People.com Archive RESTRICTED: Bob Woodruff's Incredible Recovery By People Staff and Bob Woodruff Published on March 12, 2007 12:00 PM Share Tweet Pin Email On Jan. 29 the phone call pierced the quiet, and I jolted awake to a bedspread of floral and chintz. “Aah, right,” I thought. “Disney World … the wake-up call.” “Lee, it’s David Westin,” the voice said. He had my immediate attention. The president of ABC News does not make social calls to employees’ wives at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. “We’ve been trying to reach you,” he said. He stopped for a beat. “Bob has been wounded.” “Wounded?” I said as calmly as I could. “What do you mean wounded?” “He was on an embed outside of Baghdad. We don’t have a lot of information right now, Lee, but …” “David,” I interrupted him. “Is my husband alive?” “Yes. Bob is alive, but we believe he may have taken shrapnel to the brain.” No one knows how they would behave in a crisis until it drops out of the sky and knocks you down. I felt the panic in my voice as I spoke to David Westin, and tears streamed down my face. At the same time, I began to feel a cool, steely calm seep into my brain. All four of my children [Mack, then 14, Cathryn, 12 and twins Nora and Claire, 5] were blissfully sound asleep beyond my door. Their lives were being hacked apart while they dreamt, oblivious to the chaos. “Okay,” I mouthed in a small voice. “Tell me what you know.” “Bob and the crew were traveling in an Iraqi armored vehicle,” David said. “They were hit by an IED [improvised explosive device] in an attack on the convoy. Bob and the cameraman Doug Vogt have been taken to Baghdad and are going into surgery. Apparently Bob asked Vinnie, his producer, if he was alive.” He spoke, I thought. This is going to be okay. My brain dictated that nothing less than recovery would be acceptable. BOB: This was my fifth time in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, and Central Iraq had continued to degenerate into a dangerous region. [But] at ABC News we wanted to get a first-hand look at the hand-over of U.S. military activities to the Iraqi forces. To cover a story, you have to get out in the field to see it with your own eyes. I was hooked on this strange endeavor of covering wars and conflicts. Wars reveal so many horrible stories about injury and death. But in the midst of the landscape, there is always powerful evidence of hope. That day we had traveled only three miles or so when there was a giant explosion, a deafening, horrific blast. Hidden behind some trees, a band of Iraqi insurgents had detonated a crude, roadside bomb. I took a direct hit to the left side of my head and upper body. The blast crushed my skull bone over the left temporal lobe of my brain. I was bleeding profusely; we were miles from the closest hospital and scared as hell. “This hurts,” I screamed. “We need to kick somebody’s ass.” Soon after that I passed out. In Orlando Lee faces the task of telling her older children. “Guys, Dad has been hurt in Iraq. I think he is going to be fine. But we’re going to pack up now to go back home.” “Is he alive?” Cathryn asked. “Yes, absolutely,” I said. Mack grabbed the remote and flipped on the TV. As if on cue, the blonde CNN anchor was reporting that “ABC Anchor Bob Woodruff was wounded …” I rushed to the TV and turned it off. It was the last time I would see the news, or any other TV, for months. I jumped in the shower. I began to sob as the running water masked the sound. All at once the bathroom door jerked open and Cathryn came in. “Mommy, you are crying,” she wailed in a terrified voice. “I thought you said Dad was going to be okay.” “I believe so, sweetie. I do. But this is scary. Everybody needs to have a good cry when something happens. Now go help the twins get dressed, okay?” I honestly don’t remember how we got on the private plane. I had given the twins a simple explanation that their Daddy was hurt and we had to get home. Now Mack and Cathryn were hunched over their homework, and the twins focused on their video games. Somewhere down below the clouds, Bob was on an operating table. I loved my husband fiercely. The day he left for Iraq, I had helped him pack. Despite how hurried we had been we had stopped for a moment to make love. I felt grateful that no matter what faced me in the future, we would have had that in our past. On Jan. 30 Lee flies with family and friends, including Bob’s brother David and Melanie Bloom, wife of the late NBC correspondent David Bloom, to the military hospital in Germany, where Bob, expected to live but with his future brain function uncertain, is under heavy sedation. The doctors gave us a quick briefing. Bob was stable, in the ICU. They had performed a hemicraniectomy, the removal of half of his skull to save brain function and let the brain swell. The concussive effects of a bomb blast disturb and shear neurons throughout the brain. The cognitive injuries were impossible to predict at this stage. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” said the chief of surgery, Dr. Guillermo Tellez. “Healing can take up to 18 months, even two years.” My first thought [on seeing Bob] was how great he looked, tan and Adonis-like. He looked like a wax model of himself, lying there completely still. Then my eyes moved up to his head. From the neck up, my beautiful husband had been transformed into some kind of freakish experiment. Bob’s head was grossly swollen to the size of a rugby ball, misshapen at the top where his brain pushed out of the missing skull flap. His left eye ballooned with a deep purple color. “You look beautiful, baby,” I said, through tears. “A few cuts here and there, a little roughed up, maybe.” I continued a monologue in Bob’s ear. The next day Bob is transported to National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he remains in a medically induced coma. Lee knows her two oldest children want to see him. This was a horrific thought. I wasn’t sure they had even seen their dad sick before. How would they react to his almost unrecognizable face? At the hospital Cathryn began shaking. As we walked through the doors of the ICU, she grabbed my hand so tightly I felt she would break a bone. “Honey, you don’t have to do this right now,” I soothed. “No,” she said adamantly. “Let’s go.” As her eyes came to rest on Bob, I saw tears well up. I began babbling at Bob in my cheery caregiver voice. “Your Cackie’s here, honey.” At the sound of my voice and the mention of Cathryn’s nickname, Bob’s body began moving. “Hi, Daddy,” she said. “It’s Cackie. I love you so much. I know you are going to get better.” Cathryn lifted her head up to Bob’s cheek and began to kiss it. Then I saw the most incredible thing, a sight that provided a jolt of hope. A small tear was running down from the corner of Bob’s eye on the side where Cathryn was kissing him. There is some good news: None of the shrapnel riddling Bob’s head and neck has penetrated his brain. But the force of the blast has injured the left temporal lobe, which controls speech and language—his professional lifeblood. To be near him, Lee moves into a local hotel, while her sisters care for the kids. When I visited with him, he was restless, and it took all of my strength to push him back in bed. Dr. Rocco Armonda, the neurosurgeon, explained that Bob’s movements were consistent with someone who had suffered a traumatic brain injury. When many patients first wake up, and even permanently afterwards, they can be easily angered, rattle off expletives. People often lose their inhibitions in ways both shocking and painful for their loved ones. “Bob will have to relearn things,” Dr. Armonda said kindly. “Like what?” I asked, trying to contain my composure. “Well, think of it like a baby. First they learn to speak, then to read and write.” I pictured my handsome, full-grown husband in an oversized cloth diaper with pins. The vision was too much and I began to sob. “A baby?” I ask. “Do you think he will ever work again? Will he be able to do his job?” “Probably not,” said Dr. Armonda, averting his eyes. “But it doesn’t mean he won’t have a fulfilling life.” I realized then that I had been living in a fog that was all too optimistic. “Dr. Armonda,” I said, now openly sobbing. “Will he still love me?” He steeled himself before grabbing my tiny hand in his two massive ones. “Not one of my patients with this kind of blast injury has ever woken up and not loved the people they loved before,” he said earnestly. On Valentine’s Day Bob undergoes surgery to remove a rock lodged against a carotid artery at the base of his skull; had the rock penetrated one more millimeter, he’d have died. The crisis averted, Bob contracts sepsis, a blood infection that could have killed him. By month’s end Bob begins to struggle out of the coma. On March 6, after 36 days, he finally wakes up. BOB: I had no idea how long I had been asleep or where I was…. but I will never forget my first sight of Lee. I can still see the expression of wonder on her face when she walked in. And I remember exactly what I said to her. “Hey, sweetie, where’ve you been?” Lee hugged me with tears in her eyes. “I’ve been here with you,” she said, crying. What I remember most about waking up was the excruciating pain. It felt as if my skull were going to split open if I moved too much. It was the worst pain I’d ever experienced and remained so for almost four months, until the surgery to replace my skull. My physical abilities came back rapidly. A week after I woke up, I began jogging around the nurses’ station as [my physical therapist] took off after me, yelling good-naturedly. There was no question that things inside my brain were now very different. Lee asked me time and again, “What does it feel like to be inside your head?” It felt like things moved in a lower gear. Reading was difficult, finding words took longer, and I had to listen more closely to grasp conversation. Complex words eluded me, although I could understand everything. LEE: On the third day of his awakening, the respiratory therapist came into his room and said in a cheery voice, “Hi, I’m Peggy.” “Porky?” Bob replied. “What did you call me?” she said, taken aback. Although she was in no way porcine, she did have a womanly figure. “Porky,” said Bob. Perhaps this was the inappropriateness of the traumatic brain injury, I thought with alarm. Perhaps he would always tell people what he thought of them. “Well, my 1-year-old niece called me Miss Piggy for a while,” she said. “I guess that’s okay.” There were other funny moments, like when Bob was trying to tell us he was going to ace his first neuropsychiatric evaluation. “I’m going to be just like …” He couldn’t think of the name. He began swinging at the air. “Muhammad Ali!” I screamed. “No,” said Bob. Later, when we’d moved on to a different topic, he began to hum the theme song from Rocky. “Rocky Balboa!” I yelled. “Yes!” said Bob, raising his fist. By the end of March, as Bob was gradually putting things back together, I was sliding into a depression. Bob could tell I was sad as I opened the door to his hospital room one morning, steeling myself for another day of rehab. “You’ve been crying, sweetie,” he said. “What’s wrong?” “I’m just sad today,” I said, smiling weakly. “It’s all hitting me.” Bob folded me in his arms the way he always had. A voice inside me began to say this might all be okay in the end. I looked at this man, in his goofy white plastic helmet, and saw an amazing person, the man I would love forever. For his part, Bob sometimes tries to shield Lee. BOB: I watched Lee’s face once while I was fumbling for the word “lettuce” in the therapy room. She looked scared and very small. She was exhausted and she had lost too much weight. Her broad swimmer’s shoulders hunched forward. I remember feeling how much I wanted to make this all right. I wanted so badly to come up with the word lettuce and I couldn’t. I was using every bit of energy I had to get through my own days. At last, on April 15, Bob comes home. On May 19 surgeons rebuild his skull with an acrylic implant. LEE: Gradually, inexorably, Bob was making his way back toward “the old Bob.” Maybe a word glitch here and there, but his expressions, his laugh, they have all returned. When I look in his eyes, all the lights are on; he is so very much Bob again. BOB: There is one person above all to whom I really owe my life. When I awoke and saw Lee’s face, I loved her even more than before. I had not thought it possible. I have been very, very lucky—more lucky than doctors, nurses and my own family believed I would be. The exact extent of my injuries is still difficult to measure, but I see improvements every day. As I work on my recovery, I grow more hopeful that I can return to my profession. If I can make it back to the newsroom in any position and do the work I love, I’ll be a very contented man.