Hospital vigil binds couple together

SANDPOINT - In sickness and in health. For better or for worse.

Millions of couples utter those sacred words every year, but few are tested by them in the way that Susan and George Hepburn have been over the past year.

Just a few months after the couple met, Susan had a burst aneurism that put her into a coma and resulted in a string of hospital stays which, measured in days, lasted longer than the two had known each other before the emergency.

The Hepburns are now virtually inseparable, certain that they might be the luckiest lovers alive after finding each other late in life and then beating the medical odds in order to stay together. In fact, they had to overcome misfortune simply to meet for the first time.

“He found me on the Internet,” said Susan, whose former friend died in 2006.

George's wife had passed away in 2005 and, after several chats back-and-forth, he suggested that the Internet daters meet in person.

“I didn't want him to come to my house, because I'd heard all the stories about those crazy guys on the Internet,” Susan said.

Instead, she drove from her home in Spokane to Bonner County in December of 2007 and attempted to make it up the steep climb leading to George's property on Rolling Thunder Ridge.

Her car skittered around on the icy road and slid backward in a series of unsuccessful tries. She was nothing if not persistent, but the driver began to eye the drop-off on one side with greater alarm each time her vehicle lost traction. Enter the U.S. Postal Service and a carrier who volunteered to use his cell phone to ring George up. “The number you have dialed is not in service,” the message instructed.

“I told him, 'I think you dialed the wrong number - could you please dial it one more time?'” Susan said. “He tried it again and George answered.”

Like a cavalryman cresting the hill, George arrived in his four-wheel-drive truck and carried his new friend home. The two shared notes about each other for the rest of the day. She, it turned out, was a successful attorney, Ph.D. and published author. He was a retired Air Force major with a master's degree that led to a second career as a corporate executive in locales as far-flung as Saudi Arabia.

As the daylight waned, Susan mentioned that she should be getting back on the road for home.

“He asked me if I could stay and I said, 'Stay for how long?'” Susan said.

“As long as you can put up with me,” came the reply from George.

By Christmas of that year, she had packed up her cats and a few personal effects and trundled them off to Rolling Thunder Ridge.

The couple made plans to marry on Susan's next birthday - Sept. 11, 2008 - but their lives changed in a matter of minutes at the end of June. An aneurism that escaped detection swelled and burst inside her head and Susan was flown directly to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. The prognosis - for survival, much less anything close to a full recovery - was bleak.

“She's a 5 percent survivor,” George said, explaining that the doctors warned him early on that Susan could die in intensive care or, if she did live, might have overwhelming physical and mental disabilities. “There was always the chance that she wouldn't survive or wouldn't have any memory at all.”

There are men and women, one could suppose, who would have taken a gut check at that point and chalked it up to the love that got away. After all, they had only known each other for a short time and had nothing to bind them in a legal sense. Backing away might have been considered callous, perhaps, but not completely out of the question.

What George did, however, was to make sure there was someone to care for Susan's cats, lock up the house, jump in the car and drive to Seattle, where he stayed by his lover's hospital bedside for the next three-and-a-half months. The first five weeks were spent in intensive care, with Susan in and out of comas.

“I was there to try and encourage her and watch all the monitors to make sure she was alright,” George said.

On more than one occasion, such as the time there was a complication with the ventilator that kept Susan breathing, he alerted the nurses and precipitated emergency procedures that kept her alive.

“He got so good at telling them when something was going wrong that I think they were going to out him on staff,” said Susan.

There were plenty of problems to watch for, as it turned out, what with the tracheotomy, feeding tubes, a shunt valve to drain Susan's head and incisions from follow-up surgeries that took place to address complications.

When he realized that the nurses had no personal background on the woman they were treating - the woman he loved - George claimed one entire wall of her hospital room and designed a photographic mural he titled, “Who She Was.”

It was as much for Susan's benefit as it was for the staff, since her first reaction to pictures of herself was to ask, “Who is that?”

“It's you,” George told her. “It's Susan riding on my tractor.”

Or: “That's us, shoveling snow off the roof.”

Over the next two months, he pulled out a small stack of hand-written flash cards and eased her through to recognition of words which, at first, were difficult for her to read and impossible to speak. Still, he reintroduced this basic vocabulary every day until the letters began to coalesce and make sense.

“Cat,” she learned to say in a voice that once argued nuanced legal matters with ease and now struggled with a single syllable. “Hello. Goodbye. Good morning.”

The next stage of recovery carried them to Kootenai Medical Center, where Susan spent a month in physical, occupational and speech therapy. Here, too, George was close at hand, reading to her by the hour and making nightly trips home to get the house ready for her return. She was released in early November - walking with help, but walking; speaking in a slurred and halting fashion, but speaking.

“One week later, we went down and got our marriage license,” Susan said.

“We asked them if they knew anyone who could marry us right away and one of the two cards they gave us was for Charley Packard,” George added. “He said he could come out that same day, so we called a couple of neighbors and he married us at 1:00.”

The Caribbean honeymoon cruise they had hoped for, as well as the celebration with family and friends, would have to wait, however. Susan's recovery was going slowly and there was still a mountain of hard work and intensive therapy ahead of them.

Last Sunday, the Hepburns finally got to have their wedding celebration. About 50 guests joined them on Rolling Thunder Ridge to watch Susan's son give her away. The agreement, he told George, was that he could keep her on a “rent-to-own” basis. Charley Packard officiated for a second time as the couple renewed the vows they had taken nine months earlier.

The first time he married them, the part-time preacher, full-time singer and long-time recording artist had to help Susan repeat her vows one word at a time. It was powerful stuff, he said, but the second celebration made an even bigger impact on him.

“I felt blessed just to be around them and to be in the presence of that kind of love,” Packard said.

It's love that stands out in a crowd. And, according to the Hepburns, love that stands the test of adversity.

“You want to know how to tell if someone loves you - really loves you?” Susan asked. “They'll sit next to you in the hospital every day for three-and-a-half months.”

George and Susan Hepburn hold hands a lot these days. She reaches out for him, he for her, and their fingers intertwine easily and often.

“Well, that's our love story,” George said, placing both hands on the table as if the punctuate the tale.

“And we're stickin' to it,” Susan chimed in as she shook a finger for emphasis.

The Hepburns laughed and looked at one another and their hands glided slowly back together. George looked down and blinked back tears. Susan took a deep breath and smiled.

“And we're stickin' to it,” she repeated, more softly the second time.