I Asked Her To Marry Me At 17. A Month Later, I Awoke From A Coma And Couldn’t Remember Her Name

"The person I had just asked to spend her life with me stood at my bedside in the ICU at IU Methodist, and I looked at her the way you look at a stranger."

I asked her to marry me at 17. One month later, a speeding Lexus struck me off a skateboard outside my parents’ driveway in Columbus, Indiana. I woke up from a three-week coma not knowing who she was.

She had been there every day. That’s not a figure of speech. I mean literally.

The person I had just asked to spend her life with me stood at my bedside in the ICU at IU Methodist, and I looked at her the way you look at a stranger. She had to be introduced to me. We had been together for two years. She knew things about me I had lost. I had to be told her name.

I think about that moment more than any other moment in my life.

Not as a tragedy – as something else I still don’t have a word for.

Chelsea was six years old when she almost died from strep-induced septic shock. The physicians saved her life, but she lost most of the hearing in her left ear and suffered partial loss in the other.

From her hospital bed, before she was old enough to understand what medicine really was, she decided she would spend her life in pursuit of practicing it.

That is who Chelsea was before I ever entered the picture: a girl with a calling and a will that will not be redirected.

“She’s the most stubborn person I’ve ever met,” my father-in-law often says about his daughter. I used to think he was exaggerating. I stopped thinking that a long time ago.

Chelsea was 17 when we first met. I was 15 and had to work for it.

“I played hard to get in the beginning,” she told me years later, “but I felt as if I was won over from the start.”

I asked her to marry me when she was 19. Then came the Lexus.

The doctors told my family I might not wake up, and if I did, I’d be a shadow of myself. The diffuse axonal injury extended all the way to the brain stem. My speech had to be rebuilt. So did my walk, my understanding of arithmetic and my sense of self.

The unspoken assumption everyone had was that our engagement would dissolve on its own. No announcement necessary. Who in........

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