Note to readers: The first real experience I ever had writing a multi-part story came courtesy of Chrissy Wright, an extraordinary woman who was the mother to Tiffany and the wife to Kenn.
After Kenn’s head injury – caused by the simple act of pitching a baseball and having it knocked back into his forehead during a high-school practice – she understandably leaned on her family for support and did not do any interviews with the press.
Ultimately, Chrissy decided to trust me to tell the family’s story. I will remain forever grateful to her for this, and the Wright family will always be in my prayers. Kenn’s recovery did not go as splendidly as Adam Quilty’s did (see Story No.1, “17 Seconds”) but the resolve he and his family showed was just as amazing. The superb editing of then-sports editor Gary Schwab on this story also deserves a special thanks.
And I would be totally remiss not to acknowledge Ed Walton, the compassionate local baseball coach and just a fine man himself. Ed did not know Kenn, but was so moved by the story that he organized a baseball marathon with his players that raised thousands of dollars for the family.
This story won the Associated Press Sports Editors national first-place award for enterprise writing among all large newspapers in 1998.
PART 1
Copyright 1998 The Charlotte Observer
All Rights Reserved
Charlotte Observer (North Carolina)
May 31, 199
COACH, ARE YOU OK?'
By SCOTT FOWLER, Staff Writer
There is nothing unusual about the pitch when it leaves Kenn Wright's hand.
He has thrown dozens of fastballs to Sun Valley High School baseball players for batting practice already on this day - Monday, May 12, 1997.
It is 4:30 p.m. on a sunny afternoon in Monroe, near the end of the school year. Sun Valley is about an hour into its practice. Baseballs thump into leather gloves. Players razz each other. Aluminum bats ping.
For one more second, Kenn Wright will be just what he is at this moment: a 28-year-old assistant baseball coach, with a promising teaching career and a wife pregnant with the couple's first child.
Then Kenn's pitch - a hard fastball right over the middle - reaches home plate.
The batter swings.
The baseball rushes back at about 70 mph, directly toward Kenn's forehead.
* * *
Two miles away from the Sun Valley baseball field, a small figurine sits on a wooden shelf in the living room of Kenn and Chrissy Wright's home.
It is the newest in a line of "Precious Moments" figurines Kenn has bought for his wife. He gave it to her the day before, Mother's Day, when the future seemed as bright as the yellow paint they picked out for the baby nursery.
Chrissy is six weeks pregnant with the couple's first child.
So Sunday had been special - the first Mother's Day they shared knowing that the baby they dream of is coming.
The Mother's Day gift Kenn selected for his wife was designed with fatherhood in mind. For 12 years, since the two began to fall in love in high school, he has chosen various "Precious Moments" figures to commemorate the signature events of their lives.
"This is what comes to my mind when I think of becoming a dad," he had told her. The tiny statue shows a kneeling father guiding a kid's bat, helping the child hit a baseball.
Helping kids hit baseballs - that's what Kenn is doing on the day that his life changes.
Kenn has played or coached sports for as long as Chrissy has known him. When they first met, he was a senior running back on the Boiling Springs High football team near Spartanburg. She was a sophomore cheerleader. They went to three proms together, dated all through college and married in 1990.
Kenn teaches seventh-grade social studies at Sun Valley Middle School in Monroe, next door to the high school. He is known for his sense of humor and his slightly receding hairline. He deejays the school dances. Of the 70 teachers, Kenn is one of two who regularly eat lunch with the students instead of the other adults.
Kenn wants to get ahead in coaching. He has volunteered as a baseball assistant at Sun Valley High for two straight years. He did well and got promoted to paid assistant for the '97 season.
At a coaching salary of about $500 for the entire baseball season, Kenn's ambition is far greater than his pay.
But it's a start.
During most Sun Valley practices, Kenn works with the outfielders instead of pitching. Kenn's arm is strong but erratic. Batting practice demands control.
On May 12, 1997, however, a couple of the coaches who usually help with practice are gone.
"Let me try pitching," Kenn said to Sun Valley's head coach. "Maybe today is the day I can get the ball over the plate."
Sure enough, he's right.
"Hey, coach Wright, it only took you all year, but you're throwing strikes," one player teased.
"Get up there," Kenn said, laughing. "I can do this all afternoon."
Kenn pitches in front of the mound, about 45 feet from the batters instead of the 60 feet, six-inch distance used in games. An L-shaped pitching screen is supposed to shield him from baseballs hit directly back at him.
The players work on their bunting first. Then they start swinging hard, getting ready for their last regular-season game. Kenn keeps throwing strikes.
And then he lets go of the pitch.
The batter's swing propels the ball toward Kenn's forehead.
Kenn doesn't get behind the protective screen in time.
The ball strikes the right side of Kenn's head and bounces 30 feet in the air, over the third-base line, still hissing.
The cracks of ball against bat, followed by ball against skull, are so close together that one sounds like the echo of the other.
Kenn is a solid man. Five feet 10, 205 pounds.
He falls hard.
Robbie Ballard, one of the team's best players, is over near third base. He runs to Wright's side. So do several other infielders and head baseball coach Pat Tompkins.
The players form a makeshift huddle, kneeling beside their fallen coach.
"Coach Wright?! Coach Wright?! Are you OK?"
Kenn raises himself slowly to his knees. With his right hand, he feels the spot where the ball struck him. It is already swelling, but there is no blood.
"At least it hit me where I have some hair," Kenn jokes.
The players laugh nervously.
"I've got a headache," Kenn says slowly. "I think I'm going to drive home."
"Don't do that, Kenn," coach Tompkins says. "Rest. I'll call your wife."
Kenn tells Tompkins his phone number. Robbie helps Kenn walk to the dugout, where they sit beside each other on a wooden bench.
Tompkins jogs a few steps to his red Dodge Dakota truck, parked right beside the field, and tries to call Chrissy.
She's not home yet.
Tompkins, a Vietnam veteran who has seen all sorts of injuries, thinks Kenn probably has a concussion. While he's in the truck, the head coach calls 911.
The accident has quieted the practice field and shut down the workout an hour early. Most of the players are gathering up practice gear.
One of the players brings Kenn a drink of water. Kenn never drinks it. He has his head between his knees, moaning now - almost in a fetal position.
Kenn raises up for a second, but only to throw up weakly in a dugout trash can. He keeps rubbing the spot where the ball hit him. His fists are clenched.
Kenn leans on Robbie's shoulder.
"I can't see very well," Kenn says quietly. "My eyes are blurry."
Within moments, Kenn's eyes close.
An ambulance arrives. Several police cars. Kenn starts shaking. He is having a seizure.
Tompkins grabs onto Kenn and holds him tight, trying to keep his assistant coach from slamming his head against the dugout wall.
"Call his wife again!" Tompkins yells to Robbie.
The coach recites Chrissy Wright's phone number. Robbie runs to the truck.
Chrissy Wright has just gotten in from her job as a secretary with the Union County school system. She passes by the refrigerator, where Kenn's note from three days before is still readable. He wrote it in blue marker, to both his wife and their unborn baby.
"Happy Weekend You Two! See you Tonight! (heart) Kenn" it reads.
At 5:10 p.m., the phone rings.
Chrissy doesn't get to it in time. The answering machine clicks on.
"Mrs. Wright! It's Robbie. I'm one of thebaseballplayers! There'sbeenanaccident. . . . "
Robbie is running his words together so fast that Chrissy doesn't even catch his name. But she hears the words "baseball" and "accident."
Chrissy sprints to the phone.
"It looks like coach Wright will be OK," Robbie says. "But the paramedics are here, and they have some questions for you. Hurry."
Chrissy races to her car. Within five minutes, she pulls into the gravel parking lot beside the field.
Kenn is unconscious, on a stretcher in the dugout. She runs to him.
"Kenn! Kenn!" she cries. "Are you OK?"
Kenn says nothing. His eyes are shut. To a frightened Chrissy, it seems as if his head has nearly doubled in size.
She wants to ride in the back of the ambulance with her husband, but the paramedics say they have to work on Kenn. She rides up front instead as the ambulance speeds toward Union Regional Medical Center.
When it gets there, 15 minutes later, the paramedics wheel Kenn away fast. Chrissy fills out insurance forms. She waits a few minutes, heart pounding.
Then a nurse comes out and calls her into a private room.
"Your husband has a subdural hematoma," the nurse says.
Chrissy doesn't know what that means. But the woman's tone scares her.
"Is it serious?" she asks.
"Yes. It's life-threatening," the nurse says.
Kenn is in a coma. Kenn's subdural hematoma - a huge blood clot in his skull caused by the baseball's impact - is putting his brain under tremendous pressure and already has caused some brain damage. A CAT scan of Kenn's brain shows that he needs an operation immediately.
The doctors cut Kenn's clothes off of him in preparation for possible surgery. Another nurse hands the pieces to Chrissy.
But the operation won't take place here. Kenn will have to be airlifted to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, which is better prepared to handle emergency brain surgery.
"Can I see him?" Chrissy asks.
"Yes, for a minute," the nurse says.
Chrissy walks into Kenn's room. She grabs his hand.
"Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Kenn," she says softly. "Squeeze my hand."
Nothing.
"I love you, Kenn," she says louder, determined to reach him somehow. "I love you. You fight this! Remember about this baby in my stomach. You remember I love you! And you fight!"
PART 2
Copyright 1998 The Charlotte Observer
All Rights Reserved
Charlotte Observer (North Carolina)
June 1, 1998
PEOPLE PRAY AND CRY AND HOPE
By SCOTT FOWLER, Staff Writer
Chrissy Wright can't stop looking at her wedding ring.
She is trapped in rush-hour traffic on Independence Boulevard. Her husband is in a coma. Paramedics are helicoptering him to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte for the operation he will need if his life is to be saved.
Chrissy rides in the passenger seat of a red Dodge pickup driven by Pat Tompkins, the Sun Valley head baseball coach.
Tompkins has a phone in the truck, and Chrissy has been using it.
She has called her parents in Boiling Springs, near Spartanburg. They are on their way.
She has called Kenn's parents in Florida twice, but can't reach them and had to leave a message.
She has called her pastor at Sardis Baptist Church.
After the phone calls, Chrissy keeps turning her wedding ring around and around on her finger. It comforts her.
She closes her eyes for a moment.
In Panama City, Fla., Kenn Wright's mother gets Chrissy's message first. Norene Wright talked to her son just the day before, when Kenn called to wish her a happy Mother's Day. She runs to call his father in from outside.
"Kenn's been hurt!" she says.
David Wright has been soothing some stray kittens he found on the campsite he manages. He hears his wife's frantic yell, places one kitten down gently and rushes inside.
He listens to the message from his daughter-in-law once.
Again.
Eight times in all.
Chrissy is talking fast and quietly on the machine. She sounds fairly calm. But the word "coma" is in her message.
Kenn Wright's parents throw some clothes into their car. Within 45 minutes, they begin the 11-hour drive to Charlotte.
At Carolinas Medical Center, Chrissy and coach Tompkins arrive at the hospital a few minutes ahead of Kenn. They soon hear Kenn's helicopter thrumming outside.
The neurosurgeon on call is Dr. Hunter Dyer. Paramedics rush Kenn inside.
Dyer quickly examines Kenn and realizes that the situation is critical.
Kenn's pupils are dilated - that means his brain stem is under tremendous pressure. If unattended, Dr. Dyer believes, the pressure will kill Kenn within a few hours.
The operation begins at 7:30 p.m., about three hours after the injury. Dyer first cuts a circular hole with a three-inch diameter into Kenn's skull. That relieves some of the pressure.
In the waiting room, friends stream through to check on Kenn. Players from the high school. Members of his Sunday school group. Kenn's fellow teachers from Sun Valley Middle School.
Some talk to Chrissy for only a few seconds, then take a seat. Some talk to her for 10 minutes at a time. About her pregnancy. Church. Anything besides the surgery.
People pray and cry and hope. Anyone walking close by in a white coat, looking medical, is studied closely.
Through this blur of people, Chrissy Wright stays calm.
Her near-constant smile is gone. She is a petite woman with soft features, a former cheerleader who looks young enough to still be in college. Some who see her that night wonder if Chrissy will be able to cope.
After 90 minutes, Dr. Dyer finishes his surgery and walks out to find Chrissy. He guides her into a small conference room near the waiting area and closes the door. They sit.
"We performed an operation called a craniotomy on your husband," Dyer says. "We removed some bone from his skull, so we could take out the blood clot on the surface of his brain. Then we put the bone flap back that we had removed."
"Is he going to be OK?" Chrissy asks.
Dyer pauses. He is always careful in these situations not to mislead the families.
"Kenn will probably live - if he gets through this night," Dyer says. "Now it's a waiting game."
PART 3
Copyright 1998 The Charlotte Observer
All Rights Reserved
Charlotte Observer (North Carolina)
June 2, 1998
EARLY MORNINGS ARE HARDEST
By SCOTT FOWLER, Staff Writer
It seems to Chrissy that morning will never come.
She stares at the clock in the fifth-floor waiting room, watching the minutes tick by. She holds hands with her mother and sister - not eating, not drinking, barely talking.
Chrissy gets to see Kenn once, at midnight. The doctors tell her that she can visit him again at 6 a.m., and that they will call her if there is any change.
Chrissy has no doubt that Kenn will be alive at 6 a.m., even if the doctors do. Kenn has always been so strong. So ambitious. She expects far more.
As she studies the clock, a vision enters her mind. She begins to believe that she will walk into the intensive-care unit and that Kenn will look at her, smile and stand up beside his hospital bed.
"Let's get out of here," he'll say, and throw his arm around her shoulder.
At 5:30 a.m., Kenn's parents arrive after an all-night drive from Panama City, Fla. The nurses say it will be OK to visit Kenn 30 minutes early, since his parents haven't seen him since the accident and Chrissy is so anxious.
The three of them look in on Kenn for a few minutes.
Kenn is alive, but still in a deep coma. Tubes sprout from his body. Machines beep and hum. He breathes with a ventilator's help.
Chrissy's vision of a quickly healed Kenn vanishes. Her husband has been hurt. Badly.
The second night is much like the first. So is the third. And the fourth. Still in a coma, Kenn can only be visited in the neurological intensive-care unit for four 15-minute segments per day.
Chrissy Wright and her family begin to live their lives in two parts:
Seeing Kenn.
Waiting to see Kenn.
Monitoring Kenn
Kenn's eyes stay closed. He is unresponsive. But in the first few weeks after the accident, Chrissy finds a small way to connect with him - through Kenn's medical monitors.
When Chrissy walks into the neurological intensive-care unit and starts talking to Kenn, something remarkable happens.
His heartbeat, often thumping at a frantic pace, slows. His blood pressure falls to a more-normal level.
But the coma continues. The doctors don't know when - or if - Kenn will come out of it.
Chrissy says the same things over and over to Kenn.
"Don't leave me, Kenn," she says. "Fight. Gosh, you have so much to live for. We've got this baby on the way. Fight!"
Chrissy sleeps the first couple of nights in the waiting room with other family members. Then she starts going home after the final 15-minute visiting period ends and coming back early the next morning.
Those early mornings are the hardest. Chrissy never breaks down in front of Kenn, worrying that he will hear her despite his coma.
But Chrissy cries in the mornings when she is alone, usually in the shower at home, her tears mingling with the shower's steam.
The fifth-floor waiting room fills every day. Students from Kenn's middle-school classes. Players from the high school baseball team. Sardis Baptist pastor Kenn Hucks and other members of the Wrights' church.
They can't visit Kenn - he is in the intensive-care unit. So they talk with Chrissy and all of her family members clustered there.
She listens sometimes. Other times, she nods pleasantly at whomever is talking, but blanks out the conversation so she can pray inside her head.
Casseroles mushroom on the countertops at the Wrights' home.
Four different friends of the Wright family show up with their lawn mowers Saturday morning shortly after Kenn is injured, all having independently decided to mow the Wrights' yard. A family friend named Jimmy Fincher good-naturedly runs the others off and decides he will take care of the Wrights' yard from now on.
Thankfully, money isn't too much of a problem. Since Kenn was a paid assistant coach at the time of the injury, workers' compensation is covering his treatment.
The Sun Valley baseball team cancels one game and thinks about skipping the state playoffs. Instead, the Wright family persuades the team to play.
"Kenn would be hot if he knew you skipped the playoffs because of him," David Wright, Kenn's father, says.
Some players flinch during batting practice for the playoffs, swinging softly so there are no more accidents. Sun Valley coach Pat Tompkins brings out the L-shaped pitching screen Kenn had been using right away, throwing behind it himself, trying to reassure the team about its safety.
The players tap the ball back timidly.
The team loses in the first round.
Chrissy's belly grows. The baby kicks.
Chrissy had signed up the couple for "New Parent" classes before Kenn was hurt. Now, she finds she can't bear going without Kenn. She cancels.
The hospital becomes home. Chrissy goes back to the house only to shower and to sleep. She narrows her focus to a pinpoint - getting Kenn better.
Mail goes unanswered. The family golden retriever, Bucky, gets an ear infection that goes unnoticed for days before Chrissy realizes it and buys the necessary antibiotics from the vet.
The transformation
Chrissy thinks about the child growing inside her every day. She tells herself she won't fall apart - for Kenn and for the baby.
The hardest times at home come when she looks at her husband's clothes in the closet or sees his watch and wedding ring on the nightstand. And in the shower.
But Chrissy doesn't let others see her emotional side very often. She is transforming herself.
As she tries to strengthen her husband, an odd thing occurs: She becomes stronger herself.
Friends, family, even the doctor who saved her husband's life with emergency brain surgery - they all wonder how Chrissy does it. Day after day, this petite woman with the soft voice goes about the hard business of rehabilitating a badly injured husband. She stays at the hospital from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day.
Chrissy always talks to Kenn when she is with him at the hospital, hoping he can hear. She brings tapes of Christian love songs like "Together as One" - a favorite that had been played at their 1990 wedding in her hometown. She puts headphones on Kenn's ears to let him listen.
She makes a tape of her own voice, encouraging him. When the nurses shoo Chrissy out of ICU, she places the earphones on Kenn and hits the "play" button.
Chrissy doesn't have morning sickness with her pregnancy - she has night sickness. The antiseptic smells of the ICU cause waves of nausea.
Kenn had talked regularly to the baby in the early weeks of pregnancy, crouching down near Chrissy's stomach when she felt bad.
"Calm down now, baby," he would say. "Don't make your mom sick."
The nurses help now, bringing her soda crackers and carbonated drinks.
Kenn moves to a less critical part of the ICU and then to the rehabilitation arm of Carolinas Medical Center, but his condition doesn't change much.
Six weeks pass this way.
Mid-May 1997 turns into late June.
A vision of hope
One of Kenn's best friends at Sun Valley Middle School, fellow coach and teacher Warren Taylor, establishes the "Mr. Wright Hotline." Via voice mail, Taylor updates it every couple of days on Kenn's condition.
Chrissy reads Kenn each homemade card that his students send him.
The social studies tests Kenn made out at Sun Valley Middle had always been thorough. But he was an approachable teacher with a playful side - dressing up as Elvis once and Uncle Sam another time for school fund-raisers.
At the end of many of his social-studies tests, Kenn's final question would be "True or false: Mr. Wright rocks!"
A number of the students' cards tell Kenn how well they did on their social studies end-of-year exam. He had been reviewing his students for that test just before he got hurt. And almost all include this theme:
"Get Well, Mr. Wright. You rock!"
Chrissy, her family and Kenn's family grow to know every inch of CMC. One afternoon, a group of relatives and family friends sits in the hospital cafeteria. A nurse comes hurrying between the tables, looking for Chrissy.
"Come with me! Come with me!" she says.
Chrissy does. The two women run upstairs.
"What's happened?" Chrissy asks.
"You've got to see this!" the nurse exclaims. "He's opened one of his eyes!"
Chrissy runs into the room.
Kenn's eyes are closed.
He looks exactly as he has looked for weeks.
"Oh, no," the nurse says, disappointed. "He closed it again. Well, stay right here. Watch."
Twenty minutes later, Kenn Wright opens his right eye again. Just partway.
A crack.
PART 4
Copyright 1998 The Charlotte Observer
All Rights Reserved
Charlotte Observer (North Carolina)
June 3, 1998
MEASURING PROGRESS IN INCHES
By SCOTT FOWLER, Staff Writer
Kenn's progress is slow.
After opening his right eye, it takes him another two weeks to open his left one.
He recognizes his wife and his parents. But his hurt brain can't order his mouth to speak. His eyes look right at people sometimes when they speak to him. Other times, he has what doctors sometimes call "doll eyes" - wide open and unfocused.
Since Kenn can't talk yet, Chrissy and Kenn's father, David Wright, try to figure out what he remembers. They tell Kenn what happened to him, then ask him questions and get him to blink once for yes.
"Where are you?" Kenn's father, David, asks his son. "At home? At work? Or at the hospital?"
Kenn blinks once after choice No. 3.
In this way, the Wrights learn that when Kenn first wakes up the summer of 1997, he believes the year is actually 1992.
He thinks he is 23, not his actual age of 28. He thinks that he and Chrissy still live in South Carolina, that they have been married 1-1/2 years, not 6-1/2.
This is a mystery to the Wright family. They wonder if it has to do with where Kenn often stares, at his dripping IV tube in the hospital.
On the metal cylinder holding the tube, there are three numbers: 692. Has Kenn decided because of those numbers that he is living in the sixth month of 1992?
The Wrights tell Kenn over and over where he is and what has happened to him. They tell him stories about himself to jog his long-term memory, which is far better than his short-term.
They tell Kenn about the time that he dressed up as rock star Gene Simmons of the group Kiss for a college talent show.
They tell him about the time that, on a lark, he and Chrissy drove to Florida so that he could participate in an open tryout for the Florida Marlins major-league baseball team - and how good a vacation the couple had even though no one at the tryout had made it.
And Brian Martin, Chrissy's brother, reminds his brother-in-law about their great Cleveland adventure.
"Remember, Kenn?" he says. "You called me. It was about 9 p.m. one night. . . ."
Kenn is eight years older than Brian, but they shared the same spontaneous impulses. That night in October 1995, Kenn had called Brian and said:
"Brian. We have to drive to Cleveland to go to the World Series!"
They had no tickets and took hardly any money, and the game was sold out. But they talked their way into becoming peanut vendors for one night, yanking candy-stripe red uniforms over their clothes and walking side by side up the aisles in Jacobs Field.
Despite the yells from hungry fans, they sold peanuts only during breaks in the game.
The ultrasound
Kenn doesn't remember anything that happened a few months on each side of his May 12, 1997, accident. But he does know that his wife is pregnant with their first child - that had happened six weeks before Kenn's injury, and Chrissy keeps reminding him about it.
One day in early July, Chrissy goes to the doctor for a pregnancy checkup. Her older sister, DeAnna, comes with her tape recorder. DeAnna tapes the baby's heartbeat for Chrissy. Then Chrissy takes the recorder back to Kenn's room, so he can hear the tiny thump-thump.
In late July, Chrissy goes for her ultrasound. This will be the day she finds out if the baby is a boy or a girl.
She and Kenn had picked out baby names before he got hurt. Tyler David was their boy's name. For a girl, it would be Tiffany. . . well, Tiffany something.
The doctor gels up Chrissy's stomach, then hooks up the ultrasound and studies the monitor.
"You're going to have a baby girl," the doctor tells Chrissy.
Chrissy is ecstatic. She stops at the gift shop to buy a big pink bow, then rushes to Kenn's room at Carolinas Medical Center.
Kenn had awoken from his coma several weeks before, but he struggles with his short-term memory because of the brain damage.
Chrissy flies into Kenn's room.
"We're having a girl, Kenn!" she says.
An hour later, she asks him if he remembers what they were having. He shakes his head "no."
"It's a girl, Kenn," she says again.
Over and over that night, Chrissy repeats herself, making sure Kenn understands.
"It's a girl. It's a girl."
She ties the pink ribbon near the IV, so Kenn can look at it.
Two weeks later, Chrissy is getting ready to go to the hospital to see Kenn again.
"Another day," she thinks. "I'm going to see something positive today. Something good."
And then, on the way to the car, it comes to her.
She knows the baby's middle name.
It is early morning. She drives to the hospital, sits beside Kenn and talks to him before he begins his daily therapy sessions.
"For some reason I've got this middle name in my heart, Kenn," she says. "It's been placed there."
She tells him what it is. How she feels it represents all they have been through and what they will need most in the future.
Kenn nods his agreement.
And so Tiffany's middle name is decided.
Faith.
Leaving the hospital
Chrissy is almost always with Kenn. Employees at the Union County school system have donated their own vacation time in generous quantities - a policy called "shared leave" - so that Chrissy can take care of Kenn and still get paid.
Gradually, Kenn gets better.
One day, he moves his thumb.
"That's huge, Kenn, that's huge!" his father says excitedly.
Later that same day, he wiggles two toes.
Kenn moans aloud one night. He makes vowel sounds for his speech therapist a few days later, and scratchily says "Dad," "Mom" and "Chrissy" a few days after that.
In July, Kenn passes a swallowing test. For the first time in months, he will be allowed to eat real food instead of getting fed intravenously. He is well enough to be helped out of bed and into a wheelchair now, so the family rolls him out to the hospital vending machines.
"What would you like, Kenn?" his father says. "You can have anything you want."
Kenn's eyes dart over the machines, dazzled at the possibilities. Finally, he picks a Mountain Dew. Chrissy gives him a straw, and he slurps it down.
A few days later, Kenn eats some solid food for the first time - mashed potatoes and green beans.
One early morning, close to three months after the May 1997 baseball accident, Kenn looks very alert. His father asks him if he wanted to phone Chrissy, who is at home getting ready to drive the 20 miles to Carolinas Medical Center.
Kenn gives a small nod. His father dials.
"Tell her, Hi Chrissy,' " his father urges.
"Hi, Chrissy," Kenn says, his voice rough but understandable.
"Tell her, I love you,' " his father says.
"I love you," Kenn says.
"I love you, too, Kenn," Chrissy says, amazed. "I'll be right there!"
The family works together to fill Kenn's needs. Chrissy learns how to give Kenn a shot each morning to help thin his blood. Kenn's father and Chrissy's brother, Brian, both learn Kenn's physical therapy routine and work with him for hours at time, day after day.
They measure progress in inches.
Parachuting toward Kenn
Chrissy's friends and family constantly remark on her strength, her resilience, her unending encouragement. But sometimes, after another long day at the hospital, Chrissy daydreams.
When she needs to get away, she does so inside her mind. She imagines skydiving, something she has never done. She longs for the freedom of sailing through the air, of the tension rushing out of her body.
She dreams of a healthy Kenn, waiting for her on the ground, running toward her open parachute as it floats down.
In real life, Kenn can't walk or push himself in a wheelchair.
He isn't paralyzed and can respond to commands, but his brain is hurt. It can't tell his body what to do. Kenn doesn't initiate conversation or movement.
But he is stable.
And, finally, he is well enough to go home.
On Aug. 29, 1997, 3-1/2 months after Kenn Wright was airlifted to CMC, close to death, his father and his wife help him leave the hospital's rehabilitation facility. They keep his departure a secret from everyone but the hospital staff, hoping to settle in at home for a few days before any visitors drop by.
David Wright pushes Kenn's wheelchair, over Chrissy's lighthearted protest.
"No way are you going to push him out of here," Kenn's father says. "You're pregnant!"
Chrissy carries the get-well posters and cards that Kenn's students made him.
Kenn weighs 168 pounds, 37 pounds less than he did when he was rushed to the hospital on May 12. He has a new haircut thanks to Chrissy, who tried to even out the hair that had grown back over the scar on the right side of his head.
He is extremely weak.
But he is going home.
The baby is due in four months.
PART 5
Copyright 1998 The Charlotte Observer
All Rights Reserved
Charlotte Observer (North Carolina)
June 4, 1998
FAMILY IS GROWING, GETTING STRONGER,
WISHING UPON A STAR
By SCOTT FOWLER, Staff Writer
The nursery is bare when Kenn comes home from Carolinas Medical Center in late August, except for a can of yellow paint sitting in the middle of the floor.
The couple had picked the paint out together, just before Kenn was injured.
Chrissy hadn't gone into the nursery since Kenn's baseball accident 3-1/2 months ago. But now, with Kenn home and their lives relatively stable, Chrissy finds more time to think about the baby coming.
For months after Kenn's hospital release on Aug. 29, 1997, Chrissy's brother and Kenn's father alternate staying at the house with Chrissy to help out. They do Kenn's therapy sessions, teaching him to re-use the muscles in his legs and arms that had grown so weak during the coma. They watch football games with him - Kenn's love for sports is undiminished.
The family support seems to strengthen Kenn.
His speech slowly begins to return. Kenn talks on the phone better than he can talk to a person sitting next to him. And he can sing even more clearly than he can talk on the phone - the words flowing through the song's rhythm.
Kenn's father, David, sometimes asks Kenn to sing with him at night before Kenn goes to bed.
One of the songs Kenn remembers best is from the movie "Pinocchio." So they sing:
"When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true."
"What do you wish for, Kenn?" his father asks each night after they finish.
Kenn wishes for different things, but they rarely have to do with his health. He does not seem particularly angry or curious about his condition.
Until one night.
"I want some new legs," Kenn says clearly.
His father is surprised. And touched.
"I'm going to be honest with you, buddy," his father says. "I don't think there's anything wrong with your legs. It's something else."
"My head?" Kenn asks.
David Wright nods quietly.
The happy room
Sometimes when Chrissy goes into the nursery that fall, she thinks about the times when Kenn was healthy. She sits on the nursery floor near the can of paint in the place she has started calling the "happy room."
This was the room where she had told Kenn in late April that she was pregnant. Chrissy had found out about the pregnancy on a Friday. Kenn was chaperoning a middle-school field trip to Washington, D.C., and wouldn't be home until Sunday morning.
For two nights, she waited.
When Kenn came home, Chrissy led him upstairs by the hand into the spare bedroom. She threw open the door with a flourish.
A colorful banner said "Welcome Home, Daddy!"
Two baby outfits - one for a boy, one for a girl - lay on the floor.
At the hardware store a few days after that, they picked out the paint for the nursery.
"That's a nice color of yellow - it's called Tiffany," the clerk said.
Kenn laughed delightedly. That was also the name they had decided on for a baby girl.
Two weeks later, Kenn got hurt and almost everything changed.
For nearly four months, Chrissy didn't return to the nursery. But then Kenn came home, and preparing for the baby becomes the most important thing in their lives once more.
In early October, Chrissy and Kenn use that can of yellow paint. Kenn rolls on paint from his wheelchair, helping Chrissy and a couple of relatives turn the nursery into the color of sunshine.
Chrissy is due in early January. But she was born on Christmas Day, and wonders whether her daughter may come early.
On Dec. 24 at 6:30 a.m. - Christmas Eve morning - Chrissy awakes Kenn and her younger brother Brian, 21, who has left college to help his sister and brother-in-law.
"This baby is coming!" Chrissy says. "Let's go!"
In Chrissy's Honda Civic, Brian loads up Kenn and his wheelchair. He helps Chrissy get inside. They speed toward the hospital.
Chrissy walks in. Brian pushes Kenn in.
Eventually, it's time.
Kenn's brain is too hurt to allow him to talk or move much during Chrissy's labor, but he watches his wife closely from the head of the bed.
Brian pries his sister's left hand off the bed rail. He takes Kenn's right hand and links it with Chrissy's.
Kenn slowly moves Chrissy's hand to his lips and gives it a light kiss.
After 15 hours of labor, on Christmas Eve at 5:27 p.m., Tiffany Faith Wright arrives.
She is 18-1/2 inches long and weighs 6 pounds, 15 ounces.
Chrissy holds Tiffany.
The room is quiet.
Kenn strokes his wife's cheek. His hand shows Chrissy's fingernail marks on every knuckle.
A calming acceptance
The first weeks of Tiffany's life pass in a blur of diapers and 2 a.m. feedings. Chrissy's parents, Bonnie and Bob Martin, drive from Spartanburg and move in for six weeks in early 1998, taking leaves of absence from their jobs to help out with the new baby and Kenn.
In a bustling house, Chrissy feels herself changing.
For months, she refused to accept that Kenn might not make a complete recovery.
One day, she always thinks, it will just click. The old Kenn will be back. Even in the delivery room, she half expects him to be shocked into his pre-injury self by the drama of Tiffany's birth.
But finally, as 1998 begins, the 27-year-old mother feels a calming force envelop her. Chrissy knows Kenn, 29, will never be the same.
And that starts to be all right.
Kenn has no visible scars, but some of the brain damage Kenn sustained that day on the ball field is irreversible. Doctors are not sure how much.
Jim McDeavitt, the doctor supervising Kenn's rehabilitation, tells the family that Kenn will probably walk again at some point - most likely with the aid of a walker.
Teaching or coaching again is very unlikely.
"The biggest quality-of-life issue with Kenn is his cognition," McDeavitt says. "It's almost like a window opens up with him sometimes, and you see him the way he was before the accident. You see the sense of humor.
"Those openings were very brief at first. Now they come a little more often. We'd all like to see that window stay open all of the time."
In late March, when Tiffany is 3 months old, the Wright family has a scare. Kenn has a seizure and must return to the hospital. Some of the pressure on his brain has returned.
The Wrights must decide whether or not to have an operation called a "shunt revision." Doctors had previously installed a shunt in Kenn - a device to drain the excess fluid in his brain. It wasn't working well.
If Kenn gets the operation, he has a small chance of getting better, but the risks are greater. He could die.
If he doesn't get the operation, he will stay the same or get worse.
The doctors give the Wrights a day to think about it. Chrissy isn't sure she wants to take the chance.
Because of the seizure, Kenn is having a harder time talking than usual.
"Kenn," Chrissy asks, "please give me a sign if you want this surgery, a thumbs-up or something."
Immediately, Kenn thrusts both thumbs up in the air.
Kenn gets the operation. Its full effects won't be known for a year, but Kenn's mind is slowly improving again. Brain-damaged patients often make progress for several years after their injuries.
When his father asks him what it felt like to be in a coma for nearly two months after his accident, Kenn looks like he doesn't understand the question.
Then his eyes flicker.
"Rip Van Wright," he says.
That flash of the old Kenn - the funny Kenn - delights his family.
Later the same afternoon, Kenn dozes off in his chair in the middle of a conversation.
Life in two rooms
Chrissy now spends her days working with her husband and taking care of their baby. Their lives revolve around the living room and kitchen in their house in Monroe - the two rooms in the house where Kenn has some space.
Chrissy still has some moments of anger - moments when she wishes Kenn could interact more with his daughter.
But when she starts getting frustrated, Kenn does something small. A laugh when Tiffany suddenly lets out a loud burp. An extra push of his wheelchair.
Kenn's workers' compensation would allow Chrissy to hire a caregiver to tend to him while she works. But Kenn says he doesn't want a stranger in the house for eight to 10 hours a day, and Chrissy can't bear to leave him.
So Chrissy decides not to return to her job as a secretary with the Union County school system. Instead, she will take the job of caring for Kenn herself - drawing a modest paycheck for it through workers' compensation.
Chrissy has never erased the message Kenn wrote her and the baby on the refrigerator a year ago, three days before he got hurt.
"Happy Weekend You Two! See you Tonight! (heart) Kenn" is still there, in faded blue marker.
She shows the note to Kenn sometimes when they are in the kitchen.
"You wrote me that, Kenn," she says. He doesn't remember - his memory of the injury and the days immediately before and after have left him.
When people ask about Kenn's condition, Chrissy tells them that her husband is a work in progress.
"This is not the end of the story," she says. "It is to be continued.' "
The Wrights go out sometimes. They go to a Charlotte Checkers game, the movie "Godzilla," the mall, a couple of restaurants.
"We're not going to stay here inside these four walls," Chrissy tells Kenn. "We're going to live."
Kenn's moment
A year after the accident, the Sun Valley baseball team invites Kenn, Chrissy and their family to the high school's athletic awards banquet May 19.
For Kenn, it will be the first time he has seen many of the Sun Valley people for months. Chrissy helps him dress, and he looks sharp - yellow button-down shirt, navy pants and a dark tie with dozens of baseballs imprinted on it.
Kenn sits at the table with his wife.
Women line up to hold Tiffany, 5 months old now and beautiful with her short-sleeved pink dress and chubby thighs.
Men and boys line up to shake Kenn's hand. Kenn doesn't say anything - the attention is rather overwhelming - but he smiles broadly at everyone.
After the baseball players receive their awards, senior John McHan steps up to the microphone.
"The seniors have a special award to present to coach Wright," McHan says, holding a plaque. "Thank you, coach Wright. You'll be with us wherever we go."
McHan walks 50 feet back to Kenn and Chrissy's table.
The applause swells.
People start pushing away their plates of barbecue and getting up, banging their hands together, harder and harder. As McHan hands Kenn the plaque, 300 people are up, shouting and clapping. The ovation continues for 60 seconds.
Chrissy's eyes fill with tears. She has made herself so strong in the past year, hardly ever crying in front of her husband, but this time she lets go.
Chrissy kisses Kenn on the cheek. Her brother, Brian, takes a snapshot. The baby looks on, wide-eyed, from a nearby lap.
Kenn grins and holds his plaque. It is engraved from the Sun Valley team to "Our coach and friend." He clutches it the rest of the evening.
The future
Kenn cannot walk to the podium on that great night.
But he can hold his baby.
One recent afternoon, Chrissy places the baby in Kenn's lap while he sits on the couch. Kenn wants to rock Tiffany a little, and he moves his right arm slightly, nudging her back and forth on his lap.
Kenn studies his daughter's face as Tiffany gazes back at him sleepily.
She yawns once, then dozes off in her father's arms.
Chrissy smiles, watching silently.
Chrissy still has her daydream, the escape she used during Kenn's 3-1/2-month hospital stay after the accident.
She continues to imagine herself skydiving for the first time in her life. But the fantasy has changed a little.
Chrissy still leaps out of an airplane and feels the exhilaration of free fall.
But Kenn is not running to meet her anymore, the way she used to imagine him.
Now Kenn is in his wheelchair, loving and aware and alive.
Kenn holds Tiffany in his arms as the sun sets. He laughs with his daughter as they watch Chrissy float down from the sky.
In the daydream, Chrissy smiles as she parachutes toward them.
