Husband held on to belief: ‘She’s in there’
Frank Calzadillas sat in a hospital room in Las Vegas, his head in his hands, listening to the plunk, plunk,
plunk of blood dripping from his wife’s bandaged head and pooling on the linoleum floor. This couldn’t be real.
Frank and Jovanna were having such a good time as they wound their way through the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest Festival to get closer to the stage, built on an empty lot across Las Vegas Boulevard from the Mandalay Bay Hotel.
Their friends Bob and Clarissa Magallanez had veered off to a restroom, but Jovanna hadn’t wanted to miss a minute of Jason Aldean, her favorite singer.
That was the night of Oct. 1, 2017, when a gunman at the Mandalay Bay opened fire on the crowd. When the shooting began, as bullets hailed down seemingly from nowhere, Jovanna fell to the ground.
Blood poured from her head. Frank scooped her up. A tribal police officer and a master sergeant in the Arizona Air National Guard, he felt his training kick in. He got her into a car, shielded from the shooting and the fleeing concertgoers.
“This is something you would see in Afghanistan, not in Las Vegas.”
Virginia Prendergast, Barrow Neurological Institute
Jovanna was one of the first victims to arrive at University Medical Center, a 7-mile drive from the chaos of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Medical staff rushed her away, leaving Frank in the emergency room lobby.
Cars and trucks pulled up to the emergency room doors, one after another. Trauma workers rushed outside to help the blood-covered victims.
Frank assessed the situation, looking for vulnerabilities. Any one of those vehicles could bring another attack. The parking garage was an easy target if this was the work of terrorists. The hospital, too.
Frank talked to the security staff. Get the police here, the FBI. Control access.
He retreated outside. He sat down behind a low wall.
This felt like war. He should know. He’d been there.
‘You need to prepare yourself’
For hours, Frank sat there, went inside and back out again. His heart pounded.
Finally, a hospital administrator approached him.
“How is my wife?” Frank asked. She wasn’t sure where Jovanna was. The victims had come in so fast, there was no time for paperwork.
“Does she have any tattoos?” the administrator asked.
Their son Eli’s name was tattooed near Jovanna’s collarbone, a flower on her back.
The administrator knew who they were talking about.
“You need to prepare yourself,” she said. “It’s not good.”
He followed her.
Jovanna’s long, beautiful hair was gone, her head bandaged. She had a tracheal tube in her throat. She was surrounded by machines.
The doctor wore an open-necked shirt with jeans and tennis shoes; he had rushed in after seeing television reports of the attack.
He told Frank the bullet had entered the top of Jovanna’s skull and shattered, sending fragments into her brain. Surgeons had cleaned debris from the wound, but that was all.
“There is nothing we can do for your wife,” the doctor told Frank.
“What do you mean?” Frank said. “She’s in a hospital. Do something! We’re here for help. Help her!”
Frank tried to calm down. He took a deep breath. He apologized. “I’m just scared, man,” he told the doctor.
The doctor nodded. He understood. But Frank would have to decide what to do.
“It’s a non-survivable injury,” the doctor said.
It was a phrase Frank would hear again and again in the next few weeks. There was too much damage, probably to both sides of her brain.
“It’s a non-survivable injury,” the doctor repeated.
He wanted Frank to think about taking Jovanna off life support.
Impossible and unimaginable
It was an impossible decision. Jovanna was 30, a mother of two. Eli was 11. Ariel just 3. Jovanna was the center of their lives and Frank’s, too.
They had practically grown up together, Jovanna in the small Arizona town of Dudleyville and Frank just 8 miles up Highway 77 in Hayden.
They went to all the same schools, Frank two grades ahead. They started dating when she was 17 and he was 19.
Frank couldn’t imagine life without her. It was almost Halloween, her favorite holiday. They had been talking about another trip to Disneyland.
Jovanna’s mother, Barb Martinez, was on the way. It took eight hours to make the drive from Dudleyville.
“I’m not going to make a decision until she gets here,” Frank told the doctor.
Then he sat, head in his hands. Plunk, plunk, plunk.
Over the next day, their family began to arrive, 100 people filling Jovanna’s hospital room, the hallway outside and waiting rooms.
They had come to say goodbye. Barb had prayed the whole way, but she couldn’t tell Frank what to do. She said it was up to him. Jovanna was his wife, the mother of his children.
It had to be Frank.
No one made it easy. Doctors pressed Frank for an answer. “It’s not a survivable injury,” they repeated like a mantra. She might never wake, they told him. Never regain speech. Never walk. Someone asked him to consider organ donation.
“They are just waiting for her to die,” Frank thought. He was waiting for her to wake up.
How could he let her go?
Frank’s brother, Orlando, stood like a bouncer at the door of Jovanna’s hospital room, making sure Frank ate, monitoring the paperwork he had to sign and controlling the number of visitors.
If there were too many people in the room, Jovanna’s blood pressure and heart rate would go up.
All the while, Frank weighed his decision. One moment, he would think, yes, he would let her go, only to change his mind.
Jovanna was young and strong. Eli and Ariel needed their mother. She was the one who took care of them and the house when he was deployed by the Air National Guard to Kuwait and Kurdistan. He was gone once for seven months. He couldn’t do it alone.
Frank needed her, too. He loved her so much.
And he knew: Jovanna would want to live.
But what if the doctors were right? What if she didn’t come out of the coma? What kind of life would it be?
A dream and a decision
Frank must have nodded off, sitting in a chair in Jovanna’s room. Because he had a dream. He thought it was a dream. Maybe it was a vision.
In it, Jovanna came to him. She hugged him and kissed him, then she told him, “Everything is gonna be OK.”
Frank started awake. It had been so real. He knew what he had to do. He called Jovanna’s mom.
“We’re keeping Jovanna alive,” Frank told Barb. “She’s gonna be all right.”
The next day, Frank asked the doctor, “Is she brain dead?”
No, the doctor admitted. “She might be in there,” he said. “She might not be in there.”
Frank took Jovanna’s hand. “Squeeze my hand, Jovanna,” he said. Please. He felt a slight pressure. Probably a reflex, the doctor said. In that moment, the dream still fresh in his mind, Frank knew it was more than that.
Jovanna wouldn’t want him to give up on her.
Returning to Arizona
Friends brought Eli to see his mother six days after she had been shot.
“What’s wrong with Mom?” Eli asked his dad. Frank couldn’t bring himself to tell his son what had happened.
“She got hurt,” Frank told him. “She’s in really bad shape.”
Eli went right to Jovanna. He was crying as he sat next to her bed, reached for her hand and held it.
Soon, Jovanna was stable enough to travel. Frank decided it was time to take her home.
His commander from the Salt River Police Department, where Frank was a motorcycle officer, contacted Angel MedFlight, an air ambulance company. It offered to fly Jovanna to Phoenix for free.
On Oct. 19, a Thursday 18 days after she was shot, Jovanna arrived at Select Specialty Hospital in Phoenix, a longterm care facility that works closely with the medical staff from Barrow Neurological Institute.
It was late, after 10 p.m., and as he followed the gurney carrying Jovanna, Frank saw other patients through windows and open doorways. Many lay still, tubes trailing from their bodies. Machines breathed for them.
Frank was scared. What if he had made the wrong decision?
Understanding the injury
Three days later, Virginia Prendergast prepared to examine Jovanna. Prendergast is a nurse practitioner and in charge of specialized neuroscience nurses at Barrow.
She takes care of patients with the most harrowing injuries.
She had been asked to look in on Jovanna by Lindley Bliss, the doctor in charge of Jovanna’s care.
Prendergast had reviewed Jovanna’s records from Las Vegas and the scans and notes from her first days in Phoenix. She had followed news of the shooting and couldn’t wrap her head around the number of people killed and injured. Bliss had warned that it was grim.
Wounds from a high-velocity weapon are different from those made by a regular gun. Military-style ammunition has more potential to destroy tissue.
The bullet didn’t leave a clean entrance wound; it shattered the top of Jovanna’s skull and left a gaping hole. It was hard to tell exactly exactly where it entered, but it looked like the most damage was to the front left side of her brain.
The bullet fragments on the brain scan lit up like tiny white lights. Prendergast knew the fragments were sterile, from the velocity and the heat, and could stay where they were.
Doctors in Las Vegas had controlled hemorrhaging, prevented infection and about a week after the shooting, when swelling had receded, had performed a cranioplasty, covering the opening in her skull with titanium mesh.
“This is something you would see in Afghanistan, not in Las Vegas,” Prendergast thought. They wouldn’t know the true extent of the damage until Jovanna woke up.
‘What was she like before?’
It was around 6 p.m. when Prendergast knocked on the frame of Jovanna’s door. Family members packed the room.
Prendergast saw Jovanna for the first time.
Her head had been shaved. She had a tube in her neck and one in her stomach. She was comatose but not still. Her arms and legs moved fitfully. She was breathing heavily and drenched in sweat. Her heart was pounding, 120, 130, 140 beats per minute. A normal resting heart rate would be 60 to 100 beats per minute.
It’s called “storming,” a common
complication after a traumatic brain injury. It’s hard on the body, distressing and uncomfortable.
Medicine could control that, to let her brain heal. This was a young, healthy woman, Prendergast thought. She was strong.
Prendergast looked around at the family. She talked with them one by one.
“What should I know about your wife?” Prendergast asked. “Tell me about your daughter. What’s your cousin like?” What was she like before? Then she made some promises.
Prendergast would be there, every day. She would be honest with them. She would do everything possible to help Jovanna.
“Let’s dig in here,” Prendergast thought. “Let’s get to work.”
With her every day
In the next day or two, Jovanna opened her eyes. She only stared at the walls. She looked right through Frank. She didn’t respond to stimuli. She couldn’t talk. The right side of her body was paralyzed.
Frank kept vigil at her bedside. What if Jovanna stayed like this? What if this was all? He felt guilty. Jovanna would hate this kind of life.
What if he had made the wrong decision?
There was no undoing it. Frank stared at the walls, too. He covered them with pictures – of Eli and Ariel, family members, friends.
The curtains in Jovanna’s hospital room were pulled open every morning, the lights and TV turned off at night, to establish a routine.
Doctors and nurses came in and out. Therapists worked with Jovanna.
Frank hardly ever left the hospital. He didn’t let Ariel see Jovanna. She was too young. She wouldn’t understand. When she asked where her mom was, Frank told her she was sleeping at the hospital.
Eli insisted on seeing his mom. Frank had to tell him that Jovanna had been shot.
“I already know, Dad,” Eli told Frank. He had overheard people talking.
Eli asked if she would have to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life.
Frank said he didn’t know. Eli said, “Tell her not to walk too soon because we can get in front of all the lines in Disneyland.”
Prendergast came every day, as she had promised. No matter the time, Frank was there.
She asked if he worked out. He used to, he said. Prendergast told Frank he had to take care of himself if he was going to be strong for Jovanna. This was going to take time. A year. Maybe 18 months.
If she were to recover, it would mean hours every day of intense therapy to learn to talk, feed herself and walk again. It would take them both to get through it.
“Go to the gym, Frank,” she told him. “I don’t want to see you again until you’ve been to the gym.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Frank said. He went to the gym. He got some sleep.
Frank had been running a sprint. This would be a marathon.
‘She knows it was me’
At times over those first weeks, Frank thought he saw something. A look in Jovanna’s eyes. A squeeze of the hand. Her mouth trying to form words. In an instant, it would be gone.
He’d tell Prendergast, show her a video he captured of Jovanna smiling, reaching toward him. Jovanna sometimes woke up crying.
“OK, Frank,” Prendergast told him. She’d have to see it for herself.
Getting shot is not like in the movies, Prendergast said. You can get shot in a leg, an arm or a shoulder. Surgery can repair the damage. You can live with one kidney, transplant other organs.
The brain is sovereign. “There is so much we don’t know about the brain,” she said.
The brain can rewire itself. It can grow new cells. But some injuries are so devastating there is no recovering.
“I really think she knows it was me,” Frank said.
“OK, Frank,” she said. On Nov. 6, Prendergast saw something. There isn’t a name for it. She’d seen it only a few times in injury cases like this. Each time, the person recovered.
Jovanna moved her left hand, making a particular finger movement, a pecking of sorts.
“OK, Frank,” Prendergast said.
“She’s in there.”
A week later, when Prendergast clapped and called her name, Jovanna looked right at her. Prendergast stopped at the nurse’s station.
“She’s in there.”
On Nov. 10, Frank videotaped Jovanna as he held his hand out to her.
“Grab my hand,” Frank told Jovanna.
She looked at him, then away, reached out with her left hand, pulled it back.
“Grab my hand,” Frank said again. “Grab my hand.”
Jovanna reached out again and grabbed Frank’s hand, intertwining her fingers in his.
“There you go, baby,” Frank said.
It seemed like Jovanna was with them more and more. Sometimes, she seemed frustrated and cried. There were times it seemed like she was trying to talk.
Her mouth would move like she was trying to push out words. One day when Jovanna’s parents were there, she got a couple out: “Goddamn it.”
Her dad, Sam Martinez, told his daughter, ”Don’t say that. You’re supposed to be the miracle child.”
Thanksgiving
Halloween had come and gone. Knowing it was Jovanna’s favorite, Frank had family and friends bring their kids to their house to trick-or-treat with Eli and Ariel. Frank showed Jovanna pictures of Eli in his “Scream” costume and Ariel as Belle from “Beauty and the Beast.”
Now it was Thanksgiving. Frank was at the hospital that morning with Jovanna, who was quiet and staring at the pictures on the wall, when his dad, Frank Sr., stopped by.
Frank Sr. crossed the room to Jovanna’s bedside and seeing that her eyes were open, he put his face close to hers.
“Hi, Jovanna. Hi, baby,” Frank Sr. said loudly. Jovanna didn’t react.
Frank watched, smiling. “Step back a little,” he told his dad. “She’s not blind.”
Later in the day, when Jovanna’s mom, Barb, arrived, Frank told her the story. Not much funny happened in here, so it cheered them all.
Barb would stay with Jovanna, so Frank and the kids could eat Thanksgiving dinner together at his aunt’s house, not far from the hospital.
It was hard to leave Jovanna, but someone would be with her. The kids needed a sense of normalcy, and this was anything but normal.
Frank hated that she was missing Thanksgiving. Jovanna always decorated the house for Thanksgiving with fall leaves and a scarecrow dressed in overalls. They had put those decorations up in her hospital room instead.
What if it was always like this?
A little while later, Frank got a text from Barb. “Jovanna is waking up.” Jovanna’s father, Sam, was at the hospital. Barb had told him about Frank Sr.’s visit. They laughed about it. Suddenly, Jovanna laughed. Barb caught it on video and texted it to Frank.
Frank watched the video and watched it again, laughing and crying at the same time.
He recognized that laugh. It was real, not a random response, not a reflex.
It was Jovanna.
Frank hurried to his truck and headed to the hospital. He couldn’t be any more grateful on this Thanksgiving Day.
Frank knew, in that moment, that Jovanna would be all right, that he had made the right decision.
She was in there.
To read more, go to karinabland.azcentral.com.