Special to The VOICE, Part 6 of 8
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FOR MANY OF OUR WOUNDED WARRIORS, THEIR FAMILIES, FRIENDS, AND fellow soldiers,
Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which closed this past August, was the medical
flagship of the nation. For them, it was the standard-bearer, the touchstone against
which all other such government hospitals were measured. It had been said by some
that if it couldn’t be fixed at Walter Reed, it couldn’t be fixed anywhere. A lifeline
in a turbulent sea, it was the nerve center of Army treatment where the most debilitated
of our war injured were summoned for healing and recovery. A beacon of hope in instances
when sometimes there was a pronounced paucity of hope, it was where all the stops
were pulled out in a valiant attempt to restore the broken to a semblance of their
former selves. Our military—and the American citizenry writ large—placed everything
on the miracles that were performed here, and are being performed in similar facilities,
daily. Invariably a house of transitions, at Walter Reed our casualties of battle
exited one warzone and entered into the belly of another and, in the best of all
possible scenarios, a fraternity of the damaged underwent magical transformation
culminating in wondrous, if partial, rebirth.
The wheels of Zac’s recovery had been set in motion in those precious seconds after
the Shekhabad attack when SSG Tyler Gerk had looked over and, acting with cool dispatch,
shouted out to his wounded Sky brother that he was going to make it. Then, through
his quick thinking and instantaneous application of medical attention, he had proceeded
to save Zac’s life. Now, less than one week later, there was a family convergence
on Walter Reed.
Zac was admitted on September 5. Forty-eight hours later and for the first time,
his mother and stepfather were navigating the long institutional corridors, encountering
as they walked “young men in misery and without arms and legs.”
In the days that had led up to their arrival, they had been in continuous telephone
contact with Zac. For example, Leanne posted on Facebook on September 6: “Just an
excellent convo with my son. He is using his right hand, [and] held the phone while
we talked. He sounds SOOOO much better than the last 3 phone calls.” But now, after
what seemed an eternity, Leanne and Jason were finally there. Close up and with
their own eyes, they would be able to assess his condition. From this point onward
they would be right at his side—two sets of broad shoulders for him to lean on in
his every step taken towards recovery and healing.
As they approached and peered down Zac’s hallway, Leanne’s heart skipped a beat.
Some fifty to one hundred feet in the distance she spotted her son lying on a mobile
hospital stretcher having just been wheeled out of yet another wound washout surgery.
As the attendants were turning his bed crossways to guide him into his room, Leanne
made eye contact with him. Despite his condition, she is certain Zac recognized
her back.
When Leanne and Jason reached him, they saw that his body was a pincushion of needles.
A web of tubes and wires was draped over him. Leanne knelt, giving her son what
she “could for a hug.” Kissing him on his forehead, she told him that she loved
him. “Hi, mom,” he said. For Leanne, those constituted the two best words that a
mother could hear. For the next five months and up to the present day, she would
be his ceaseless companion. Never in that span would she leave him as she undertook
with him this journey of restoration and healing.
But she was embarking on a harrowing mission for which there was nothing that could
have prepared her. Following Zac into his room and waiting for the doctors to come
in, Leanne stood next to his bed. Attending to him were nurses taking and recording
his vital signs. Leanne, trying to orient herself to her new surroundings and feeling
not at all comfortable, could see the barbs sticking out of her son’s forearm and
she could see them and hear the hum of the wound vacs—one each on his left forearm,
his left knee, and his left leg—pumping blood, pus, and other fluids out of his
body. Beginning to become nauseous, Leanne had to step out into the hall. Outside,
after taking some juice to calm her stomach and spending a few moments in an empty
side room, she was steady enough to go back in. On her return, however, she committed
a second misstep. “How you doing?” she innocently asked her son. “I’m doing fine,”
Zac responded, “but you need to suck it up, mom.”
Getting into Washington, DC at ten in the evening, Terry Blaisdell checked into
his hotel room and then proceeded directly to Walter Reed. Peeking into Room 6532
for the first time, he was struck by the almost eerie darkness illuminated by the
neon glow of machines and the faint glimmer of a nightlight. Terry walked in and
noticed that his son was sleeping. Bending down, he woke Zac, telling him that he
loved him. “How are you doing?” Zac asked his father. Terry observed the shrapnel
bruises and burns pocking his son’s body and the cuts carved into his skin. But
he “really didn’t see the extent of the wounds until the next day.” When he did,
his heart sank. “Oh my God! He was so tore up,” Terry winces.
Zac’s room filled with a revolving line up of medical personnel. Some twenty physicians
and specialists were on his recovery team. They reported to the family in shifts
based on their areas of specialization. When the bone unit gave their briefing,
a doctor brought up a picture of Zac’s arm on his cell phone, sharing it with Jason.
Startled by what was there—or, more accurately, what was not there—Jason turned
to Leanne—who had indicated that she would rather not look—telling her that she
had better see it. The image showed a break in Zac’s bones and a tear of his skin
so gaping that the wall was visible in the background.
When it was his turn to present, the plastic surgeon, Dr. Mark Shashikant, confronted
Zac with two options for treating his forearm: limb salvage or direct amputation.
Limb salvage would mean attempting to save the appendage, but leaving him with only
limited functionality. Dr. Shashikant then introduced another possibility, but one
that would be risky, would require extensive surgery, and could still result in
amputation. He had been investigating a procedure, he explained, called a Muscle-Vein
Skin Graft. It had been performed only twenty-one times before—all at Stanford University
in California. “Now usually we take the arm and sew it into the area of the donor
site,” Dr. Shashikant said. However, “with you, Zac, that is not possible as we
do not want to disturb your only artery [that is] left until we are sure the flap
will live. Therefore we would have to do it by detaching the donor site and leaving
it sit until the tissue is viable to be attached to your arm, then [it would] need
to live there with the original blood supply flowing to aid the re-growth of blood
vessels.”
In laymen’s terms, what Dr. Shashikant was saying was that the procedure would involve
a very invasive operation in which Zac’s abdominal muscles would be exposed from
hip to hip and wrapped around his arm and used as a graft for that appendage. Because
it had only a single functional artery, the arm would need to be braced above his
stomach until the graft had taken, with an artery behind Zac’s bellybutton serving
as a conveyor of blood and oxygen. For thirteen days, he would have to remain virtually
motionless and, if the technique failed, they would be right back at square one
and, perhaps, worse. Dr. Shashikant indicated that he felt confident in his ability
to do the surgery.
It had been an anguishing conversation. No matter which direction Zac decided to
go, the outcome promised to impact the entire future course of his life. Before
anyone could say anything, Zac announced: “I want my hand.” Knowing the gravity
of the situation and all that was involved for his patient, Dr. Shashikant responded:
“Well, it is up to you, Zac, but I want you to think about it and I will come back
tomorrow for your answer.”
Once the plastic surgeon was out of the room, Zac and his family were left to consider
and ultimately to choose between two frightening choices. One—amputation—could bring
tragic but possibly straightforward closure. The other—virtually an untried procedure—would
entail multiple surgeries and months, if not longer, of rehabilitation. “Everything
was experimental,” Leanne reflects, “and there were no guarantees no matter what
we did. It was hard for me because as a parent you have to give advice. I wanted
Zac to have his hand, but Jason thought it might be less painful and more successful
in the long run to amputate.”
In the end, it was Zac’s decision to make, and he did. “It sounds good to me,” he
declared in reference to the new operation. Although it probably wouldn’t have made
any difference, Zac and Leanne didn’t find out until later, in the course of a routine
office visit, that only one of the Stanford cases had been successful—and it had
not involved a trauma patient.
The next concern was his eye. In the Shekhabad attack shrapnel had penetrated Zac’s
right cornea and nicked his retina before exiting out the corner of his eyeball,
leaving him able to make out only shadows and vague movements. The immediate treatment,
the optical team explained, was a process aimed at stabilization in which the eyeball
would be encased in a silicone buckle and then filled with a gas. In the short term,
the procedure would mean that Zac would have to endure an excruciating level of
pain, never easy news to hear but a reality made that much tougher considering everything
else he was going through. On an encouraging note, the ophthalmologist thought that
Zac might qualify for a cornea transplant in the future. If successful, and with
the added aid of a contact lens that would likely have to be worn for the remainder
of his life, the operation held out the potential of restoring Zac’s vision to 20-20.
In relative terms, the injury to Zac’s knee posed the least threat. Because the
kneecap is composed of cartilage, the doctors believed that over the passage of
time it would largely repair itself. But Zac had suffered the loss of an artery
in his leg and there had been significant nerve damage. Therefore, once he got to
that point and, perhaps for a period of many months, Zac would have to walk with
the support of knee and foot braces.
The upshot of it all was that his medical team was preparing to launch an all-out
assault on Zac’s injuries. “So much talk for the plan for his left forearm that
I can’t remember it all,” Leanne wrote on September 9. For Zac, the weeks and months
ahead held out the prospect of relentless challenges that would, in all their facets,
test him to his core.
“How is Zac doing?” his mom asked in the days just after she got to Walter Reed.
Answering her own question, she responded: “Good and scared.” He was “upset about
a few things that may happen in the future,” and he was experiencing “lots of pain.”
In that regard, Leanne mentioned that she had been stressing to Zac that he should
ask for medications “and not wait until [it became] unbearable.”
Meanwhile, one positive had begun to emerge. “He did say he wants to stay a soldier
after all this,” Leanne announced to his family and friends. It was a decision that
carried with it, she believed, an added benefit. He now had “a goal towards his
recovery.”
