THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, December 2, 1995 TAG: 9512020571
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY REBECCA A. MYERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH LENGTH: Long : 170 lines
In the weeks leading up to his Coast Guard retirement ceremony, Chief Warrant Officer Robert J. ``Bob'' Brickwedde practiced his salute and kept secret from his wife what he planned to say about her.
She knew he would thank the physical therapists who helped him learn to eat, talk and walk again. She was sure he would thank his family for their thoughts and prayers during the critical months after the accident.
And she knew he would have some humorous things to say about the Coast Guard family with whom he has spent the past 23 years.
Finally, on Friday, Sandra Brickwedde watched him, handsome in his uniform, deliver his speech and heard the words he had saved for her.
``To my wife, I appreciate everything she has done for me. . . . I know that there were times that I was close to death, but she helped me through it.''
After his speech, he put on his hat and saluted the crew. It was sunny outside on this day the 52-year-old had looked forward to for so many years.
And it was a long road from the one that changed the Brickweddes' lives forever.
Sandra Brickwedde will never forget Feb. 18.
It had been raining in South Carolina for five days, she says. So when she hit a stream of rushing water on Interstate 20, the car hydroplaned and slid off the pavement, the tires digging 6 to 8 inches into the mud as she desperately slammed on the brakes.
``It was so soggy that those wheels just kept going,'' the 46-year-old says. ``It was like being on a sled.''
She remembers seeing the tree but doesn't remember the impact - just waking to find the car wrapped, V-shaped, around it.
She couldn't move because of her husband's weight. He had been knocked on top of her, both of them trapped under the steering wheel.
Bob had been in the passenger seat taking a nap. He would not fully wake again for two months.
But as his wife waited for rescue workers, she did not know whether he would make it at all. She still has nightmares about the strange sound of his breathing.
``Every once in a while I'll wake up because I'll hear that breathing. And I'll make sure it's not him.''
The Brickweddes had been on their way to see her terminally ill father in Alabama.
One family tragedy should have been enough to deal with.
But before the day was over, a helicopter was flying Sandra's comatose husband to a hospital in Columbia, S.C. The worst was yet to come.
``The doctor said to me, `I can't tell you how long he's going to be in the coma, but I can tell you right now that he's probably the best he's ever going to be.'
``I just couldn't believe that it could be over already,'' she said. ``I just wouldn't let it.''
Bob's labored breathing was caused by an injury to his right lung. He also had injuries to his heart and brain.
``I didn't know anything about comas,'' his wife remembers. ``I mean, you hear about them, you watch them on TV. They go to sleep, they wake up, you think they're fine.
``But when you start reading about what happens to people, . . . how their bodies can shut down, it's not as easy as the movies make it out to be.''
Nothing was easy now. For five weeks, Sandra had a husband in a coma in one state, a dying father in another and a 16-year-old daughter, suddenly on her own, back in Virginia.
``I didn't know which way to go,'' she says.
Fortunately, co-workers at Allied Colloids in Suffolk pitched in to take care of her daughter.
Meanwhile, Bob lay motionless in the intensive-care unit of a South Carolina hospital, breathing through a respirator and being fed through tubes, while his wife camped out in a waiting room between the 15-minute visits she was allowed four times a day.
In those short visits, she talked constantly to him. She made cassette tapes so he could listen to her voice when she wasn't there.
She read cards sent to him by friends, family and Coast Guardsmen from all over the country, many they had never met.
Ten days later, she noticed his face looked different. It had more expression. When she entered the room a few hours later, she said, ``Hi, honey,'' and he opened his eyes.
His pulse rate went up to 160, and a nurse encouraged Sandra to keep talking.
It would be five more weeks before he opened his eyes again.
By then, he had been in the Portsmouth Naval Hospital for two weeks and then was transferred to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Richmond.
The day before he was to leave the Naval Hospital, he opened his eyes and kept them open for half the day. By the time he reached the VA hospital, he seemed able to follow voice commands, and doctors considered him out of the coma.
Sandra, a procurement clerk, revised her schedule to work four-day weeks and commuted to Richmond the other three.
She filled her husband's hospital room with family photos and tried to ``re-introduce'' him to his daughter, his two adult sons and his grandson. She helped therapists exercise the paralyzed right side of his body.
Then one day she got a call at work.
``Bob can talk,'' the doctor told her. ``The nurse was bathing him, and he almost scared her to death.
``He told her the water was too cold.''
He also could say his name, and he could tell them that he was in the Coast Guard. But he still didn't remember his family.
``He knew we were somebody who came to see him, and his nurses told him I was his wife,'' Sandra says.
As Bob's condition improved, Sandra decided to capture the miracle on film. Her album is filled with pictures of the ``Come Back Kid,'' as one of Bob's brothers calls him.
It wasn't until the family brought him home over Memorial Day weekend that Bob started remembering.
And one day after he returned to the hospital, a therapist called.
``He doesn't want to do therapy today,'' a nurse said. ``He wants to go home.''
His doctor decided it would be good for him to be near his family, so Bob was transferred to Skyline Rehabilitation Management at Manning Convalescent Home.
Soon after his arrival, he could walk with someone guiding him at the elbow. The paralysis on his right side began to subside.
His lopsided grin returned to a beautiful, ear-to-ear smile.
Family members coached him, and his slow and deliberate speech improved.
In July, he went home for good, but his work continued. He had to practice, again and again, lifting his right arm.
One day, Sandra came home from work to find him standing at the front door, a ``big smile on his face,'' waving. He still does not have complete use of the arm, but he's teaching himself to play tennis with his left hand. He also practices putting golf balls in the living room of his Southampton Arch home. And he plays pool on the new billiards table Sandra bought him as a retirement present.
Until August, he wouldn't watch TV because he had split vision and everything blended together and looked gray. Then one day he jumped up.
``I can see the whole TV,'' he said.
He began reading everything, from the sports scores on ESPN to the labels of the salad dressing bottles on the dinner table.
``He was just like a little kid for like a week,'' Sandra says.
He had reason to be excited. A specialist had told Sandra the chance of getting his vision back had been 1 in 10,000.
Though he still has not regained peripheral vision in one eye, his distance vision is now better than it was before the accident. His hearing is better, too.
But he still struggles to piece together the remnants of his memory.
He didn't remember his son had gotten married, but did remember the son had a 2-year-old.
But, sometimes bits and pieces of the past return to him in dreams, and he will ask his wife about it.
The week before Thanksgiving - nine months after that February day - the Brickweddes flew to Alabama to attend the funeral of Sandra's father.
So much had changed since then.
But in a strange way, their lives also have been enhanced since the accident.
They are closer, for one thing.
``I used to think that we lived to the fullest each day, but we didn't,'' Sandra says. ``There were too many things that we put importance on that really weren't important.''
Now, she treasures things as simple as her husband's smile.
``I used to hop right up from the table, do the dishes right away,'' she says. Now, the dishes wait sometimes two hours, while the Brickweddes sit and talk.
In June, they plan to take a cruise to celebrate their 28th anniversary. They're going with Bob's parents, who are celebrating their 60th.
Last Sunday, as the family began decorating their home for Christmas, Bob told Sandra: ``You know, I don't remember a lot about our Christmases in the past.''
``Well,'' she said to him, ``we'll just have to make new memories.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by MARK MITCHELL, The Virginian-Pilot
Chief Warrant Officer Robert J. Brickwedde said of his wife, Sandra,
at his retirement ceremoney: ``I know that there were times that I
was close to death, but she helped me through it.''
KEYWORDS: HEAD INJURY COMA by CNB