If your brain changes, are you still the same person?
That was the question behind a 1991 movie titled Regarding Henry. In that film, Harrison Ford played the part of Henry Turner. Henry was a wealthy New York City lawyer. He was also narcissistic, uncaring, and even a little unethical sometimes. He got what he wanted and he didn’t care who was in the way.
One night he stops into a convenience store and accidentally interrupts an armed robbery. Henry gets shot in the head, but somehow survives. But he has damage to his brain. As he recovers, he slowly emerges as someone very different than who he was before the shooting. He forges new, loving relationships with his wife and his daughter. And of course they love the “new” Henry.
My guest today is Marcy. She’s a wife and a mother. She has first-hand experience with seeing someone change after a traumatic brain injury – it was her husband, Greg.
He was not the same person.
If you’d like to contact Marcy, she’s in the Facebook group – WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook.
Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/251
Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.
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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):
If your brain changes, are you still the same person?
That was the question behind a 1991 movie titled Regarding Henry. In that film, Harrison Ford played the part of Henry Turner. Henry was a wealthy New York City lawyer. He was also narcissistic, uncaring, and even a little unethical sometimes. He got what he wanted and he didn’t care who was in the way.
One night he stops into a convenience store and accidentally interrupts an armed robbery. Henry gets shot in the head, but somehow survives. But he has damage to his brain. As he recovers, he slowly emerges as someone very different than who he was before the shooting. He forges new, loving relationships with his wife and his daughter. And of course they love the “new” Henry.
My guest today is Marcy. She’s a wife and a mother. She has first-hand experience with seeing someone change after a traumatic brain injury – it was her husband, Greg.
He was not the same person.
Scott
What was it about Greg that first attracted you to him?
Marcy
Oh, he was a great looking guy for starters, and very athletic. The night we met, I think he was playing foosball and just crushing it at the foosball table. Back then, people played foosball and that was very attractive. Somehow, we struck up a conversation and things kind of went from there.
Scott
Okay. So a little bit of back story when this happened. Who was in your family at the time? Obviously, your husband, Greg.
Marcy
So yeah, my husband, Greg, and my son who was five and my daughter who was two and a half.
Scott
And how long had you been married at that point?
Marcy
I’ve been married for 12 years at that point.
Scott
So it seemed everything you’ve told me about Greg is that he was pretty happy and everybody liked him.
Marcy
Yeah, it was a very happy-go-lucky kind of funny, sweet guy. I mean my nephews preferred him over me when we would get together with them. We’d go to see my sister, we’d open the door, and they would run to greet him first before me. So yeah, he was a really likeable guy.
Scott
And he was a hard worker. What kind of work did he do?
Marcy
Oh yeah, he was a really hard worker – he had a custom framing company, so he framed big custom homes – and a very talented carpenter as well. He did a good bit of the work himself. He had a crew, but he also did a good bit of the work himself.
Scott
Alright, so let’s talk about that day. What happened and was there anything unusual that morning at all?
Marcy
Nope. It was a normal day. We had our sales meeting that day and I went to work. We kissed goodbye. We got the kids all set up. It was summertime, so they were going to camp. I believe I probably dropped them off. Just a normal morning. Went to work. Yeah, it was a normal day.
Scott
And he usually left earlier than you.
Marcy
He did. In construction, they typically started at 7.30 and finished by 4. I was in a sales meeting and it was one of those meetings where you’re in a conference room, the door’s closed, and everybody waits to interrupt until it’s over. Like, nobody just comes in. The HR lady, who’s a friend of mine, opened the door, was like, “Marcy, you need to come out. You need to come with me.” So my first thought was the kids. Something happened to my kids? One was at camp, the little one, my daughter was, I believe, with a babysitter probably, or daycare. So of course, my first thought went to my children as I’m sure for a lot of moms.
Scott
Sure. That’s always the first thought. Yeah.
Marcy
So I went to take a phone call and the lady who had come in to get me already knew. She had been on the phone with the paramedics and so– (sob) sorry. It was a paramedic on the line. He is saying he’d fallen and I could hear screaming in the background. I knew that was him, but I didn’t know how badly hurt he was. They were telling me he was badly hurt and they needed to get him to the ER and they were either going to LifeFlight him or drive him to the closest hospital, depending on where a neurosurgeon could be available immediately, and none of that really registered to me. Neurosurgeon. Like what? None of it registered. My other really good friend came out of the meeting because, now, everybody knew there was something major going on, so she drove me to the hospital. We actually got to the hospital before he did.
Backing up a little bit, it turns out neurosurgeon was available at the hospital, which was about a 10-minute drive from where he was working from his job site. It was about a 30-minute drive for us. So she drove me, we got there, and the first thing they did was usher us into this, like, little back room.
Scott
But you got there before the ambulance, right?
Marcy
We actually did, and I found out later because with the type of head injury that he had, he’d fallen and landed on his back, his head, and he was immediately combative. Apparently, they were having a hard time getting him stabilized so they could put him on a gurney and get him into the ambulance.
Scott
Okay. So you were in this waiting room where they brought you. Who else came in?
Marcy
Greg’s best friend came in, who’d been on the job site with him. He couldn’t really talk. He had blood on his shorts and he just really was sitting there and I was like, “What happened?” And he just was like, it’s bad. He couldn’t tell me and we didn’t really know yet how bad. He’s a big guy that was just completely freaked out.
Scott
So you still really didn’t know any details of what had happened.
Marcy
No. Didn’t have any details yet. The ambulance did come. We saw it pull up and I went running out and– of course, they ushered us away – me and my friend – and were like, “We need to get him into surgery,” et cetera. So, we went back to the room. Then, the paramedics who brought him came into the room and they needed to get information – his age, all the details that you have to give somebody in that kind of scenario. I think I was just completely numb at that point. I just knew it was bad, but I just didn’t know how bad. Then, here’s these two big burly ambulance guys across from me with tears in their eyes. They’re, like, sad. I’m thinking, “Why are you sad? Nothing happened to you. Why are you sad?” Of course, in hindsight, I knew they were sad because they knew my life had just completely changed as I knew it, but I didn’t realise that yet, but they did. They knew from the type of injury that he had that nothing would ever be the same again for me.
Scott
Before he went into surgery, the surgeon came in also.
Marcy
Right. She came in and she was detailing out the injuries. He’s got two broken vertebrae in his back. He’s got a broken shoulder, he has a broken ankle, and he has a major TBI, which is a traumatic brain injury. So I’m asking questions like, “Well, is he going to be paralysed? How bad is his back?” And she’s like, “Don’t worry about the back. It’s the head injury that we’re really concerned about. We’re about to take him into surgery. Do you want to come back and see him first?” Went back. It was July, it was summertime, and he was super tan and he just had shorts on at that point and he was laying there on the hospital bed completely peaceful. He was in really good shape. He looked fine except he had blood gushing from his ears because of the head injury.
Scott
Was he conscious at all at that point?
Marcy
No, he was not conscious. He was just out completely still. His body looked fine. It was just his head but you couldn’t see any injuries to the actual head itself. Like I said, there was blood coming from his ears.
Scott
For you to see that, that had to just be traumatizing for you as well.
Marcy
Yes. At that point, I was just numb. I was just trying to take it all in and everything was happening so fast at that point. They’re talking in medical jargon that you don’t understand and they’re asking, “Who do you want to call?” And I couldn’t think of anybody to call because I would’ve called him. So I didn’t call anybody. I was there by myself with my friend and she was like, “Oh my gosh. I have to call somebody for you.” And she kind of took over. I just was kind of incapable of doing much. He was in surgery for three or four hours, and then they came. We were in the ICU waiting room. They said he’d be in the ICU. So then, they came out to the ICU waiting room and, by then, a couple more people had come – some friends and people who had heard what had happened – and they said, “You can go in and see him.” Just me.
It was so shocking. ICU rooms are all open to the main nursing station. There’s no doors and tubes everywhere. His head was shaved. He had a drain coming out of his head. He was on a ventilator. There was a nurse in his room that was stationed in his actual room. I could even barely get into the room – there was so much machinery there.
When they do surgery, somebody has a traumatic brain injury, what they’re trying to do is relieve the pressure in the brain as much as possible because the brain is going to continue to swell. He cracked his skull when he fell about 30 feet. He fell from a second storey he’d been framing. He’s a great framer, like I said, a great carpenter, and he just made a mistake and didn’t nail something down and fell through a hole where the stairs would’ve been and fell all the way down to the concrete basement and hit his head. So the brain just has nowhere to go. It gets slammed into the front of the skull. There really is no successful surgery. They’re just trying to relieve as much pressure on the brain as possible in hopes of alleviating as much damage as possible because the brain is– they don’t know how damaged it’s going to be at that point, or how much swelling there’s going to be, but they did say, “It’d be about 48 hours before we know whether he’ll live or die.”
Scott
And you’re thinking, I’m not going to know anything new for the next two days.
Marcy
Yeah, time goes slow. Nowadays, 48 hours is the blink of an eye, or prior to that. That 48 hours was forever. I stayed at the hospital. I think I stayed probably till about 2 AM and then they wanted me to go home. There was nowhere for me to stay in the room or sleep, and it was just fueling my anxiety in a way that was just– I’m sure I was making them crazy too, like asking all the questions about the beeping and the pressures going up. I finally did go home, came back early the next day, and that kind of became the routine.
Scott
And what about your kids?
Marcy
They were at camp with a good friend of mine. Well, my son was at camp with a good friend of his family, so he went home with them for a couple days. I had a nanny in the past for the kids and she came back to the house and stayed with my kids and she was a godsend. She stayed for the next month or so at the house.
Scott
Can you talk about your friend who was an ICU nurse who kind of translated stuff for you?
Marcy
Yeah. Like I said, my anxiety was just at a hundred because I just didn’t understand all these numbers. There’s pressures and beeps from different machines and the amount of liquid being drained from the brain and blah, blah, blah. So, she was amazing. She was an ICU nurse, so she came and just explained to me what all these numbers meant, not that any of them were necessarily good, but at least I had some kind of an understanding. She brought me, like, a pad and a pen so I could write some of these things down because I was, again, trying to remember the medical jargon. This was like everybody had their phone. I could have Googled what does this mean or what does that mean. I was just taking it all in and trying to understand what was going on.
Scott
And this was just a friend of yours? It wasn’t one of the nurses working in the ICU there, right?
Marcy
Right, She just happened to be an ICU nurse and a friend of mine.
Scott
That’s pretty handy.
Marcy
Yeah. She was amazing to have around. Over the next couple of days, you’re just watching the swelling and watching to see is it going to get to the point where his brain is no longer functioning or is the swelling going to start going down. The swelling did start going down and they knew he was going to make it, so they put him at that point in an induced coma to make sure that his body would be still, and he’d be able to start healing, whatever that looked like. I mean, the next few days were just a nightmare. He was in a coma. He developed pneumonia, which is apparently not uncommon when you’re in a coma, so they put him in this, like, massive iron rotating bed. Then, every day when I was there, they would have me go out of the room and they would suction his lungs and it was terrible.
In the meantime, I got a letter from the insurance company that they weren’t going to pay his bills because it was an on the job accident. I got a letter from OSHA fining his company, like, $5,000. It was like one nightmare after another. There were a couple different times that they tried to take him off the ventilator and lift him from the coma. The first time, he immediately was, like, fighting against everything, so they put him back under. They tried again, I don’t know, maybe a couple days later and took him off the ventilator, lifted the meds that he was on that was inducing the coma, and I had this expectation that, just like the movies, he’d come out of the coma and everything would be great, he’s going to be fine. There’s even a movie like that, right? They’d come out of a coma and it was so far from that.
The first time, they had him sitting up. I remember I think I had gone to take my kids somewhere, I don’t remember, but I got to the hospital and they had him sitting in a chair and he was holding onto a blood pressure cuff, like picking at some imaginary stuff on that blood pressure cuff. I don’t even know how to describe it, but it was horrifying. I walked in and he didn’t even acknowledge me. It’s like nothing was there.
Scott
Was he at all aware of what had happened or why he was in the hospital?
Marcy
No, I mean, I guess the one godsend for the person who has the injury is that with the TBI, traumatic brain injury, to that extent, they don’t know, they don’t understand what happened. He didn’t even know he was in a hospital. As he started to get “a little bit more aware”, I say in quotes because it wasn’t aware like you and I would think of aware – situationally aware. He thought he was at a hotel and he wanted us to check out. It’s like, “We need to check out. We need to leave. We need to check out.” And he would ask the same questions over and over again, “Where are we and why are we here?” And he couldn’t absorb any of it.
The ICU portion was about 10 days, and then they transferred him to an inpatient rehab type unit and they wanted to put him in this thing called a veil bed, which is like a zipped up canvas bed, so that if he did wake up middle of the night, he wouldn’t wander or try to hurt himself or whatever. I refused to let them put him in that thing because I was like, “Oh my gosh, if he wakes up and he’s in this trap, he’s going to freak out.” It sounded horrible to me and it seemed almost, like, animalistic, putting him in a cage. So they said, “Well you’re going to have to pay for a private nurse.” And I was like, “Okay then. We’ll pay for a private nurse to sit in the room with him.” So did that.
Maybe three or four days later, he started coming around a little bit more, but he still wasn’t aware of where he was. Same questions every day. Where are we? Why are we here? And just constantly agitated and had no filter. There was one kind of funny story where my sister had come and we were trying to keep him entertained and he was in the bed and there was like a big erase board directly in front of him. So she started to draw, like, a tic-tac-toe up there so we could play a tic-tac-toe or maybe hang man, I can’t remember. As she’s doing this, she has her back to him and, out of the blue, he says, “Gosh, see, I never realized how big your butt was.” So he had no filter. That was the only funny thing that ever happened. Beyond that, he was just mad. He was angry.
They were letting him get into a wheelchair and wheel around the hallways. We went outside a little bit and I came the next day and they told me he stole cigarettes from somebody. The weird part is he had been a smoker, but he had quit about a month before the accident, but he had forgotten that he quit. He had been a smoker his whole life and he had just had no memory. Apparently, he stole cigarettes from somebody on the floor and they thought I brought him cigarettes. That was a bit of a mess.
Scott
Around this time, were you able to have any kind of meaningful conversation with him, or could you comprehend that he wasn’t quite the same as before?
Marcy
Yeah. It was very clear that he wasn’t the same as before, but I thought he would continue to get better. The neurosurgeon said, “Yeah, he’s going to continue to get better.” There’s kind of a scale they give you of the stages of a traumatic brain injury. There’s like aphasia, which is actually what I think Bruce Willis has, where you say things like, “Okay, hand me the fork,” and what you really have in your hand is a cup. You mix words up and a lot of that, and then he would just get super pissed, frustrated, mad. It was everybody else’s fault. He didn’t know what was going on, so I thought, “Maybe if I bring the kids–” A good friend of mine was staying at the house with the kids at this point, and I thought, “Maybe if I bring the kids, he’ll recognise them and it will trigger something for him.”
So I had her bring them and it was a disaster. Get into the hospital room and he didn’t recognize my son, his son. He was just like, “Oh, you’re a big kid. Come here.” And he was scary. Sometimes, you just have that initial feeling from somebody that they’re just scary. You don’t want to be around them, and that’s how he was. I don’t even know the word for it. It was so unbelievable. It was like how could this be happening?
Scott
Yeah. And your son was just five at the time, right?
Marcy
Yeah, he was five.
Scott
And of course, you had never seen Greg have any kind of interaction like that with him.
Marcy
No, he was a great dad. He loved the kids and yeah, he loved having kids. He was a good dad. Same with my daughter. Nothing really registered and she didn’t want to sit by him. She didn’t want to sit on his lap. She just was also just kind of afraid of him. It’s like the instinct that kids have of danger or whatever that is. So like I said, it was a disaster. I told my friend, I said, “Just take them back home.” He was getting more agitated because he didn’t know why these kids were in his room. So she got back out to the car and she told me later that she put my daughter in her car seat and then she came around to strap my son and he had his little hands in prayer and he knew enough. He was praying. He was praying for his dad.
Scott
We talked about your life changing. Their life changed then as well.
Marcy
Yes, their life changed tremendously and, in some ways, I felt like it was a blessing that they were so young and didn’t have as many memories of him before. I thought, in a lot of ways, that was a good thing because they wouldn’t really know what they lost. They just knew him as the dad that he became after the accident. So before he came home, they told me to remove the keys, remove the alcohol. They gave me all the meds, all the things. He had a back brace because he had two broken vertebrae in his back and sent him home with Risperidol and Trazodone and all of these, like, heavy duty antipsychotics, if you will, which in hindsight, there’s no relation between psychosis and brain injury. I guess one is to calm the brain. In the case of TBI, it’s almost like everything got unplugged and they were trying to use these meds to plug things back in, maybe, but it didn’t work.
So we got home and he didn’t know what was going on, why he couldn’t drive, why he couldn’t drink alcohol. I was angry, agitated. The first night we were in bed and one of his friends had come home with us to help me and spend the night. He was down in our basement bedroom and, all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, Greg wakes up and he’s like, “I just know you snuck downstairs and you fucked Bob and you were down there in the basement with him.” I mean, it was so scary because obviously nothing like that had happened. But he was just so angry. That look in his eyes was “I’m going to hurt you” kind of a look and just made no sense. I mean, I’d been in bed the whole time.
Scott
That must have instilled a little bit of fear in you just having him back in the home. Did you have fear for yourself or for the kids?
Marcy
I started to. I mean, almost right away, after that happened, yes. It became very scary. He was illogical. He would get angry over the smallest things. He would punch the wall, kick my car when I would try to go somewhere with the kids. The kids would not stay with him, so if I wanted to go to the grocery store or anything, I would have somebody come over and sit with him while I went to the grocery store. At this point, he was in outpatient rehab, so he was going to rehab most days during the day. I had my daughter – she was two and a half – and I had been working at the time, just going back to that. I had an angel of a boss who gave me 12 weeks off, fully paid because he knew I needed to take care of my kids and try to take care of my husband.
Scott
You had enough to worry about.
Marcy
Yes. He’s in outpatient rehab and I would drive him every day. Somebody would stay at the house and watch the kids. It was summertime, like I said. My son was going to various camps and then we rolled around to the fall and it’s kindergarten. My son was going to kindergarten that year. I remember waiting at the bus stop on the first day of kindergarten and he didn’t want to wait anymore. The bus was running late and Greg didn’t want to wait anymore. He was like, “We got to go. I have to be at rehab. I have to be there at whatever time.” I was like, “This is our son’s first day at kindergarten. Let’s just wait for the bus.” And he was just getting super agitated. So one of my neighbours finally said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get him on the bus.” So that’s always stuck with me. I never got to see him get on the bus for the first time – just kind of meaningful time in a parent’s life, right?
Scott
Yeah. That’s one of those moments.
Marcy
Yeah.
Scott
You told me ahead of time that it’s okay to ask this question. How did this change sex with Greg?
Marcy
Yeah, it was definitely like sleeping with a stranger and I didn’t want to have sex with him, but I also felt like his wife and, maybe, in some way, shape or form, that will help him. But it was horrible. Again, it felt like sleeping with a stranger. It was just bad. It was bad all around.
Scott
So you knew obviously something semi-permanent had changed. I mean, what do you do? Are there support meetings? How do you proceed from there?
Marcy
Yes, there were brain injury support group meetings at the hospital for people who had a serious TBI and we would go to those and they had somebody there to watch the kids, and we would all sit around and talk. The spouse of the injured person would sometimes be often in the small group trying to just– we understood kind of a little bit more what was going on. Nobody else in the group had the same situation as me. One of the ladies had a husband who, after his TBI, became very childlike, which also can happen. So, for her, it was like taking care of another child instead of a husband. She would tell me that he seemed to understand that something was not quite right and he didn’t know how to do certain things that he would allow her to whereas, with Greg, he was just angry, like, all the time.
I remember, one morning, we were on the way to one of the meetings and he asked me to get him some candy because he wanted some candy for breakfast. I said sure. So, I went in the house, got some candy, brought it out to the car, and he totally lost his shit because he told me he didn’t say candy. He had said candy, for sure, but he had thought that he had said, like, a cereal bar. It was like the ultimate mind fuck constantly because I started questioning myself, “What did he say? Maybe he did say that and I didn’t understand it.” I have my kids and I’m trying to do all these support groups and doctors. Maybe it was me. Maybe he did say something and I took it the wrong way or I didn’t understand what he said. There were a lot of those situations where he was just completely illogical.
There was one night where I think I’d bathed the kids and I had sent them to go downstairs and I was cleaning up the bathroom. He was downstairs and I was just hurrying up, trying to get down there as quickly as I could, so they wouldn’t be with him for very long alone. My daughter asked him if she could have Tootsie Rolls for a snack before bedtime – I remember this like yesterday – and yelled up to me upstairs. I’m coming down. He says, “Can she have Tootsie Rolls for a snack before bedtime?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s fine.” He goes, “Why would you tell her that she can have Tootsie Rolls before bedtime?” I said, “Well, you just asked me if she can have Tootsie Rolls because she asked you and I said yes.” He goes, “But why would you say yes? Why would you do that?” The conversations that we were having were just– it’s hard to describe, but they just had no logic. They were, like, circular conversations that just didn’t make sense and he didn’t realize they didn’t make sense, but they didn’t make sense.
He was angry and mad. Instead of taking a breather maybe and being like, “Okay, maybe there is something wrong,” or just calming down or anything, he could not calm down. He just would not ever calm down. And it’s hard because– I mean, some of it, obviously most of it, all of it, it wasn’t his fault. But by the same token, living in that situation was absolutely killing me and my kids. I’d lost about 30 pounds. I mean, I’m not a big person as it is. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t do anything.
Then, two months after the accident is when 9/11 happened. And, on that particular day, his best friend, the one who’d come to the hospital, had started taking him on occasion back to the job site just to have him be there and be in what seems to be somewhat of a familiar environment and give me a break. These were on, like, non-rehab days. On that particular day, I had told Pete, , his friend, that I would come pick him up at lunchtime, and I had told Greg we would go get a bite to eat before heading back to the house. So 9/11 happened that morning and we all know what happened and it was horrible and everybody’s just freaking out. We got to the restaurant and the TVs were on, and everybody is of course glued to the TVs, watching what’s going on, watching the news, and he literally looked up – because I think we just got our food – and say, “Are you going to watch TV the whole time or are we going to eat lunch together?” It was just a moment for me that almost took me completely over the edge because this thing is going on and he has no concept of it. He doesn’t understand. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in the world and he just has no concept, he couldn’t care less, he just was just mad that I wasn’t paying attention to him at that moment.
So I called Pete and I was like, “Pete, please, I’m bringing him back. I can’t do this today.” And so Pete came and got him, and I think I went to some friend’s house that day.
Scott
It paints quite a picture because you’re seeing on the news, on the television that everything’s being destroyed but, right in front of you, your own world is falling apart as well.
Marcy
Yeah, I kept having hope that things would get better. Like I said, we did brain injury support group meetings and we did a variety of different counselling sessions. I continued to have hope that he would get better.
Scott
Can you remember a particular time when you just came to the realization that he’s not the same person or was it just gradual?
Marcy
He was not the same person from the time he woke up from the coma. But what was gradual for me was realizing that he was never really going to get better like he was going to be. He was a little bit better to where he knew how to brush his teeth and do all the normal things, but he wasn’t going to ever get better, and that’s kind of what happened gradually. We went to several different types of counselors. I found one counsellor who specialised in– he was a marriage counsellor, but he specialized in trauma therapy and we’d go to our first session and he said all the ground rules. I’m not on your side, I’m not on her side, blah, blah, blah.
We started the conversation and it was things like, “Well, she moved my cup last night when we were at dinner from the right side to the left side, and that’s bullshit. That’s some fucked up shit.” And the counselor’s like, “Marcy, can you give me a little bit from your side?” Because again, he’s not calling Greg out, he’s not doing any of that. I said, “This is kind of our life. There’s no logic to the things that he gets mad about and overreacts to.” So he says to Greg, “Is there a different way maybe you could have said that? I don’t like you moving my cup or?” Greg launches into, “No, that’s just bullshit. She shouldn’t be doing that. And it’s so fucked up.” The counsellor said, “Greg, can you step outside for a minute? I want to talk to Marcy by herself.” So my husband stepped out and he said to me, “I’m so, so, so, so sorry, but I can’t help you. This is not that. I can’t help you.” So at that point, it was just getting closer to being at my woods end and just being like, I don’t know how much longer I can do this. If it wasn’t for my kids, I’d be done, I’d just be out.
The final straw was we started going to see our pastor. We were pretty involved in church at the time and he was comfortable with the pastor and went to see the pastor. The pastor was a wonderful man. The first session, he was just very kind and very understanding. We didn’t really get anywhere, but he was just very empathetic. We got home and, that evening, I said to Greg, “When do you want to make the next appointment?” Because he was going back to work some days, I was trying to ask him, schedule-wise, when would you like to go? And he said, “I want to go on the next rain day.”
“I don’t know when it’s going to rain, Greg. Can we just decide on a day?”
“Nope. I want to go next time it rains.” I mean, it was definitive and cruel. Did he know that was like a really fucked up thing to say or not? There were times I couldn’t tell whether he was cruel because he was cruel or he was intentionally being more difficult, but that was like the last straw for me and I knew I had to save myself. At this point, my friends were all saying, “This is not good. This is not getting better.”
Scott
They could see the toll it was having on you. Maybe more than you could.
Marcy
Yes, I think so. I would be like, “No, he’s getting better. Come over and talk to him and you’ll see.” And they would come over and they would talk to him. They’d be like, “Not sure what you’re seeing, but it’s not getting better.” But I think I was at that point so traumatized – I don’t even know the word. I just kept looking for the slightest ray of hope that things might be better and it just wasn’t. The kids were scared of him and he was mean to the kids and that’s one thing that I don’t know that I handled as well as I could have, but we did finally get divorced. It was really difficult with the kids and he wanted some custody, but it was like he only wanted it to be vengeful because he knew I didn’t want to give him any custody.
When I was around the kids and we talked about him, I never said anything bad, but I never said anything good. I never told them at any point in time when they were growing up that he was a great guy and he was sweet and kind and all those things because I always thought that, if I told them those things, it would feel like more of a loss to them whereas, if they just knew him as this person who wasn’t good to be around and wasn’t nice to be around, then unfortunately they just had this dad who was just not a nice person. And yes, he’d had this accident, but you could only be empathetic for so long when somebody is constantly being cruel and, eventually, it breaks you.
Scott
Yeah. You didn’t want them to feel the same loss that you were feeling.
Marcy
Right, yes. I thought it was protecting them and, sometimes, I think in hindsight, maybe I should have talked more about the good side too.
Scott
It’s easy to think about things in hindsight, but you’ve got to give yourself some grace. You were thrust into a position through no fault of your own, or Greg’s, and you have no idea how to handle this. All you can do is the best that you can do to protect yourself and your kids.
Marcy
Yes. Thank you for saying that. I think I appreciate you saying that because it was so hard to get people to understand what I was going through and why I would leave, why I would get a divorce because people looked at it in a nutshell, “Okay, he fell, he had this accident, he had this brain injury, and then you left.” And I wrestled with that so much for so long because nobody understood what I was really going through and living with, and that part was also hard for many years.
Scott
That’s got to be incredibly difficult to be judged by people who don’t really know what’s going on.
Marcy
Yeah. That was definitely difficult, but I was also in the middle of trying to raise my kids and work. I didn’t get any child support from him. He went back to work a little bit, but not to any meaningful extent and I was just trying to get by.
Scott
How did you have that conversation with him to tell him that you want a divorce?
Marcy
I remember broaching the conversation and he was like, “No way.” He thought everything was fine. I mean, again, he just didn’t have any concept of how cruel he was or that the kids were scared of him. He just didn’t have a realistic picture of what was going on. I think I eventually enlisted his family and asked them to, “Please just tell him to come home for a little bit. Let me get me and my kids out of there.” He just wasn’t going to leave. He didn’t understand really what was exactly going on and why I would want a divorce.
Scott
And how did the kids feel about that?
Marcy
I think divorce is hard, no matter what age the kids are, what the situation is, because it’s just a change. It’s a big change. They were fine though. They were better because they weren’t around him anymore, but he had some custody. He had like once a week and every other weekend, which as I said, was more like something bad to do to me more than he wanted the kids. They had to go over there and be at his house one night a week and every other weekend and that was also tough on them because he wasn’t nice. Shortly after we got divorced, he told them to call me mo-hoe, like literally, and they were little. So they’d come home and, during dinner, they’d go, “Dad says we need to start calling you mo-hoe.”
Scott
What does that mean?
Marcy
Your mom, the hoe, like literally. I mean, they were too young to really understand. I knew they didn’t really get what was going on and that it would all just kind of play out like it would play out and I was as supportive to my kids as I possibly could be. I never said anything negative about Greg. Like I said, I didn’t say anything positive, but I never said anything negative. Over time, he became more and more cruel to them. They became more of the punching bag. Another thing I felt guilty about is I had escaped it, but they couldn’t really escape it.
Scott
Yeah, but you tried to help them escape it.
Marcy
I did.
Scott
The courts just didn’t agree apparently.
Marcy
Exactly, yes. I mean, he could be functional enough to fake his way out in a conversation. The crazy part is if you didn’t know him before, you wouldn’t know what kind of person he was. If he’s talking to a judge or an attorney, they just think he’s kind of a short tempered guy, just not very easygoing but, unless they were in a scenario where they frustrated him or pissed him off, they’re not going to see what’s really going on.
Scott
This all happened about 25 years ago.
Marcy
Yeah.
Scott
What’s happened with Greg since then?
Marcy
Unfortunately, my kids haven’t seen him in about 15 years. He was just so difficult to be around and so mean and hateful about me. They just chose to quit associating with him as soon as they were able to and he continued to work with his friend doing construction type work. From what I understand, that’s still what he’s doing. I’m in touch a little bit with my ex sister-in-law. He remarried and was remarried for a few years while my kids were really young, which was a good thing. She was a lovely woman, but she’d actually come from a domestic abuse situation, so I think that volatility wasn’t as– I don’t know. Maybe being with Greg felt familiar to her for some reason. They ended up getting divorced as well after about five years of marriage. He’s out there somewhere but I have completely lost touch, like I said, so are my kids.
Scott
What’s one of your favourite memories with Greg from before the accident?
Marcy
Oh, I think my favourite memory is that we used to always sit down as a family for dinner. Of course, again, the kids were really little. One particular night, Greg got some food on his face and I said, “Hey, you have some food on your face,” and he goes, “Oh yeah, I’m saving that for later.” And then, a couple days go by and we’re sitting at dinner again and my son had something on his face, I said, “Hey buddy, you got something on your face.” He goes, “I know, mom. I’m saving it for later.” Of course, Greg laughed his ass off at that. Of course, it was funny and cute and all the things. He was a good dad.
Scott
You’ve told me that part of your reason for telling this story now was for your kids. Can you talk about that?
Marcy
Oh yeah. They know the overarching picture, but they don’t know all the details and I always tried to protect him from most of that. Of course, they have their own story because they also had to live with him. The other part is that I’ve wrestled so much with, “Should I tell them more about the good stuff?” Again, I didn’t want them to feel more of a sense of loss than they already did and I just want them to know the whole picture that this is what happened. I did do my best. I tried to do what I thought would protect them. I don’t know if it was the right thing or the wrong thing.
Scott
You’re a good mom.
Marcy
Thank you, Scott.
Scott
I’m sure they understand that
Marcy
They’re great kids. I mean, they’ve turned out amazing. I mean, they’re both awesome and I’m very proud of both of them. They’re very kind and sweet and very caring.
Scott
Maybe they inherited that from you and from the original Greg.
Marcy
Yeah.
Scott
You said something interesting to me also that, in a way, you were kind of jealous of people whose spouses had been in an accident and had actually died.
Marcy
Yeah, that was a tough one for most people to understand. When somebody has a spouse die suddenly, just like this accident happened suddenly, they immediately mourn that person and they have these great memories of that person and it seems like the norm that people will just remember the good things when somebody dies that suddenly, especially in a marriage. They just remember the good stuff and that’s kind of a gift, and I didn’t get any of that. He lived but he became this completely different, horrible person. I thought many times it probably would’ve been better if he had not, and that’s the blessing and the curse of modern medicine, right? They want to save somebody no matter what and is that always the best thing to do?
Scott
And yet, once again, it’s one of those things that if you say that out loud, “It would’ve been better if he died”, nobody is going to understand that.
Marcy
Yeah. Maybe my kids, but yeah, nobody who hasn’t lived through it. But as I said to you, Scott, if somebody told me that, tomorrow, I would have that exact same experience, I would literally say, “I’ve had a good life. I’m out. Not doing it again.”
Scott
Have you met anyone else who’s gone through what you’ve experienced?
Marcy
No, and that’s the crazy part. I really wish I had. I know there’s people out there who have had significant others or kids who’ve had traumatic brain injuries and have turned more violent. I take that back. I was actually pen pals, email pals with a lady whose son had a traumatic brain injury and he also was violent and just not logical, same kind of scenario, but I think that people don’t maybe hear about it as much. People always want to hear the happy stories, the wake up from the coma and everything is wonderful story.
Scott
There’s a good chance someone listening to this has been through something similar, so maybe they can reach out to you. I don’t know what that connection would look like, but you would. You’re in the podcast Facebook group, so that’s where someone can contact you. Tell us just a quick update, what’s happened with you since then?
Marcy
Yeah, so I was a single mom for about 14 years. I did date some, but my kids got older and grown. About three years ago I got remarried to a great guy and I felt like all those terrible years are now good years. I was in that bad situation for so long and now it’s like the exact opposite. I’ve married a great guy and we have a great life.
Scott
We like a story with a happy ending. Marcy, thanks for sharing your story with us.
Marcy
Yeah, of course. Hopefully, it’ll help somebody else.
Scott
As I mentioned in our conversation, Marcy is in the Facebook group so come on over and find the post for this episode to ask a question or leave a comment about her story. WhatWasThatLIke.com/facebook.
And speaking of Facebook, the question in the group this past Tuesday was “What’s something most people think they want, until they get it?”. It’s like that old phrase, “be careful what you ask for!”. Do you have something like that? Come on over and share it with us.
Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.
And now, you’re in for a treat with this week’s Listener Story. Each main episode ends with a story that was sent in by a listener. And we’re still waiting on YOU to send in your story. Just record it on your phone, make it around 5-10 minutes, and email to me – Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com.
This listener tells a pretty amazing lost and found story.
Stay safe, and I’ll see you next time.
(Listener Story)
When I was a senior in high school, my parents got me a super nice Seiko watch as a graduation gift. It was gold and shiny, weighty, and they looked great on my wrist. At some point after I graduated and moved to Colorado, I accidentally hit the watch and knocked a small chip off the crystal face. Little did I know that small chip would soon play a key role in one of the greatest stories ever to unfold.
As a freshman at Colorado State University, I lived in the on-campus dorms. It was a requirement. I lived in Westfall Hall, a 12-storey high rise on the west end of campus. The view from my 10th floor room was amazing. Looking out of the mountains, just to the west of the city, sunsets were epic. There was another set of dorms right next to the towers. Between the two dorms was a rec centre that housed a cafeteria and a bar called The Tap, which is key to this story.
In Colorado during the 1980s, you had to be 21 to drink alcohol. If you were over 18, you could drink what was called 3-2 beer. Instead of having 6% alcohol, it only had 3.2% alcohol. Hence, the name. Even though it was beer light, we just drank twice as much and achieved the same effect.
So one night, let’s just say I had my fair share of twice as much as I probably should have. The good thing though, I only had to stumble my way across a courtyard to get back to the building where my dorm was, which I did. However, once I got there, I didn’t go right up to my room. Instead, I decided to go to the basement where there was a game room with all sorts of video games. There was no one else in the room. It was dark and quiet when I walked in, with the exception of the occasional bleep or bloop of a video game. I flipped on the lights, walked over to a game where you had to stand to play. I wasn’t quite getting the dexterity in my hand movements that I needed to get the high score and a few free games. Instead of thinking, “Well, it must be because I’m smashed,” I figured it had to be the watch on my left hand, the same shiny gold watch given to me as a graduation gift. So I took the watch off and set it on top of the video game cabinet. Problem solved, racked up points, fee free games, called it a night.
The next morning, I woke up incredibly hungover and starving, so I rolled out of bed and was heading out my dorm room when I suddenly realised my watch was not on my wrist. Fuck! After a brief moment of panic through the pounding in my head, I remember I had taken it off after the bar last night when I was playing video games. No problem. I went down to the basement of the building, walked up to the video game I was playing, reached up on top of the cabinet, fully expecting my watch to be there. Fuck! I went to the office where the RAs hung out and asked if anyone had turned a watch in from the game room. Nope. I kept checking for the next week or so, but nothing. The watch was gone.
Christmas break was quickly approaching and I was in a panic. If I showed up at home with no watch on my wrist, my parents would ask questions. I’m a terrible liar, and would’ve been caught immediately if I tried to make something up. So I went down to the jewellery store at the mall, and luckily they had the same exact SEIKO watch in stock. I bought it. It literally blew most of my budget for the second half of the year, but I’d figured that out later when I walked off the plane and greeted my parents. That watch would be on my wrist and they would be none the wiser, which I did, and they weren’t.
In my second semester, I took an introductory astronomy class. I figured it would be kind of interesting and should be an easy grade. It was in one of those giant lecture rooms that sat 300 people in theatre style seating. One day, I was sitting in class. My mind started to wander, and I started looking around. Suddenly, I saw it there. It was my watch. It was on the wrist of a kid sitting directly in front of me, a couple rows down. My heart was beating like crazy. I knew it was mine because I could see the face and it had the same chip in the crystal. The conversation in my head began immediately, what should I do? Should I confront him after class or should I just let it go? I mean, after all, I replaced the watch anyway, he’d probably deny that he found it and just tell me I was crazy. So I let it go, and honestly, I thought nothing of it again, nor did I see him again in class or on campus until my junior year. By then, I was deep into coursework for my major, which was technical journalism, and wouldn’t you know it, on the first day in one of my classes there, he was sitting one row over with my watch on. I could see it much better now, and it was definitely my watch, but again, I figured I’d just let it go, which I did. That was the only other class Jeff and I had during the rest of our time at CSU. But our paths would cross again professionally.
A few years later, I graduated and took a job at WTVT, a television station in Tampa. I’d been working there for about a year or so as a newscast producer. One of the managers came up to me one day, and said, “Hey, we just hired someone to work on the assignment desk who went to your college.” I said, “No kidding. What’s their name?” Sure as shit, it was Jeff, the guy who had my watch. So fast forward a few months, Jeff shows up and is working the assignment desk.
One evening, it was quiet. I was busy putting a show together and Jeff came walking by. He stopped, stood next to me, and said, “Hey, I’m going to the break room. Would you like me to get you anything staring intently at my computer?” I said, “No thanks.” Then Jeff said it and it stunned me. Noticing the watch in my left hand, he said, “Hey, I have a watch just like that.” It was like the world and time slowed. At that moment, what I had known all along was right in my face and standing next to me.
This time, I was not going to let the opportunity go by. I stopped what I was doing, I turned, I faced him and smiled and said, “I know you do Jeff, and I know exactly where you got it.” The utter shock that came over his face was priceless. “You found it on top of a video game in the basement of Westfall Hall.” There was silence. Then he said, “How do you know that?” I looked him dead in the eye and said, “Because it’s my watch.” I proceeded to tell him the story of how it ended up on top of the video game and how I’d seen him wearing it in class, but decided not to make a big deal about it because I had bought a replacement. Again, he was speechless.
He explained that he had asked the RAs at the desk if anyone had reported losing a watch and they said no, so he kept it. He told me how it had travelled with him around the world after he left school and into the beginning of his professional life. We both had a good laugh about it. I told him, “No hard feelings,” but it did make for a great story. A couple of weeks later, we wound up working together again. One night, he walked up to me and said, “Here, this is yours.” In his hand, my watch. He said, after hearing my story, he felt so guilty that he had to give it back to me.
While this story took literally years to come to an end, it reminded me of one thing. People are inherently good to this day. I still have both watches and along with them, the greatest lost and found story ever.