ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 1, 1996 TAG: 9612020011
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE
SOURCE: JACK CHAMBERLAIN SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
Somewhere deep inside Jason Rooker resides Jason Rooker, and his parents strive daily to bring him back to a full life
Last summer, Greg and Fran Rooker of Pulaski County snatched their only son back from death. Now, with the prayers of family, friends and strangers, and the caring skills of professionals, they are trying to guide their 11-year-old back to a meaningful life.
No one knows how long it will take. No one knows how far they will go.
The road to recovery from severe brain damage is not clearly mapped. It is often fraught with detours, barriers and dead ends. Glacially slow progress can suddenly reverse without apparent reason.
But people are praying for Daniel Jason Rooker, who hanged himself by accident at his home on Claytor Lake. And Greg and Fran Rooker say they still have a lot to be thankful for. Their faith, family, friends, and hundreds of cards and letters from strangers, have enriched their lives.
"The response has been the energy to keep us going," said Greg Rooker, 49, owner of the Southwest Virginia Enterprise in Wytheville and two other community newspapers. "I am surprised by that. I've always been a cynical newspaper person. Independent. I didn't need anybody. A hug gives you energy. I guess we don't feel like we're alone."
Fran Rooker, 46, is at Jason's bedside at the University of Virginia Hospital's Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center almost continually. He needs his mother's voice. He needs his mother's touch. He needs changing like an infant.
Jason lies in a hospital bed, unable to speak. He cannot control his arms or legs, either. But he can control his head and watches his mother with brown eyes that stare out from under heavy dark brows.
Fran is alone with him and talking. She is always talking to him, trying to get through. "I know Jason is in there," Fran says.
Imagine a prettier sister of TV's Rhea Perlman, the witty waitress from "Cheers," the feisty student on "Pearl." Fran is 5 feet 3 inches of energy. She is usually smiling and often joking.
At other times, she is on the edge of tears. Sometimes it's when she thinks how her son is so close yet so far away from her. Or it's when she thinks of her two daughters at home, 150 miles away, trying to live the normal lives of high school teen-agers without their mother.
"I wish I could be back with my daughters," Fran says. "I know we'll be back together again. I just don't know what type of family we'll be."
On weekdays, Greg runs the newspapers and cares for Jennifer, 16, and Stephanie, 14, Radford High School students who recently won places on the district choir. They call their mother often on the center's 800 number.
Greg calls Fran two or three times a day. He spends most weekends in Charlottesville. One week a month, Greg and Fran switch roles. When both parents are with Jason, friends in Radford help with their daughters. Members of their church prepare meals once a week.
"People want to help," said Carol Bobzin, Fran's friend and minister of religious education at the Rookers' church, St. Jude's Catholic in Radford. "I think it's great that Fran and Greg have allowed that. Some people just go inside themselves."
The week of Jason's 11th birthday, Nov. 7, was not the best of his 20 weeks at Kluge. During good times, he is serene. His eyes can follow his mom, his dad, a visitor. They can focus on the TV, and he laughs at things young boys think are funny - slapstick and bathroom jokes.
"He started laughing on Sept. 14," Fran says. "He laughed at Homer Simpson burping."
During bad times, Jason vents his frustration and distress the only way he can - mournful cries and uncontrolled rigidity. Arching his head, back and legs. Routine bodily functions seem to be agony.
During these times, his eyes are tightly closed. There is no reaching him. His mother, sometimes with a nurse or therapist, hovers over his bed, working his legs, flexing his rigid knees, trying to soothe him.
* * *
On Thursday, June 13, Jason was out of school after completing the fourth grade. In a few days, he was to leave for seven weeks at a school for learning-disabled children near Charlottesville.
"The last time I saw him he had his lasso," Greg said. "He was trying to lasso the fence."
Greg had finished mowing the lawn. Fran had planted onions. One of the girls was raking leaves. An elderly neighbor was whacking weeds with a Weed Eater.
When Greg went to call his son for dinner, he saw him standing on a stone post of the fence. "I thought, `Darn him, his mother is calling him and he didn't come.'''
Greg was not aware of Jason's peril. He walked toward his son.
"Then I started screaming, calling for Fran. I was holding him up. I really thought he was gone."
The noose was around his neck. The other end was looped three or four times around the knob of a sawed-off locust branch.
"He was just hanging. He was just hanging," Fran said. "His face was gray. His lips were blue. His tongue was blue. His eyes were barely open."
The two had to drag him up and over the 5-foot fence. Greg figures his son was unconscious almost immediately. He had made no attempt to save himself. Conscious, he may have grabbed or climbed back on the fence, barely two feet away. He would have clawed at the noose. Jason had no scratches on his neck, only the awful wound from the rope.
There's no way to know for sure, but Greg thinks Jason had been hanging for up to 10 minutes. He was not breathing. He had no pulse. His mother breathed life into his lungs while his father compressed his chest. Jason started to breathe. He coughed. Color returned to his face.
"Everybody says we were so cool," Greg said. "But I pretty much thought he was gone. We didn't think about it. We just did it automatically."
Through it all, the neighbor continued whacking weeds. The whir of the whacker, Greg and Fran speculate, had covered any sounds Jason may have made when he fell.
"Sometimes I think back," Fran said. "But you can't change a thing. You can't change a thing."
By 8:25 p.m., Jason was on his way to Carilion Radford Community Hospital. Less than three hours later, he was on his way by helicopter to Carilion Roanoke Community.
"We've had doctors tell us Jason is going to be a vegetable," Greg said. "We've had doctors tell us he would be fine."
The couple was not surprised by Jason's accident. He was adventurous. He sometimes acted without thinking. They had feared an accident on the lake someday or car wreck several years from now.
"Jason has hung himself several times - by the foot," Greg said. His father would get him down. "I'd tell him, `Never tie a rope to yourself.'''
Jason's injury is known as anoxia, total deprivation of oxygen to the brain. Unlike specific damage from a blow or a stroke, anoxia affects the entire brain. The longer the brain is deprived, the more profound the injury. Once dead, brain cells rarely regenerate.
"I think he's better than he was in August," said Jason's doctor, Richard Stevens, associate professor of pediatrics at UVa Hospital. "I've seen clear improvement. It's been slow - frustratingly slow. But I feel optimistic that he hasn't plateaued. We just don't know how far he'll progress."
Jason has one big thing going for him, his doctor said. Normally, the brain continues to develop into early adulthood. Jason was only 10.
* * *
Room 1008 is Jason's home. It's a typical hospital room with a bed, two chairs, and two small chests of drawers. It also has a machine that pumps nourishment through a tube in his nose.
His family has surrounded him with familiar things: his Braves baseball cap, his Rawlings glove, and a left-handed Cal Ripken Jr. model, Jason's hero.
A montage of family photos is on the wall: Jason in his baseball uniform. Jason in his white karate outfit. The family's mixed black Labs, Miracle and Abby. And Calvin, the cat Jason brought home from Cub Scouts last year.
Greg missed his son's 11th birthday, but he breezed in the next afternoon carrying a big birthday poster the fifth-graders at Bethel Elementary in Montgomery County had made. Greg made jokes, and Jason smiled and laughed.
Fran told Greg Jason had had a bad day.
"You've been Glumpo the Grumpo!" Greg said, maintaining a constant banter of bathroom humor and rude noises for his son. Jason, eyes glued on his father, laughed some more.
"Can you blink at me?" Greg asked. "Blink your eyes at me."
Jason blinked. "Who knows what that means?" Fran said softly.
Down the hall in the parents' lounge, Greg said: "You know, I would dance naked in the room to make my son laugh. You can't be jovial all the time. It's almost like being a professional comedian. It's hard work."
* * *
On Aug. 27, nearly 11 weeks after Jason's accident, a letter bearing two "Love" stamps arrived at Room 1008. "I know you probably don't remember me," wrote Donna Mills, the custodian at Jason's school.
Mills had copied 29 verses of II Kings, Chapter 4, on six pages of school notebook paper. The verses, a lesson in faith and persistence, tell of a woman's prayers bringing her son back to life.
Maybe Donna Mills' letter was a coincidence. Maybe it was more.
Jason had emerged from his coma on Father's Day, June 16, at 10:12 a.m. At that hour, during a Mass for Jason 50 miles away, a woman was reading aloud from the Bible. The scripture for the day had been another selection, but by mistake, she had read the passage from II Kings.
"I couldn't believe Donna wrote that," Fran said. "She doesn't go to my church. She had no idea what was said."
The Rookers have received hundreds of cards and letters offering prayers, hope, rides to Charlottesville and help with the laundry.
A mother said her daughter spent 7 1/2 months at Kluge after an auto accident three years ago left her in a coma. "Progress is slow," the mother wrote, "but she is a happy 12-year-old now."
"It's going to be a long, slow recovery," Fran says. "Whatever is God's will, that's what we will live with."
Greg arrived just in time for "The Team Meeting," held every two weeks to evaluate Jason's progress with the doctor, nurses, therapists, psychologist and nutritionist.
The good news is that Jason has made slow progress and recently made more eye contact and faster "Look at me!" responses.
The bad news: Jason's not eating, as he was two weeks earlier. His agitation and arching has increased. He needed more medication, nursing care and monitoring.
Jason's care costs about $1,000 a day. Trigon Blue Cross-Blue Shield, the medical insurer for Rooker's newspapers, stopped paying Oct. 30. "This is a very serious situation," Fran said of her son. "I don't want to have to think about this. I just don't need that stress. I'm just a little bit angry."
Trigon wants Jason moved to a cheaper facility, such as a nursing home. Jason's neurologist, Thomas J. Spicuzza, said moving Jason would be "detrimental to his health and his recovery process." The Rookers hope he can stay at Kluge until June.
"First, I wanted him to live. Then I wanted him to smile," Greg said. "It is my hope that we can rehab him enough here that we can pick it up at home, [that] he would be able to get some enjoyment out of life, that he could be of service to somebody else."
Since Jason's accident, Fran has read everything she could about brain injury: Mainstream medicine, holistic medicine, intuitive medicine. An acupuncturist visits twice a week. A woman called "The Angel Lady" came to conjure up Jason's guardian angel. The doctors don't mind, Fran says. It might help. Who knows?
"I just hope that Jason will be able to communicate with people in some way, " she said. "I would like to see him do something in his life that will make him happy. I just know he'll be doing something that will teach other people. He's doing that now."
Jack Chamberlain retired in 1993 after 30 years as a reporter and editor with the paper. He lives in the Northern Neck.
ERIC BRADY Staff Sometimes, Jason (top) becomes rigid with frustration when his physical therapist, Sherry McNaught, works with him at the Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center in Charlottesville. His father, Greg, (middle photo) makes the trip to be at his son's bedside most weekends. Jason seems to really need the touch of his mother, Fran (above).
Fran says times are hardest when her son is so near, but yet seems so out of reach.
Jason has hundreds of cards in his room, this one received after his recent 11th birthday.
LENGTH: Long : 230 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY\Staff. 1. Jason receives physical therapyby CNBfrom Emily Berry (left) and Sherry McNaught. Watching (from left)
are aunt Linda Angelelli, grandparents Frank and Mary Vickers and
mom, Fran. Jason's doctor, Richard Stevens, associate professor of
pediatrics at UVa Hospital, says Jason has made ``clear improvement
We just don't know how far he'll progress.'' 2. Jason has received
hundreds of cards in his room, this one received after his recent,
11th birthday. 3. Fran says times are hardest when her son is son
near, but seems so out of reach. 4. Sometimes, Jason (top) becomes
rigid with frustration when his physical therapist, Sherry McNaught,
works with him at the Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center in
Chartlottesville. 5. His father, Greg, (middle photo) makes the trip
to be at his son's bedside most weekends. Jason seems to really need
the touch of his mother, Fran (above). color.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE