Fishwrapper - Stacy’s tale of courage

It started out as a Georgia sweethearts story, commonplace in the details but nonetheless endearing because of its archetypal charm. Bright, cute girl from a small North Georgia town has a crush on one of her older brother’s friends. The putative paramour is indifferent — until one day the girl blossoms and the boy’s heart starts a-thumpin’.

In the never-ending rhythm of romance, the two court, wait until he returns from a war, marry, move into a house, plan the future and ...

Then life gets short-circuited. More precisely, the young man’s brain stem shorts out, probably thanks to hazardous work he had done while serving his country fighting Saddam Hussein. The crushing stroke leaves him totally paralyzed except for the ability to make some painfully tiny movements with his head and on the right side of his body. No speech, and his vision begins to blur.

Dreams collapse, the couple’s world disintegrates. But their story doesn’t end.

Before I introduce this tragic pair, let me set the scene for their drama.

My favorite spot in Georgia is one particular hilltop near Blue Ridge. My family has a home in the woods there, and from our porch you can shrug down into an old chair and view the rows of violet hills striding off into the mist. Those hills never do anything, but they’re always worth watching.

The town is a not quite comfortable collision of Southern rural clans and “we’re here to soak up the charm and the scenery” transplants (like me). The biggest businesses are probably the Swan Drive-In Theater and the Blue Ridge Railroad, which hauls tourists to Copper Hill, Tenn., and back. There’s an Ingles and a CVS, to be sure, but thank God the citizens have resisted the attack of the Wal-Marts.

News addict that I am, I kick back each weekend and read Blue Ridge’s local twice-weekly journal, The News-Observer. It doesn’t pretend to be the New York Times. It certainly isn’t aloof or elitist or self-absorbed. Each story is written as if the reporter personally knows the luckless soldier who became North Georgia’s first fatality in Iraq, or the man collared by a deputy for causing a ruckus at a city meeting, or the schoolteacher who is retiring. And the reporters probably are at least nodding, how-y’all-doing acquaintances with most of their subjects.

If The News-Observer has a fault, it’s that its consciously monotone writing fails to capture the culture and the color of the Appalachian foothills. It’s pretty “just the facts, ma’am.” Until you turn to the editorial page — where you’ll find our heroine, Stacy Chastain.

Stacy — I’m setting aside the journalistic law that says call people by their last names because I like and admire her, and this is a story that deserves the sympathy of familiarity — has the title of associate publisher. In small-town newspapering, that means she does everything from covering county commission meetings to racing a wheelbarrow loaded with a hog, as she did a couple of weeks ago at a Kiwanis rodeo “pig tote.”

You’ll see the ubiquitous Stacy at most community events. She’s easy to recognize by the explosive flashes her high-voltage energy generates. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but Stacy is hard to miss. Big ol’ smile that hardly ever disappears, windblown blond hair, always going going going.

She always so cheerful, always ready with a gentle joke. It’s hard to believe the tragedy she carries.

Time to meet the tragic hero. Jimmy Chastain, now 35, was the boy too busy with adolescence to notice a friend’s kid sister — until the day when he couldn’t not notice.

Jimmy became a soldier, got released from active duty and then, a month later was recalled to serve in 1991’s Desert Storm. His job involved handling chemicals, and that would likely prove his undoing.

After the war, Jimmy returned home to Cherry Log — a wide place in the road about halfway between Ellijay and Blue Ridge noted primarily for the venerable Pink Pig barbecue. Life looked good for him. He had his own grading and contracting business. In December 1991, he started dating Stacy, and in June 1993, they were married.

“We had it wonderful,” Stacy recalls. “A house, seven dogs. Jimmy was very easy going. We were happy.”

But, like the first whiffs of ozone in the air that signal an approaching thunderstorm, Jimmy began having headaches. “He had them ever since Desert Storm,” Stacy says. “They weren’t so bad in the beginning.” But by September 2001, “they had become too great to bear.”

Doctors discovered Jimmy had an aneurysm, which the dictionary says is a bulge in an artery caused by the buildup of liquid in a sac. For the young man, the word meant the end of normalcy. On Nov. 14, 2001, while doctors were performing a procedure, Jimmy suffered his stroke. A vital, healthy human being became a mind trapped inside unresponsive flesh. His only communication — the only way he can say “help me” or “I love you” — is via a letter board.

For Stacy, 30 at the time of Jimmy’s stroke, it would have been easy to understand if she had buckled and shattered. She didn’t, and her defense of her man is tenacious, often combative.

Jimmy has “locked-in syndrome.” Stacy explains: “Jimmy is essentially a prisoner in his own body. He’s completely all there [mentally]. However, most people treat him as if he is deaf and dumb.”

Once, while at the Georgia War Veterans Home in Milledgeville, staff members were talking about Jimmy in front of him. To the staff, he was invisible. They “complained about how Jimmy’s trash can was always full and they were constantly having to take out the trash,” Stacy relates. “Jimmy heard these comments. Jimmy spelled out ... that he had never placed anything in the trash. It was constantly being filled with supplies used for his daily care, but he had never placed anything in the trash can personally.”

With understatement, Stacy observes: “The health care business is not very people-friendly.”

Since the stroke, life has been an odyssey for the Chastains. Jimmy has gone from hospitals to nursing homes to other hospitals to other nursing homes. Every event becomes a grinding exercise in frustration. When Jimmy began seeing double — or as Stacy puts it, “When I’m standing at the foot of the bed and ask him how many wives he has, he says, ‘Two’” — they were sent to a Veterans Administration hospital in Augusta. The prism lenses given to Jimmy didn’t work, but instead of allowing him to go to the VA hospital in Atlanta, near where Jimmy is now receiving care, he was forced to endure the four-hour drive back to Augusta.

“His experience in the health care system is constantly shaped by the people who take care of him,” Stacy says. “He depends on someone to do everything for him bathing, toileting, positioning, dressing.”

Insurance companies are equally dense. The Chastains’ policies won’t buy Jimmy a mattress that prevents bed sores — the company will only pay after his skin begins to deteriorate.

Through all of this, Stacy continues to work, recounting in her column life in North Georgia, trying to keep politicians honest, and, every few weeks, updating the community about Jimmy. Blue Ridge has responded with barbecues to raise money for the couple — the medical bills far outdistance insurance and government programs.

The house and the dogs are gone. “I had to downsize everything,” sighs Stacy, who now lives in a little apartment. There’s some help from the couple’s families — especially Stacy’s twin sister Tracy Williams. “We’ve driven a lot of people at the hospitals nuts until they figure out there are two of us, that we’re twins,” Stacy chuckles.

She feels buffeted by a health care system that really doesn’t want to deal with the high maintenance Jimmy requires and feels Stacy should assume full-time responsibility for her husband’s care. “But how can I do that?” she says. “I have to work.”

When she has seen abuses at nursing homes, she’s complained — only to learn that it takes three weeks, often more, for a state inspector to investigate. “By then,” she says, “the nursing home knows.” Stacy goes through a list of incident after incident where she has butted heads with Big Medicine to get what’s right for Jimmy. “I know I’ve been called a bitch more than once,” she says. “But I don’t care. It’s for Jimmy.”

She’s even gone to see Gov. Sonny Perdue, but his only help was a sympathetic “poor thing” look.

And, the big hurdle is still to come. Stacy is sure Jimmy’s illness is related to his Desert Storm duty. But she knows that the military brass has fought harder to deny the existence of war-related illnesses than it did to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And the Bush administration, far from supporting the young men and women in uniform, has aggressively slashed military and veterans benefits. One paralyzed ex-soldier doesn’t rate high among priorities in Washington.

“We have to find a doctor who will sign a statement saying the stroke was related to Jimmy’s service,” Stacy says. “I know that it is, but it’s going to be hard to prove.”

Through it all, there are tiny blips that almost seem normal. “I don’t think he is as honest about his feelings when he writes with me, because like any husband, he fears his wife will get mad. And, I do,” says Stacy, relating how the spat is carried on via the letter board. “We still argue, which is amusing in retrospect. In the heat of the argument, though, it’s not so funny.”

Stacy knows that woven into her story are big issues — a health care system that excludes many and is driven by profits not people; the military’s responsibility and its disregard for veterans. But, she says those are just too huge to think about.

“When people call the paper and complain about something, that’s real life,” she says. “I try to stay focused on what’s happening now, not what could have been. I could be very bitter, but I’m not.”??