BRAIN INJURY FRUSTRATES COUPLE; VICTIMS, EXPERTS CAN'T FIND RESOURCES

Richard "Hutch" Hutchison and his wife, Denise, usually look and act like any contented couple.

He puffed on a cigarette Friday morning while she applied makeup. It seemed impossible anything was wrong. Then Hutchison was asked his age.

"Forty-four," he said, certain he was right.

His wife shouted from the bathroom. "No you aren't."

"Forty-five."

"No."

"What's the year, Hutch?"

"1991."

The right answer is 47 years old, reached after some prodding. The scenario was one of hundreds like it, with Denise encouraging her husband to remember even the simplest detail about his life.

The Southeast Missouri natives were living in North Charleston, S.C., when their lives changed forever. Hutch was a Vietnam veteran working as a Harley-Davidson motorcycle mechanic. Denise, 35, was office manager for an import-export shipping company.

On Sept. 14, 1995, Hutch had a stroke while riding his motorcycle and slammed his head into the back of a pickup. He wasn't wearing a helmet, something a neurologist later said was a blessing. He told Denise the helmet wouldn't have offered any protection in that situation and probably would have made things worse.

Between the stroke and the accident, the occipital lobe of the brain, which controls vision, was damaged, along with the frontal lobe, which controls emotions and reasoning. Hutch had to have an emergency partial frontal lobotomy.

He also had a shunt put into his brain that drains excess spinal fluid into his stomach.

"Before the operation, the neurosurgeon told me that if he made it through he wouldn't be the same man I married," Denise said. "I didn't have time to think about it."

When Hutch recovered from the surgery, he had cortical blindness resulting in tunnel vision in both eyes. He can see the diameter of a quarter in one eye and the diameter of a dime in the other, and he has no depth perception.

Hutch has no short-term memory -- even from one second to the next. If he puts down a fork, he might forget he is eating. And all the confusion makes him upset and combative, yelling and grabbing at people.

That problem is getting better as his brain heals.

The couple spent September and October in hospitals with Denise providing the only rehabilitative services. She wrote things on a write-on, wipe-off board, wheeled Hutch up and down the halls, talked to him about their life together.

She tried to get Hutch evaluated at a Veterans Administration Traumatic Head Injury Unit in Tampa, Fla., but he was too upset for the tests and had to go home.

The couple returned to Missouri in January to receive services from the VA hospital in St. Louis while Denise stayed with her mother, Judi Naeter, in Cape Girardeau. Hutch was checked into Jefferson Barracks for an evaluation at 1 p.m. on Jan. 30. At 9 a.m. the next day, a doctor called Denise and told her to pick up her husband -- he was too combative to keep.

It was the same story at other places. Denise has a list of 25 facilities she has called to get help for her husband, and they all have different reasons to reject him: He can't see. He's too combative. There's a waiting list. His disability income hasn't started yet. He doesn't have insurance. He doesn't have Medicaid.

All the telephone calls and correspondence forced Denise to run Hutch's life like she would a business. She has volumes of files with labels like "Head Injury Literature," "Copies of all Certified Material," and "Dietary-Accident Report-Misc. Information."

"You have to be organized," she said. "You talk to so many people, so many different agencies, you have to keep up with what they told you. I write down the date and time I talked to them and people's names, and I keep copies of all the applications I've filled out."

It's a task many families of brain trauma victims face.

Cathy Tanksley, a speech language pathologist specializing in brain injuries, said information and help is hard to find. She works with the Brain Injury Resource Group, an organization serving Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois. The group's biggest goal is to get more resources in this area for people suffering brain injuries.

Tanksley said funding for care often is the problem and advised people to check their health insurance policies. If they don't cover "cognitive care," the insured won't receive compensation for any sort of rehabilitative therapy from head injuries.

The best thing for brain trauma victims and their families to do in this area is get in touch with people who have the same problems, Tanksley said. Her group will meet at 6:30 p.m. March 4 at the St. Francis Center for Health and Rehabilitation at 28 South Mount Auburn Road.

Until Hutch and Denise get help, meeting with others is about all they can do. Denise said she knows it's a tough road ahead, but she plans to keep plugging.

"I know that right now I'm the only chance he's got," she said. "He's my best friend, and he needs a best friend right now, somebody he can trust.

"But I don't have a husband right now. I have a 5-year-old in a 47-year-old's body."