Chapter One
TEDY BRUSCHI, LINEBACKER
I've been a pro football player for twelve years, and my end-of-season story hasn't changed in a decade: it's always been tough for me to fall asleep when there are no more games to play. You get used to the frantic NFL schedule, one that's akin to cramming for sixteen different tests in sixteen weeks. There are workouts and meetings in the mornings, practices in the afternoons, and extra film study in the evenings. There is a lot of information to absorb in a short amount of time, all leading to the ultimate high of playing in a game once a week. It usually takes my body a few weeks to adjust to the off-season schedule. This explains why, one day after I returned from the 2005 Pro Bowl, the late-night glow from a television could be seen in the master bedroom at 21 Red Oak Road. It was one o'clock in the morning, and as Heidi slept, I sat in bed watching a repeat. Not only was it a repeat that many fans in America had recently seen, it was a program in which I had been one of the characters.
The NFL Network was showing a replay of our conference championship win over the Pittsburgh Steelers. The game replay reminded me how punishing parts of that afternoon were, especially one collision that I had with Jerome Bettis. My playing weight is about 245 pounds, and Bettis is one of the few running backs who actually outweighs me-by at least 10 pounds and most likely 15. There was a play when he rumbled through the hole and I met him there. It was force against force; we both fell to the ground, and we both bounced up promising to be in the other's face all day.
The play was so vivid that I dreamed about it when I finally dozed off. In my dream, Bettis was running toward me. And there I was getting ready to wrap him up and make the sure tackle. This time there was no playful trash talking at the end of the play. This time my muscles contracted and there was tightness in my neck. My fists were clenched and my arms were in the air, as if I were bracing for something big. That's how I awoke at 4 A.M. It was no longer a dream; there certainly was something odd about my left arm and left leg. When you play pro football, you get used to playing in pain and waking up sore. You really do develop a threshold for pain, and when you're on the field you tell yourself that it will go away in twenty seconds. So I stayed in bed for a few minutes, trying to make a fist and regain the strength in my arm. It never occurred to me that something was really wrong.
That night, as usual, I slept to Heidi's right, the side of the bed closest to two windows in our bedroom. As I got up to use the bathroom, I noticed that the numbness in my leg was more problematic than I had thought. The "walk" to the bathroom never happened. I tried to stand and lost my balance. I grabbed a post at the foot of the bed, saving me from crashing into the windows. But the sudden grabbing of the bed and the commotion to keep myself standing was enough to awaken a confused Heidi.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"I think I slept on my arm wrong or something," I answered.
Neither of us was processing what the other was saying. It was too early, and we were both disoriented. Heidi told me to get back in bed, and I told her I would after I went to the bathroom. But my sleeping left leg and left arm wouldn't cooperate, so I got down on my hands and knees and crawled to the bathroom. Once there, I obviously couldn't stand. I sat on the toilet for a few seconds. I had to hold myself there until I was finished, and then I sat there trying to figure out how I was going to get back to bed. It seems so clear telling the story now. Now I know that I should have been more concerned earlier. All the symptoms were there: no balance, numbness, muscle weakness, and the early stages of a headache. But that night, I just sat on the toilet, wondering if all of it had happened because I had slept awkwardly. I must have been in there for ten or fifteen minutes, because Heidi woke up again.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I think I slept on my arm or something, and now I've got a headache," I replied, still sitting in the bathroom.
"Maybe you were sleepwalking," she said. "Come back to bed."
I did go back to bed-through the air. I wasn't confident that I could make the short walk from the bathroom, so I took a step out and leaped. I dived in, landed sideways, and slept that way for the next hour before waking up again. This time the headache was stronger than before, and I couldn't get comfortable. Heidi got some Tylenol, and after I took it I decided to sleep downstairs on the couch. But I had to make it downstairs. I sat on the edge of the stairs, like a small child who hasn't quite mastered walking, and slid to the bottom. I made another dive, this time for the couch, and slept there. Briefly.
There have been many rough, sleepless nights in my NFL career. There are times when a shoulder is so tender that even rolling over brings a great deal of pain. But the early-morning hours of February 15 were different because there were so many moving parts: the inexplicable headache, the lack of balance and coordination, numbness on the left side of my body. I took an Aleve and, surprisingly, had a much easier time walking up the stairs and getting into bed. I fell asleep, and ninety minutes later Heidi let me rest when the boys awoke at six-thirty.
Heidi may have closed the door so I could sleep uninterrupted, but the incidents at 4 and 5 A.M. stayed with her as she fed the boys. She often says that she knows me better than I know myself, and she's right. She has watched me play football since my days at the University of Arizona, so she knows the difference between football discomfort and something else. This was clearly something else, so Heidi was eager to talk to her father, Bill Bomberger, who is a physician's assistant in Tucson. We're always asking Bill for medical advice, and he's always willing to help. Much later, Bill would scold us for waiting until 10 A.M. on the East Coast-seven in Arizona-before calling him. Heidi explained that she didn't want to wake him up too early. Besides, neither of us ever imagined that February 15 would be one of our longest days of 2005, one that we'd never forget for the rest of our lives. Heidi told her father that some strange things had been going on with me in the middle of the night. She described my symptoms, and Bill came to a swift conclusion: I needed to be seen immediately.
While Heidi was downstairs on the phone, I was in the bedroom waking up. I moved to the edge of the bed and just sat there, staring. For the first time that morning, I was scared. I didn't know what was happening to me, but I knew it had nothing to do with football. The thrashing headache was still there, and I was starting to have problems with my vision. Heidi entered the room to tell me that I needed to go to the hospital. I didn't need to be convinced. By then, I was so shaken by what was going on that I wanted to go. I called the Patriots' head trainer, Jim Whalen. He heard what I had to say and told me to call 911 while he contacted some people at Massachusetts General Hospital. In the meantime, our oldest son ran into the room with his usual enthusiasm and said, "Good morning, Daddy." I could hear TJ, but I couldn't see him. And then-boom-there he was on my right side. I saw him so suddenly that he startled me. That's when I looked at Heidi and said, "Call 911."
I've known Heidi since she was a freshman volleyball player at Arizona and I was a redshirt sophomore playing defensive line on the football team. We know how to read each other's emotions without saying much at all, so I know she was screaming inside when she somehow managed to make a composed 911 call and then follow it with a call to close friends who could take care of the kids. She contacted Tracie Pond, one of our North Attleboro neighbors. Tracie has three kids of her own, but she was quickly at our house. Fortunately for us, her mother was visiting, and that allowed her to help us. And we needed it. Dante was just an infant at the time and was still being nursed. Heidi considered taking him with us to the hospital, but Tracie said it wasn't necessary. She told us not to worry; she had stayed with the boys before and it wouldn't be a problem this time.
The day already felt full and it was well before noon. I couldn't even speculate on what my issue was. As far as I knew I was a healthy thirty-one-year-old middle linebacker. I had played in the Super Bowl ten days earlier and in the Pro Bowl in the previous thirty-six hours. And just like that there was an ambulance at my house, waiting to take me to the hospital. I was given a vision test, and it was quickly apparent that my results were poor. I remember the EMT saying, "Let me know when you can see my finger." He moved his index finger from left to right and then right to left. Whenever he moved it to the left, I saw nothing but blackness.
I was placed in a chair, which became a stretcher, and carried outside. It was midmorning on a weekday, so there weren't many people around. It was mostly quiet on the street, but you could hear the pavement echoing with the footsteps of two running boys-my sons. The boys had been with Tracie, who told them that Mommy and Daddy were going away for a little trip. We might have been preparing to go to the hospital, but we never mentioned the word to them. But when TJ saw the red and white lights flashing and me on a stretcher, he ran outside.
On an ordinary day, we'd all go to the end of the cul-de-sac and the boys would play and ride their bikes. I'm sure my sons were too young to grasp that something was wrong and that I was starting to worry. Heidi was trying her best to be upbeat. She told TJ and Rex, who had run out after TJ, that Daddy was going for a ride. They really are wonderful boys, and they brought some levity to the situation by saying, "Good-bye, Daddy. Have fun." I'm an emotional guy who rarely shows it through tears, but I was crying when I saw my boys. I picked them up and pulled them close to me. I kissed them both and told them, over and over, how much I loved them. And then the doors closed for the thirty-five-minute trip to Boston.
Heidi was in the back of the ambulance with me and tried to be positive as she held my hand. I had my cell phone and called Jim Whalen twice more. "What's wrong with me, Jim?" I asked. "What's going on?" He didn't know, but he had already spoken with people who had a good idea. I was a few minutes away from meeting David Greer, a neurologist at Mass General. An emergency room physician had called Dr. Greer and told him a Patriots player was on his way to the hospital. It was fitting, because Dr. Greer was in the process of completing the paperwork that would make him the chief neurologist for the Patriots and the Red Sox. He cleared his schedule for the next three days and focused on trying to get me back to health.
My arrival at the hospital overwhelmed me. It may sound silly, but after seeing all of the sick people in the ER, it began to register that I was sick, too. It seemed so improbable. I remember being rushed to a room with a sliding glass door, and as I lay there on a gurney, I was surrounded by what seemed like dozens of men in white coats.
"What's going on here?" I asked no one in particular. "Who are all of you?"
There were residents from neurology and emergency medicine. There was a stroke fellow. There was a cardiologist. As they examined me and asked questions, Heidi moved around the table, trying to answer the questions that I couldn't. She also had the presence of mind to ask who they were and to write down all of the important things they had to say. Things were happening very quickly, so much so that in the emergency room I actually had an echocardiogram and an ultrasound of my heart. Dr. Greer told me later that those things rarely happen so fast. But it wasn't what he told me months later that stunned me. It's what he said in the eleven o'clock hour on the fifteenth that took me aback. He stood next to my stretcher, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Tedy, you've had a stroke."
A stroke? I was shocked. How could I have had a stroke? I actually asked this decorated neurologist-who comes from a family of doctors and even has a master's in English-if he was sure. Heidi put her face in her hands and began to cry. When she heard the word stroke, she immediately thought "debilitating." Naturally, we both wondered if I would ever be the same. By the time I was seen by Dr. Greer, the symptoms were obvious. There was drooping on the left side of my face, and I had sensory and coordination problems on the left side of my body. When I looked to the left out of either eye, there was darkness. And there was that pounding headache, much more intense than it had been at any point at home. The headache was so strong that I slowly stopped responding to the doctors' questions. I was in the fetal position, just hoping for relief.
For Dr. Greer and the medical team, the focus was on finding answers. All of the terms they used that day were unfamiliar to me then but are part of my vocabulary today. The first question was simple: was my stroke bleeding or not? A CAT scan determined that it wasn't. Since my first symptoms had taken place well over three hours before I arrived at the hospital, I couldn't be given a clot-busting medicine called TPA (tissue plasminogen activator) that can sometimes open the blood vessels. The drug is not given to those who have had hemorrhagic (bleeding) strokes because it can induce further bleeding.
Heidi and I were getting a crash course on stroke as I was experiencing one. We would learn that a stroke is caused by the blockage of a blood vessel, sometimes by a clot and sometimes by the narrowing of a vessel. What concerned the doctors about me was the weakness on the left side of my body. To them, it meant that there was a circulation problem in the back of my head. They were sensitive to that because there is one main blood vessel-the basilar artery-that leads to the back of the brain. If it is clogged, the results are fatal 80 percent of the time. So I was given a CT angiogram, which is when dye is injected into the veins and travels to the brain. Pictures are then taken of the brain to see if all the vessels are open and if there are any residual clots ready to do some damage. I didn't have any problems there, nor did I have a dissection, which is when there is a tear in a blood vessel. But there was more surprising news to come: I had a hole in my heart.
The hole had been there since birth, and it was allowing blood to travel freely between the ventricles. It was the cause of my stroke. A clot had formed and gone toward the back of the right side of my brain. Looking back on it now, I was lucky. The stroke could have been larger, and the trouble area in my brain could have been farther back. If that had been the case, some of my motor skills and vision would not have returned. I feel blessed now, but I didn't have that perspective at the time. I had been told that I had a stroke and that there was a hole in my heart that might require surgery at another time. I also couldn't see and had to be observed closely because there was the likelihood of another stroke over the next two weeks.
"Is there anything else?" I asked my doctors.
I wanted to make sure they weren't leaving anything out, that they weren't trying to craft a diplomatic way to give me more alarming news. I remember Heidi saying that it seemed like we were in a movie, and I felt the same way. Long before the stroke, I had supported Mass General and the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. When I talk to people now, I tell them that the hospital they see as someone else's can be theirs tomorrow. That's what happened to me. I never expected to be in Boston on that Wednesday morning. I know it was tough for my wife to watch me take all those tests and, in a few cases, watch me struggle with them. My speech wasn't slurred, but my handwriting tests weren't very good. My personality hadn't changed-which often happens with stroke survivors-but I wasn't walking like myself. And I know it took a lot of strength for Heidi not to panic when she saw all the things I was missing on my vision tests. I didn't think of football the first two days. Long term, I wanted to know what it was going to take to recover. Short term, honestly, I just wanted to get rid of the headache.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Never Give Upby Tedy Bruschi Copyright © 2007 by Tedy Bruschi. Excerpted by permission.
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