before her recovery is finished.
But she can take her time. Almost every morning, her husband arrives at the hospital by 7. He hails nurses, doctors, therapists and aides en route to the third-floor room where "panapola mou" -- "my everything" in Greek -- is getting ready for breakfast.
They kiss, they pray, and she begins another day on her road back, which includes physical therapy, speech therapy and occupational therapy. When she does well, he will gently say, "Bravo, baby, bravo."
Nanny, Caregiver, Wife
He was married when they first met.
Arion Pattakos was a U.S. Army officer who had been sent to study in his father's homeland at the Greek War College in 1962.
Just before heading across the Atlantic, his then-wife, Thalia, received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disease of the central nervous system. After they arrived in Greece, he realized they would need help caring for their two children, Nadine, then 3, and Nicholas, only a few months old.
It happened that there was a 17-year-old girl from a poor farming family who worked as a nanny in Thessaloniki. Her name was Maria Koukounari. She looked after his wife and children during their two years in Greece, saying goodbye when they headed home.
Back in the United States, Thalia Pattakos's illness worsened. Paralysis set in. She was confined to a wheelchair and had brain surgery.
"She just disintegrated before my eyes," Arion Pattakos said.
In need of help again, the family asked Maria to come from Greece.
She arrived in 1972, by then a 27-year-old woman. She cooked, shuttled the children around and essentially "raised the kids," Arion Pattakos said. And she cared for Thalia until her death in February 1981.
"She saved my life," Arion Pattakos said.
They were married in Northwest Washington's St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral on July 26, 1981, and have been inseparable since.
'She Put Down Her Life'
Last Oct. 12, Maria Pattakos was out for a sunny morning walk with her neighbor, Pauline Londeree, along Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park, just off Rockville Pike, near their Kensington home.
Maria pushed Londeree's granddaughter, Jenna Sauber, who was who quite 2, in a stroller
At Beach Drive and Cedar Lane, Londeree pressed the pedestrian crossing button on the traffic light pole.
When the "walk" signal started to flash, the women began to cross. Maria and the baby were a few steps ahead. At that moment, a pickup, which had slowed at the light on Beach Drive, began to turn right onto Cedar. The driver, John Paul Purcell, 54, who lived about four blocks from Pattakos, told police that the sun was in his eyes and that he didn't see the women.
Maria must have seen him, because police said she shoved the stroller out of the way an instant before the truck hit her. The stroller overturned, but Jenna suffered only a few scrapes.
Police reported that Purcell didn't seem to be going fast -- there were only smudges on the truck's paint, and smears that were most likely "skin and other biological matter" on the grille where Maria was hit.
But the impact tossed her into the air. She crashed to the middle of the street. She suffered broken ribs on both sides of her body, two punctured lungs, a broken pelvis, eye and hip injuries, a broken collarbone and a fractured skull. Londeree told police it looked as if Maria's head had "opened up" on the pavement. "She put her life down for Jenna," Londeree said.
When Arion Pattakos reached the hospital, she was unconscious, in critical condition, and her survival was in doubt.
Doctors operated on her brain to remove blood clots and installed a temporary catheter to prevent pressure, her husband said. She had another operation on her shattered ribs. Slowly, she emerged from danger and began to heal.
But her psychic recovery was different. She did not open her eyes until more than a week later. She was unresponsive for almost three weeks. She could not speak for 58 days.
As the time passed, her anguished husband waited, sat with her, exercised her limbs and talked to her through his diary.
"It is raining and will probably rain all day," he wrote Nov. 4. "You seem so tired and still no hello to me."
A devout Greek Orthodox Christian, he set up a small shrine to her, with a candle and an icon of their patron saint, Paraskevi. He kept the candle in the kitchen sink. This was the easternmost spot in their home -- the closest to the Holy Land -- and also would not cause the house to catch on fire.
"I've been crying this morning because I feel so sad," he wrote Nov. 5. "Everyone says that you are standing in the door. Please step through it soon and say hi."
He tried to keep the house tidy, making the bed, doing the laundry, taking out the trash. "I'm even shutting closet doors," he wrote. He brought in the plants when it got cold, but he couldn't find the watering can. He ate cereal and canned chili for dinner.
He wrote to her about the presidential election and the tsunami and Johnny Carson's death. He told her stories.
"I came in bright and early and had a little run-in with the nurse," he wrote one Sunday. "She reminded me that visiting hours did not begin until 11 a.m. I replied that visiting hours begin when I arrive. She said I was rude. . . . We later made up and she has been sweet."
On Nov. 8, his wife kissed him on the cheek. "Wow," he wrote.
He washed her hair, rubbed lotion on her hands, played her CDs of Greek music and the Beatles. He bought her hiking boots at the military PX to support her feet. He bought himself cologne, and pretended it was from her.
On Dec. 3, she took her first shower, helped by a therapist. "You did great today," he wrote.
But her progress was slow. She still couldn't talk. And his moods went up and down. Monday, Dec. 6, was a bad day.
"I continued to be depressed today," he wrote. "I need you to communicate with us. It hurts so much that you do not do that yet. I'm supposed to be patient and strong but I don't know if I can be strong. It is so painful. I had my bad thoughts this morning. . . . "
On Dec. 9, she finally spoke. He accidentally bumped her head while getting her ready for physical therapy. "Ow," she said. The next day, she laughed for the first time since the accident.
On Dec. 17, he asked her whether she could say out loud that she loved him. It would "make my heart sing," he recorded. She nodded yes, and said, "I love you."
But five days later, he wrote that he was not sure she really knew who he was. "I told you my name and the fact that we were married for 23 years," he wrote. "Good," she responded.
Weeks passed. Christmas and New Year's came, and he said good riddance to a "lousy" year. She could now write her name and talk to him on the phone.
On Jan. 6, he asked whether she knew his name. "Arion Pattakos," she said.
Nearing Discharge Day
One Friday this month, he arrived at the hospital, early as usual, and made his way to the third floor. She was dressed in a pink shirt and black exercise pants but was still in bed and looked groggy.
Her bulletin board was filled with cards and letters from well-wishers. Large photographs of family members hung near her bed, to help her remember who was who. The hospital had set a possible discharge day for this month. But she still had work to do.
"My pretty girl," he said. "You're still tired?" She needed to be peppy and cooperative for the day's therapy, he said. "Yep," she said. She understood.
Breakfast arrived. He helped prepare her cereal. Eat, he told her. "I'm eating," she replied.
When she was finished, he remembered that they had not yet prayed. "Let's do that really quick," he said. He leaned over and held her hands. "Ready?"
"Our Father," he said, beginning the Lord's Prayer. She stumbled, and he prompted her. Then they made the sign of the cross together as he recited: "In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and ever unto ages and ages. Amen."
"Amen," she said. |
