THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, August 16, 1995 TAG: 9508160644
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARIE JOYCE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 229 lines
FOR WEEKS, William Kidwell lay in bed, tortured by painkiller dreams that were more real than the walls of his room in Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.
His wife had packed up and left, and so had all his neighbors. He was at home, tearing down the dog pen in the back yard because Pety and Patches had run away. An aunt had borrowed his credit card and racked up terrible bills he couldn't pay. He was living in an old, decaying house, ashamed of the life his wife and daughters led and worrying that he couldn't afford to leave the house.
In the hospital world, people flitted about like ghosts. They talked to him in a language he couldn't understand, and he couldn't answer.
He came out of the haze gradually. When he did finally surface, he discovered it had been two months since the motorcycle accident.
His legs were gone, and so was his left arm. His right arm was crippled.
His wife, pregnant with their third child, was just a few weeks from her due date.
He could barely move.
Kidwell, 29, always had a reckless streak.
When he was in his early 20s, he'd party all night then work hard all day. He dated several women at once. He didn't take care of himself - it was nothing for him to skip two or three meals in a row.
If a vehicle could go 170, he says, he'd push it to 170.
It wasn't the kind of life he wanted.
Kathy, his wife, changed all that
They were married four years ago. After moving around a bit, they settled in Moyock, N.C., a one-traffic-light town. Bill got a job with a concrete company, overseeing a crew that poured driveways and things.
The crew had a troweling machine, but Bill often would get impatient and scramble across the planks of the wooden framework on his knees, a steel trowel in his right hand, a tool for working the concrete in his left, and finish off the job himself.
They had two daughters a year and a half apart. Kathy stayed home with the girls. They lived paycheck to paycheck. They got by.
With each step - the marriage, the birth of each child - he felt a little bit more responsibility press on him. Not a weight, really. More like an anchor.
But his wild streak emerged just a little bit on the day of the accident. It was the Wednesday before Easter, one of the first real nice days of spring.
He and the crew were heading from one job site to the next and stopped at a gas station for sodas. Kidwell usually drove the company truck, but he got the urge to ride a motorcycle that belonged to one of his coworkers.
He remembers the tires skidding a bit as he raced out of the parking lot. It was just 2 miles or so to the next job. He pushed the bike past 100 mph.
He was almost there when a trailer backed across the road, blocking his path. He was going too fast to make a sharp turn.
The bike flew into hundreds of pieces when it hit the trailer. The speedometer froze at 140.
Kidwell can't remember the months after that - the numerous amputations to cut away dying tissue in his crushed limbs, the surgery for other complications, the hospital chaplain reading him last rites three times. All he remembers are the nightmares.
Kathy remembers the real horror vividly, but she has lost count of how many times she was told that another piece of him had to be cut away.
``Every time you got your hopes up and one little thing got better, you'd come back the next day and things had gotten a lot worse,'' she said.
But Kidwell survived. When he finally emerged from nightmares, about two months after the accident, he was lying covered in sweat in his Norfolk General room, looking out at people moving at the nursing station.
He was thin. He had bed sores from where he had lain for so long. An enormous angry scar ran down his remaining arm, the right one. Doctors had been able to save it only by removing some decaying muscle, so it didn't work well anymore. He could hardly lift it. He couldn't feed or bathe himself or brush his teeth or pick up the phone to call someone.
He knew he had done this to himself. ``It was my fault,'' he says. ``It happened.''
He was transferred to the physical rehabilitation unit on the hospital's top floor. He'd have to learn how to take care of himself, they told him. He'd learn how to walk.
Occupational therapist Beverly Peebles had never worked with a triple amputee in her four years on the unit.
``Most people when they come up here have something intact,'' she said.
When she first met him, he wasn't even strong enough to turn from side to side in the bed.
He didn't talk much. When the staff asked him questions, he'd answer in a flat, emotionless voice or just turn his head away.
But even then, Peebles said, he was asking about the therapy. He wanted to use his hand again. He wanted to get out of bed.
He wanted to see his new baby.
Kathy had not arranged for anyone to take his place in the delivery room. If he couldn't be there, she was going in by herself. ``I wanted him in there bad,'' she said.
Finally, Kidwell told the rehab staff how much he wanted to see this baby born. The staff at Norfolk General and Kathy's doctor helped make arrangements to move the delivery there from Chesapeake General Hospital.
On June 26, 2 1/2 months after the accident, Kathy showed up in Kidwell's room earlier than usual. ``Billy, I'm having contractions.'' She had driven herself all the way from Moyock, contractions coming three minutes apart.
Bill couldn't sit up for long, so they had decided that Kathy would go to delivery by herself and he would wait in his room until it was almost time. He fretted for about two hours, then when he couldn't stand the tension anymore, he asked his mom to wheel him downstairs.
He entered the room just as Kathy was calling for him. His chair was placed beside her. He held her hand. ``She was in pain. I told her it was going to be all right and not to think about it.''
``And,'' recalls Kathy, ``I love you.''
An hour later, he was holding Kylie Page for the first time. His right arm, he discovered, was still strong enough to cradle a baby.
But Kylie's birth only made him ache for home even more. He should have been there, he thought. Kidwell sank into depression again. What about his responsibilities? Would people look at him differently?
That's the way he was when Khalil Shabazz came to the rehab unit. Khalil had lost his right arm and leg in an accident on the job.
The staff told Khalil there was a guy his age on the floor. ``They told me he wasn't feeling too good.'' They told him this guy didn't like to talk. But Shabazz needed to talk.
He had one of the staff wheel him to Kidwell's room.
``How're you doing? My name is Khalil Shabazz,'' he said. He didn't get much of a response. But he saw something there. ``I'll come back,'' he said.
``OK,'' Kidwell said. He thought: ``What is this guy trying to do?'' He kind of hoped Shabazz would not come back. And he hoped he would.
Shabazz returned later that night. He said: ``C'mon, man. Let's get out of bed. We're still living. Let's go do something.''
Soon the two men were hanging out together. They discovered they had worked in the same business. Shabazz, 32, from Franklin, was injured when a concrete piling fell on him.
Shabazz told Kidwell they were lucky. In the first place, he said, they had survived. They were young, he said. They had their whole lives ahead of them.
He pointed to the photos of Kidwell's daughters tacked to the wall. Kidwell still had a beautiful family.
When Kidwell worried about Kathy taking care of the babies by herself, Shabazz would say, ``That's just for a little while, Big Guy. You'll be back there soon.''
Kathy was there every day. And his daughters came, too. Sometimes Kathy would try to leave the girls with relatives, but his oldest, 3-year-old Gabrielle, would cry so hard that her mother usually relented.
``He got me thinking,'' said Bill. ``My wife might not have wanted me when I was like this. I've got it made.''
A friend of Kidwell's mother got him a motorized wheelchair, an enormously expensive gift. People from his church helped out with the rent.
He and Shabazz started going outside to get some fresh air. Then they'd sit in a small park and talk.
They talked about their accidents, and about using their arms and legs, and about Kidwell's fears.
Kidwell had always been the sort of guy who was friendly with everybody but shared things with nobody, besides his wife.
``I didn't let people get close to me,'' Kidwell said. If you were down, he believed, people will kick you. ``I never really opened up to a man.''
When Shabazz got tired, he'd hold on to the back of Kidwell's motorized chair, and Kidwell would tow them both back into the hospital.
Shabazz said they could do anything they wanted. It would just be harder than before.
Shabazz only got depressed one time. He was in the rehab gym and he saw that one of the other guys there had just given up and didn't even want to try his exercises. Shabazz started crying.
``I didn't know whether I was sad for him or me or both of us.''
Kidwell hadn't expected so much kindness from the people in the rehab unit. They'd coax him to eat so he'd gain back his weight. They put a special cuff on his phone's receiver so he could make calls. They taught him how to eat again using a special spoon holder, how to dress himself, how to brush his teeth and wash his face. They pushed him when he wavered.
He lifted weights. He stretched his muscles. He got refitted for his artificial legs time and time again as he gained weight.
A therapist took him and Shabazz to a public pool to go swimming. They had lunch at Elliot's to learn how to negotiate in a crowded restaurant.
Peebles noticed that when she told him something, he'd practice on his own.
He got counseling. He went on antidepressants temporarily.
On a recent afternoon, he sat on a bench in the gym while therapist Wayne Church helped him strap on his two prosthethic legs. He already wore his prosthetic arm, with a set of pincers at the end that helped him grab things.
Kidwell grasped the walker with his left artificial hand, resting his right on the other side.
Carefully, he lifted one rigid leg a tiny bit off the floor and swung it forward. He shifted his weight and swung the other leg. The rubber tips on his walker squeaked against the tile floor.
He picked his way out of the gym, down the long hallway of the rehab unit and back again.
The holsters on his artificial legs pinched his thighs. Sweat matted the hair on his forehead, and his face was pinched with the strain.
Dr. Cecilia Lim Ransom watched from the door of the gym. When patients like Kidwell first learn to walk again, they use up a lot of extra energy until their muscles get used to it.
``It's like putting his own weight on his shoulders,'' she said.
Kidwell goes home this week. It'll be good to sit on his own couch, to lie in his own bed, to stand in his own yard.
Eventually, he'll probably move his family to western Virginia, where there's a center that will teach him a new trade like computers.
A lot of people in Moyock have heard that he died in the accident, Kathy says. Some even called to offer sympathy. ``I imagine there's a lot of people who still think he died,'' she said.
A few days ago, he and Shabazz were sitting outside. Shabazz wanted a cigarette, but the shop that sells them was across a busy street in the medical complex and they weren't really supposed to cross it.
Kidwell went anyway. He rolled right across the street and up the ramp, pulled on the door handle, wedged his chair in the opening, sailed in and bought a pack of Newports.
No one on the rehab unit knew about it, of course, but they know Kidwell by now. When they take him swimming, he still dives into the pool head-first.
``He's still got a little bit of that reckless streak,'' said Dr. Ransom. ILLUSTRATION: Color photos
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
Top: Gabrielle Kidwell, 2, holds her father's hand in the physical
therapy room at Norfolk Sentara Hospital. Left: William Kidwell
works his arm with physical therapist intern Wayne O. Church.
Graphic
LEND A HAND
Waterside Live! at Waterside is organizing a fund-raiser for Bill
Kidwell at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 8, at the Bait Shack at Waterside.
Organizers are looking for bands willing to donate time, items for
an auction and sponsors. If you're interested, leave a message for
Phil Ryan at 625-5483, ext. 88.
Photo
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
William Kidwell walks the halls of Sentara Norfolk with the help of
physical therapist Wayne Church. Kidwell's wife, Kathy, and daughter
Gabrielle, 3, look on.
by CNB