A mom’s battle
A mother balances care for her veteran son, family and herself.
On the morning after her first child was born, Debbie Schulz remembers lying in the hospital bed, trying to breastfeed her son as she suffered through the pain wrought by a brutal 18-hour birth that left her in stitches. Then the doctor came in with a stern directive.
“Debbie, don’t be stoic,” she recalls him saying. “Take the pain meds. It won’t hurt the baby.”
“Somehow,” she says, “he read in me that, you know, I was going to do what I needed to do to protect this baby, from birth on.”
Schulz took the doctor’s advice. In that moment, she needed permission to consider her own needs. It’s one of the hardest lessons of motherhood: how to balance sacrifice with self-preservation. It’s a skill Schulz didn’t think she’d still be refining at the age of 61.
Her greatest test as a mother came after her oldest son, Steven, was grown, a 20-year-old corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps on his second tour in Iraq. She agreed to sit down with me last week in the Friendswood home they share to tell her story.
When he told her he wanted to join the military in 2002, she tried to steer him toward the Coast Guard, but resistance was futile. He was every bit as headstrong and independent as her. The second day of kindergarten, he declared he was ready to walk himself to school. She put her foot down then. But then, he was a man.
“I believe young adults need to set their own course,” she says, explaining that she always encouraged individuality in thought and spirit in all three of her children. Then she laughs: “And we reap what we sow.”
Schulz and her husband, also named Steven, supported their son, drove him to boot camp and threw a party afterward. They prayed as he deployed for the first time, giddy. And they prayed as he returned from war, changed.
Then on April 19, 2005, around 11 p.m., the phone rang. A gruff voice proceeded to read a verbatim message informing her that her son had been gravely LISA FALKENBERG Commentary
wounded in Iraq. She recalls the voice mentioning something about brain injury, about surgery. By now, her husband was listening.
“He starts this sound I’ll never forget, wailing and crying,” Schulz says.
She remained calm. As a special education teacher, she understood brain trauma. The former social worker in her kicked in. She began making calls. Eventually, she learned Steven had been hit by a roadside bomb. Soon, she found herself at the National Navy Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., meeting with a neurosurgeon before surgery, asking him about her son’s chance of survival. The doctor said 50-50.
After surgery, Steven’s brain was “angry,” the doctor said. His mother asked again about his chance of survival. Thirty percent.
She describes seeing her son as “surreal.” She had tried to prepare her other children, 19-yearold Elaine and 15-year-old Clay. She says her daughter almost fainted after seeing Steven in bandages and a probe protruding from his head. Schulz remembers how perfect the rest of his body was, except for a small bruise near the cross tattoo on his arm.
All she could do was pray. And be grateful. The doctor told her that just 10 years earlier, during the first Gulf War, Steven would have died on the battlefield.
After weeks in a medically induced coma, the family was elated when Steven answered a command to give a thumbs up and to squeeze his mom’s hand. But soon after, he was strangely unresponsive. Doctors discovered bleeding in his head that required another emergency surgery, leaving his brain angrier still. This time, she didn’t ask about survival.
“It was too low for me even to want to know,” she says.
She went from praying to help her son to praying simply for “thy will to be done.”
Schulz says now that the tragedy strengthened her faith, but at that time, her beliefs were in crisis — especially any notion of predestination.
“I was definitely struggling to find God in a bomb blast,” she says.
Schulz kept vigil at her son’s bedside. The seventh week seemed to be a turning point. It’s the first memory Steven has after his injury. The commandant came to present the young corporal with his Purple Heart. As the officer entered the room, Schulz watched her son, who had lost all use of his left side, trying to rise from his perpetual slump, and begin lifting his hand to salute.
“No, son. I salute you,” she remembers the commandant responding.
“That was the first time I knew Steven was all there,” she says. Advocate in chief
The journey only got harder from there. Schulz did her best to research options, but before smartphones, painfully slow dialup Internet made that difficult. She didn’t know until later about Houston’s state-of-the-art rehabilitation hospital TIRR Memorial Hermann. So they ended up in Tampa at a facility that mostly treated older veterans recovering from stroke.
Exhausted, she slept in one morning. When she walked in at 10 a.m., Steven was still in bed. Both his call button and his breakfast were on his left side – the side he can’t move. Nurses said he didn’t want to get up.
“That’s when I realized I was going to have to be the chief advocate for my son’s recovery,” Schulz says.
Living out of a suitcase, she stayed in Florida for months, checking in with her other children by phone but bearing the guilt of her absence from their lives. Fellow teachers donated sick leave and she got support from family and church, but the trauma of Steven’s injury affected the whole family, she says, and she began to see symptoms of depression in her husband and younger children.
She considers herself lucky never to have struggled with depression, but she quickly learned to seek advice and comfort from online support groups and peers at the hospital. She started pushing and never let up — to get her son out of a diaper, to get him out of the wheelchair, to rebuild his independence. She once even discovered a small notation in medical records that prompted lifesaving surgery.
As we talk in the living room, Steven, seated in a love seat near his recently retired therapy dog, Sonny, says his mother wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“I couldn’t ask for better,” he says, his speech a hurried jumble of words. “She got me walking again. They said I never would.” Finally back home, her son required constant attention, including hourly trips to the restroom. She was his chauffeur, his nurse, his physical therapist — prodding and cheering any little leaps in cognition or physical activity.
“He would ask, ‘What do we do now, Mom?’ I’d say, ‘Brush your teeth.’ He’d do it and then say, ‘Now what?’ ” she says. He had to relearn how to initiate, to follow a schedule. It took years. While Schulz says she got support from the Marines and their families, she knew, once she rejected the suggestion of an assisted-living facility, she was largely on her own.
“There have been no gunnies come to help me brush my teeth, ever,” Steven says.
At first, he took orders pretty well from his mother.
“Then he was Steven again, and he didn’t want to hear his mother’s voice all the time,” Schulz says.
She learned how to ask for help. She arranged for a recreational therapist, a life coach. And Sonny, the therapy dog, challenged Steven to take responsibility.
Schulz claims she did what any mother would do. But people who have worked with other veterans’ families say she stands out.
“The fact that Debbie thinks she’s not special, after her faithful, loving sacrifice against all odds, proves how wonderful she really is,” says Kelly Raley, executive director of Helping a Hero, a nonprofit that donated most of the cost of the Friendswood home.
Ron Gutierrez, a life coach, said he’s worked with brain injury patients for decades, and he ranks Schulz a perfect 10 as a caretaker — mostly for stamina.
“The proof is in the 12 years,” he says. Celebration, not a day off
Schulz looks at her son now and marvels at how far he’s come. He lost 90 percent of his right frontal lobe, which controls executive function. He can’t cry — not even when his father died in 2011. After 20 surgeries, he walks with the help of a special electronic device that activates muscles in his left leg. He has a girlfriend. He volunteers at a nursing home, playing board games with an elderly dementia patient. He can be alone for up to an hour and a half.
Schulz relishes her short stints of alone time, and she has learned to set limits and explain to her talkative son when she just needs silence. But the woman who used to juggle several books at a time doesn’t read like she used to. Her brain is too tired, she says. Her friends from church don’t understand when she can’t take a day trip to Galveston.
She smiles when I ask her if she’d always wanted children. Growing up in Karnes County, the fourth of six, she says no.
“I kind of viewed children as — they stole your life,” she says, laughing. “Maybe I was right.”
Schulz’s humor, and her pragmatism, are as remarkable as her devotion.
“I’m very much in love with my kids,” she says. “They enhanced my life enormously,” and gave a chance to see bits of her husband “going on in the world.”
She doesn’t want to be idealized or held up as a saint. Mother’s Day, she says, is a day for celebration, not a day off. What she did was hard. Every day, it is hard. She has a few mantras: Keep swimming. This too shall pass. And always: Forward, not back. Her message to other caretakers is that there are always options. Do only what you can handle.
Schulz’s son, now 32, has a park named after him. He’s been to the White House to meet the president. He has a picture in his phone with Brad Paisley, and random people buy his meals at restaurants. He deserves it all.
He’s a fighter. He’s a survivor. But it needs to be said: He gets it from his mama.