Scripps scheduled more surgeries. During the first, a reconstructive eye specialist found and reattached Johan's torn eye muscle. The white and the purple orchids in his room had never looked better.
A new set of X-rays, CT scans and MRIs confirmed that the halo had stabilized the vertebrae in his neck. But Johan knew his trauma was not just physical.
Disassociation had become his protection. Nightmares lurked beneath each day's progress. He kept them at bay by focusing on his life, on Jenna and on the good that had befallen them. One day, a psychiatrist came into his room for a consultation and noted that Johan appeared a bit "too happy," that his affect, slightly hypomanic, was "mildly inappropriate."
"I have had a lot of visitors," Johan told him, adding, "I do not want anybody going away from here feeling bad."
But by trying to make others around him feel comfortable, the psychiatrist concluded, Johan put on too many smiles, which could easily dissolve into tears.
Barttelbort was also concerned about Johan, who seemed to expect too much of himself. Barttelbort wondered if it was a problem that Johan was being attended to by co-workers and didn't feel comfortable enough to let his guard down. Or that Johan had been cast as the courageous fighter of the bear and defender of his daughter.
Probably it was a little of everything.
AFTER nearly two weeks of daily wound management, Barttelbort decided it was safe to start closing some of Johan's deeper lacerations, a process that required every puncture and tear to be enlarged, essentially made worse, in order for them to be sewn shut.
Heal and disappear were Barttelbort's goals, for he knew that each visible scar would remind Johan of the attack, make him self-conscious and slow his integration into the world. He also knew that Johan was wearing down, so he worked quickly in the operating room, cutting and cleaning, judging how good the tissue was, how efficient the circulation, before closing each wound.
As the surgery wore on, Barttelbort knew he was exacting a toll. After six hours, nearly twice as long as expected, Johan woke up in the recovery room exhausted. Four days later he got up in the middle of the night, shivering, the first sign of an infection. Three weeks after the attack, he was still fighting the grizzly. By morning, he had a temperature of 101. Barttelbort put him back on wound care and reopened the wounds that looked the reddest and least healthy.
