REHAB TESTS WILL, ENDURANCE
Shooting survivor Nick Tullier’s therapy brings breakthroughs and frustration
Danielle McNicoll woke up around sunrise and checked the time on her phone. It glowed daily with Facebook notifications from strangers all over the country who had been keeping up with her fiancé’s recovery.
How many of them had clicked “like” in February, when she posted a video of Nick Tullier taking his first steps since the shooting? He had needed help from three therapists, a walker and an overhead support line, but he had made it 42 feet that day, an inch or two at a time. How many had choked up, that same day, when she shared a photo of him standing with his arms draped over her? “I’ve longed for this hug more than I could ever explain,” Danielle had written.
Now, a few weeks later, she was eager for the next breakthrough. She climbed out of the sofa bed in Nick’s hospital room, where she had been sleeping the past four months, and leaned over an end table next to his bed — past a framed photo of the two of them smiling on a cruise just a year earlier — and checked to see if he was awake. “Good morning,” she said, knowing she wouldn’t hear a reply.
When they lived together in Baton Rouge, La., Nick was usually the one up first. Now, in their new life at Houston’s TIRR Memorial Hermann, she was the one who rose early to get him dressed and ready each morning. Nothing he wouldn’t have done for her, she figured.
They were out the door by 8:45 for the day’s first session. Danielle maneuvered Nick’s power chair through one of the hospital’s beige corridors, past an endless line of framed photos and patient success stories, until she reached a small rehab room on the sixth floor.
“Hey, Nick,” Carissa Ngo, his speech therapist, said as they entered. She picked up a spoon and showed it to him: “We’re going to work on swallowing again, OK?”
Nick’s face tightened.
After being shot three times, including once in the head, Nick was struggling to relearn a reflex infants master by 6 months old. Ngo poured fizzy water onto the spoon. “I want you to swallow as fast as you can,” she said.
Nick’s head dipped away as she lifted the spoon to his mouth, like he was trying to avoid it. His spastic right leg kicked straight out, reflexively, as he squirmed in his chair.
“Nick, hold your head up for me,” Ngo said, pushing back gently on his forehead. “I don’t want to mess up your hair.”
His fiancée responded for him: “Danielle did my hair this morning.”
“All right, then don’t make me mess it up,” Ngo said.
She wedged the spoon between his lips and tilted it up. After a few seconds, he swallowed hard and groaned. His face reddened.
“Way to go, Nick,” Ngo said. “I know it’s hard.”
Indigestion is common for peo-
Part 1 Deputy Nick Tullier’s doctors and family try to assess his prospects after a shooting leaves him with brain damage.
Part 2
Houston doctor begins painstaking work to restore his “minimally conscious” patient.
Today: Part 3 For Nick, months of rehab yield steady but fragile progress.
Part 4
New understanding reignites a decades-old debate: What is a life worth living? And who decides?
damaged nerve fibers can sometimes be restored. Or, in some cases, electrical messages can be rerouted around damaged fibers and sent instead through healthy brain tissue.