Each move to or from the wheelchair begins with a ritual.
One, two, three.
Dawn Weiss counts off, each numeral propelling her closer to launch. She rocks her torso, places her hands, aims for the target – a bed or a chair or a seat in a car.
“I never realized how heavy my legs are until I tried to pick them up,” she said.
Her husband, Mike, is there every time she begins that count, waiting on one knee in front of her, a man in perpetual proposal. He grabs her hips, bracing her weight against his own, helping her make the transition. “I get scared when he’s not with me, if he’s not next to me,” Dawn said.
In May, robbers shot Dawn five times on Redmon Road in Norfolk. The bullets fractured two vertebrae and burned her spinal cord, paralyzing her from the chest down. Other bullets shattered the bones in her arms, leaving her with limited motion.
Before the shooting, Dawn and Mike lived the kind of life many people have – hectic, crowded, short on time. Dawn, 31, enjoyed the independence she developed during years as an Army wife, caring for two young daughters while Mike, 33, was deployed. She spent nearly every evening at the gym. She had washboard abs, legs toned from 10-mile runs, arms buff from 95-pound bench presses. She lived on salad greens, egg whites and chicken breasts. She strove for physical perfection in a single-minded way that baffled her husband.
When Mike, a sergeant first class, came home at night he played with their daughters and then went to his desk, often to join an online role-playing game that Dawn didn’t understand.
Now they spend nearly every minute of every day together. Mike helps dress her in the morning, makes her meals, coaches her workouts. Dawn laughs at the movies he shows her on the computer, quotes them later to make Mike smile. They have grown closer even as Dawn fights to regain her independence.
“This has opened my eyes up to priorities,” Dawn said. “This would put anybody’s priorities straight.”
Dawn married Mike 1½ weeks after graduating from high school in Silver Spring Shores, near Ocala, Fla. She was a month shy of 19; he was 20.
They paid for the wedding themselves, spending $1,300 . Dawn rented her dress. Her mom took pictures. Mike’s mom bought the nonalcoholic champagne.
“A lot of people told us we weren’t going to make it,” Dawn said. “That made me even more want to say, 'Ha ha, I’m going to prove you wrong.’”
Mike joined the Army at Dawn’s suggestion after going through seven jobs the year after he finished high school. He’d been a skinny kid, but the Army’s physical training beefed up his shoulders and broadened his chest.
They moved together to Fort Eustis, and lived in Newport News. Dawn relied on Mike for nearly everything she needed, calling him throughout the day.
They had their daughters, Kayla and Destyni, now 10 and 6. Their names for each other changed to “Mama” and “Daddy.” Dawn had few friends and kept to herself.
That made Mike’s deployments hard at first. He went to Alaska for four months. Then, in June 2006, he deployed to Kuwait for a year.
Suddenly Dawn was forced into independence. She grew to love her self-sufficiency.
She and her daughters became the Three Musketeers. She kept up her workout schedule. She went back to school and studied to be a radiological technologist. She loved learning about bones and anatomy, and stayed up half the night to study.
That life changed on May 2.
The robbers attacked her and her daughters at a house on Redmon Road. Dawn had been watching it for a friend who was away.
The four teenage boys held Dawn and the girls at gunpoint.
One asked the girls if they wanted a drink, a kiddie cooler in a barrel-shaped bottle.
One gunman forced Dawn upstairs and told her to undress. She refused.
Destyni asked if Mama would be safe, and started to cry. Kayla tried to comfort her.
“She’s going to come right back downstairs,” Kayla said.
After that, Dawn would not let the gunmen separate her from her children. Dawn promised the robbers money if they would accompany her to a bank.
Instead, she tried to make a break for it. Dawn told the girls to run to their car and get in the front seat. She climbed in herself, put the car in reverse, and looked over her left shoulder.
The barrel of a gun was in her face. The robbers fired.
She told the girls to honk the horn to summon help. Kayla told her she couldn’t honk the horn anymore because she was bleeding. The blood was Dawn’s.
Dawn slumped over, unable to move. As she drifted out of consciousness, she accepted that she would die.
It was about 5 a.m. in Kuwait when someone woke Mike.
Throw on whatever clothes you can and report to the sergeant major, his commander said. Mike thought he must be in trouble. A few minutes later a chaplain came in.
Your wife is in surgery, the chaplain said. They’re saying she’s not going to make it.
You must have the wrong Mike Weiss, Mike said.
It took him more than a day to get back to the States. As he traveled, Mike struggled to ready himself for what he would find at the hospital, what might happen before he got there.
“The thought of her not being there anymore, of my girls. … I really couldn’t think at all,” Mike said. “I was a mindless zombie.”
Dawn doesn’t remember seeing her husband until days later. But Mike recalls that first moment in the hospital room clearly.
He knew he needed to show her she would be OK. “I didn’t want her to see despair in my eyes.”
Scars from the bullet wounds frame the hollow at Dawn’s throat.
Two more on her left shoulder. Another on her back.
They glow a shiny coral-pink against the brown of her freckles, oddly delicate reminders of brutality.
A host of health issues accompany the spinal cord injury and paralysis. She has a rod in her right arm to replace the bullet-shattered bone. She has no control over her bladder or bowels. Nerve damage made her skin so sensitive that even the breeze from a fan can make her feel like she’s on fire. Her fingers swell and stiffen. Sometimes she feels like she’s being stabbed.
The medications she takes have made her blond-streaked hair turn brittle and fall out. Every day, she uses a mirror on a pole to check her skin for bedsores – she cannot sense the pressure that would make a feeling person shift weight. Her body has not yet relearned how to regulate its temperature, so she carries a blanket everywhere to ward off the chills that make her tremble. She has poor circulation in her legs because her muscles are always relaxed, a condition that causes her blood pressure to drop.
“Everything goes black and I just pass out,” she said.
Doctors have termed Dawn’s paralysis “incomplete” because she has movement in her arms and some feeling below the site of the spinal cord injury. It is unlikely that she will ever walk again.
Dawn has approached her rehabilitation in the same single-minded way that she used to work out.
At the Shepherd Center, a “catastrophic care” hospital in Atlanta, therapists devised a series of workouts for Dawn to teach her how to get in and out of her wheelchair, how to position herself in bed, how to dress herself.
When she left the Shepherd Center, she and Mike and the girls moved in with Dawn’s parents in Ocala, Fla. Dawn’s father, Jerry, built her a gym in their garage. He made a padded, raised exercise bench like those at the hospital, with a cross support for a weight bar. She works out and stretches in the home gym for several hours every day, surrounded by paint cans and power tools and love.
Mike’s always there, coaching and cajoling.
He gently crosses her arms over her torso to loosen her joints, pushes and pulls her legs into yogalike poses. Mike spots her when Dawn hangs ankle weights from her thumbs to lift in a modified bench press – she started with 5 pounds.
She swings her legs over the side of the bench, and Mike holds her hands so she can pull herself into a modified crunch. When she rests, he tickles her belly until she snorts.
She rolls onto her stomach, and Mike holds her hips so Dawn can do push-ups.
“No, no, no! I’m not ready,” she says.
“Well, here we go, anyway,” he replies.
She winces each time she lowers her torso toward the mat, arms trembling from the effort.
“Push, push, push, push, push. … Let’s go! 10!” Mike coaxes.
By the sixth, Dawn is gritting her teeth.
She exercises best in the pool near her sister’s apartment, where the water makes her buoyant. Mike swims behind her, towing Dawn when she needs to straighten out or turn, encouraging her when it seems too painful to lift her arm behind her head for one more backstroke.
Their relationship has become one of both extreme intimacy and physical separation.
Dawn has learned little things about him, the kind of endearing trivia gleaned in the realm of new love. She had never noticed that he likes pepper on his french fries. He snores. … Dawn never noticed because she’d had no reason to lie awake at night.
“You get so used to – so wrapped up in living the daily routine,” Mike said. “You get up, say goodbye, go to work.” Simple acts, such as eating dinner together, have become daily treasures.
Their closeness is limited by the wheelchair. Mike can’t hold her in a full-on hug. In bed at night, it’s difficult to cuddle because of the many pillows and props Dawn needs to avoid bedsores.
That changes in the swimming pool. There, Dawn feels like she’s standing. There, Mike can put his arms around her waist and pull her close.
The dynamics of their family have also changed because of the injury. Mike now drives the gray Mustang convertible Dawn bought for her 30th birthday. He had been indifferent to its throaty roar until he got behind the wheel, Dawn said. Dawn used to exhaust bottles of cleaning supplies each week.
Now Mike is often the one to make dinner and wash the dishes. Dawn used to ready the girls for school; now she usually listens from bed as Mike does it.
Dawn used to think she and Mike were opposites, fulfilling roles in their family that were distinct, immutable. “We’re peanut butter and jelly,” she said. “I love tons of peanut butter. He loves tons of jelly.”
“Makes a nice sandwich,” Mike said.
Rehabilitation has been about more than Dawn’s body. Each member of the family has had to deal with the effects of those bullets.
Before he got on the plane to fly home from Kuwait, Mike’s commanders made him sign a document promising not to seek revenge.
Even now, he grapples with the rage he feels toward those who shot his wife, who could have shot his daughters. “The best way to describe how I feel is pure hatred,” Mike said. “I’m over there in another country, fighting for this country to remain free so these guys can do whatever the heck they want to do? I had mortar rounds falling around me, sniper rounds at my feet. It makes me angry. What I’m doing isn’t worth it. How can I go protect my country when my country can’t protect my family?”
He has not yet found a way to be rid of that anger.
“I tuck it away. There ain’t nothing I can do about it,” he said. He saw a counselor once. “I felt stupid. I felt weird talking about it. It didn’t make me feel any better. The psychologist said that’s how I was supposed to feel. I said, 'Why the heck am I talking to you?’”
At home in Florida, Kayla worries all the time, wants to know every move her parents make. She locks and relocks the door. She seems frightened of all black men – all the teenage boys charged in the shooting and robbery were black. Dawn and Mike don’t want her to feel that way.
“I don’t want her to be prejudiced,” Dawn said. “Sometimes people make bad decisions.” Destyni says little things, like, “Mama will never be able to dance again.”
Both their girls broke down once at McDonald’s when an ambulance wailed past.
“Don’t let my mommy die!” they screamed.
Depression gripped Dawn in those first weeks after the shooting. She cried the first time she saw her stomach, her legs. It was not the body she had worked so hard for.
She used to love to go shopping. Now she can’t squeeze her wheelchair between the racks at most department stores. Even if she could, she would dread trying on clothes in a fitting room.
“It’s little things you don’t think about,” she said. “Like getting soda. I never thought about reaching up to get a soda. Or having your wheelchair fit under the table. You have to put a napkin on your lap and lean over.”
She has had to adjust to being short – she stood 5-foot-9 . In heels, she was 6 feet tall. But in the wheelchair, she looks Destyni in the eye.
Grocery stores present their own challenge. The cereal she wanted taunted her from an upper shelf. It could have been on top of a mountain. “How am I supposed to get that?” she said.
She thought of all the days she spent on the beach with her daughters and wondered how she would ever do that again. She wondered how her girls would see her, worried that they would reject the wheelchair, would think she was weird, uncool, a freak.
That was a needless concern.
“They came for the first visit and they were just … the same,” Dawn said. “They pushed me around (in the wheelchair). My sister said, 'The kids want you. They want their mom. Same as before.’”
Dawn cut her hair in November.
Clumps of it had been falling out, and no amount of conditioner made it feel like something other than straw. The new look frames her face in soft layers, plays up her pale blue eyes and the arch of her brows.
It seemed time to make a few changes.
She plans to go back to school in January, just one or two classes at first. She lacks the strength to pursue a career as a radiological technologist, the discipline she studied before, because it requires arranging patients’ bodies to be X-rayed. She decided to study nutrition instead, and focus on becoming a dietitian. The goal fits with the old egg-whites-only Dawn. Dawn wants another tattoo, maybe on her arm, maybe on the back of her neck.
It would be one word.
Believe.
“I believe it’s gonna be OK,” she said.
The Army has been compassionate and generous, permitting Mike a reassignment to Florida so he can continue to be near Dawn and allowing time for him to help in her recovery. Someday, Mike will be reassigned to Fort Eustis, maybe deployed overseas again.
One night, lying awake, Dawn imagined what it would be like to be without him. To be unable to sit up on her own, or turn herself in bed, or even take a shower when, as eventually must happen, Mike’s job takes him away.
“It was 2 a.m., and I said, 'Mike, I want to learn to sit up on my own,’” Dawn said.
“She got so emotional,” Mike said. “I said, 'Let’s do it now.’”
They learned it together.
Sometimes she feels tingling in her legs. Another wakeful 2 a.m., Dawn willed them to move. She raised her left leg slightly.
“I woke Mike up,” she said. “I said, 'Is my leg moving, or am I imagining it?’”
It was real.
Mike got her out of bed, propped her up against the wall, both of them wondering if maybe she could stand. Dawn passed out. She hasn’t moved her leg again since then.
She does not know if she will ever walk again. She wants to, of course, even half believes that she can, on mornings when she hovers between being awake and asleep.
She has forgiven the boys who shot her.
“I feel like, to move on with my life, I need to do that,” she said.
She still has days when she worries about the wheelchair and people’s reaction to it. She still misses her favorite jeans and the way she looked in them, still misses her favorite high heels.
Then she has days when she plays with her daughters, when they march into her workout room wearing crayon-colored crowns.
She’s up to 81 pushups every other day, up to 40 pounds on her modified bench press. But she lets herself enjoy breadsticks and the cheese-smothered chicken at Outback.
Her counselor told her that would be the best thing for her and for her family.
Just to live.
