A tale of love and guts

[okarol]

A tale of love and guts

By JEREMY GOLDMEIER, News-Record Writer jgoldmeier@gillettenewsrecord.net
Published: Saturday, February 7, 2009 11:42 PM MST

She drove to the bus depot at 4:30 that morning to wait for him. Pre-dawn. Single digit temperatures outside. The snow falling, illuminated by the street lamps in the parking lot.

She hadn’t slept that night. She had tried watching TV, tried playing her daughter’s Nintendo DS to distract her mind. But her thoughts stubbornly kept focusing on him and his return. So she counted the hours ... and waited.

He had been stuck on that bus for 11 hours. The drive from Denver along Interstate 25 blurred past in one long stretch of nothing. It gave him the time to think about her, about his family, about how strange life had gotten in the three months since his transplant surgery.

This had been his second emergency trip down to Denver in those three months. He hadn’t exactly wanted it. Another Life Flight meant another intimidating set of bills to pay. But after he spent a whole night vomiting, his doctor in Gillette was convinced that there had been a blockage in his stomach. Turns out he had just caught a nasty flu bug.

That misdiagnosis was annoying. Being apart from her was worse. They called each other constantly during the three days he spent away.

When the bus hit that depot, relief washed over the both of them. They took his bags to the car, and hugged. The next day, after resting up, they would go back to searching for jobs together. Someday, they were going to get married. And maybe, just maybe, life could get sane again.



Second chances

There’s nothing storybook about the relationship between Jennifer Brown and Jason Vigil. The backstory is ugly, littered with bad breaks and tough mistakes. But the more screwed up things seem to get around them, the closer the two draw together.

Each is coming off a failed marriage, with the litigation for Brown’s divorce still ongoing. They both have kids from their previous spouses. Both of them came to Gillette looking for a clean slate, a place where they could go to work and get their heads straight.

*
Instead, they found each other.

Brown and Vigil met during the summer of 2007 while working at Wal-Mart. Romance was not in the air.

“I didn’t like him,” Brown says.

“She thought I was arrogant,” Vigil explains, wearing his trademark smirk.

One of Brown’s coworkers kept telling her that Jason was really just a nice guy, but she dismissed that possibility outright. Vigil, meanwhile, just wanted to work and be left alone. He’d run into some trouble back in his old home of Rock Springs, hanging with the wrong crowd, and didn’t want to make the same mistake in Gillette. But even in Wal-Mart’s sprawling showroom floor, they kept running into each other.

So what broke the ice? Water gun fights. Camera wars. The weird and juvenile things that Wal-Mart employees used to do at night, when customers weren’t around. During those moments of horseplay, Brown started to realize that Vigil wasn’t as full of himself as she had thought. They got to talking. One thing, naturally, led to another.

But before they could get any closer, Brown would have to learn about Vigil’s medical history. It wasn’t pretty.



Bad news

Jason Vigil’s first brush with death came the first day after his mother brought him home from the hospital. In a fit of sibling jealousy, his 4-year-old brother tried to smother him.

It wasn’t the most promising start to life. Vigil’s prospects took another hit when doctors diagnosed him as an infant diabetic. For the next three decades, he would have to take two shots of insulin each day.

Brown met him just in time to see his condition bottom out. By the time he proposed to her, he was on dialysis and languishing on an organ waiting list. With his future uncertain, he wanted her to know how he felt.

He brought her the ring on Valentine’s Day last year.

“I know things are kind of bad right now,” he said as he knelt. “But I’d like to know if you’d marry me.”

She never actually said “yes.” Instead, she cried, hugging him around his neck. After a quiet moment, Vigil looked up with that familiar, mischievous glint in his eyes.

“Well?”

“Yes!”

But as has been the course for their relationship, the proposal was one happy moment sandwiched between setbacks. By August of last year, Vigil’s blood sugar levels were becoming impossible to maintain. He’d have episodes where he’d literally regress to the bearing of a toddler, stumbling into things and slurring his words. His prognosis kept darkening.

“Every single day, you didn’t want to wake up for all the bad news we were getting,” Brown says.

But in October, Vigil hit the jackpot. His name reached the top of the list, and the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver scheduled him for a double organ transplant. Things went smoothly. Surgeons implanted him with a new pancreas and kidney. His body accepted the organs, with no complications.

Of course, this being Jason Vigil, that meant something horrible was about to happen.



The Sneeze

They call it “The Sneeze.” It came Nov. 11, Vigil’s first day back from Denver after his transplant. At around 7 p.m., he had just finished visiting with his mother at her house on Stanley Avenue. While driving back to the apartment that he and Brown shared, Vigil felt a sneeze coming on. He inhaled sharply. The moment he exhaled, he felt something rip in his gut.

“It was like this blob in my shirt,” Vigil says.

The force of the sneeze had ripped apart some of the stitches from his surgery. Vigil’s abdomen had opened up, and his entrails were literally oozing out of the breach. Panicked, he held them in with his free hand, wheeling the car around and driving back just over a block to his mother’s house. He slammed on the horn frantically, over and over, eventually staggering out to her doorstep.

First, a call to 911. Then one to Jennifer. She thought he was joking.

Within hours, they were both on a Life Flight down to Denver. Gillette medical staff had cut off his favorite Dallas Cowboys shirt and forced his intestines back in. In Denver, doctors sewed him most of the way up, but left a slit on his stomach open to heal on its own. It stayed that way for a month, with Brown re-bandaging it twice every day.



Smitten

The drama seems to have passed. Vigil recovered, healed up, and learned to sneeze with caution. He and Brown both regularly attend vocational rehabilitation in search of new careers. Otherwise, they have plenty of time together.

They look at each other, and a hundred unspoken inside jokes seem to pass between the two of them. He’s 35, with a prominent mustache, but age hasn’t yet stamped out the boyish looks from Vigil’s face. When he grins, he looks like a youngster who just got away with something naughty. He pats a hand on her knee.

She takes a hold of the hand. At 37, she’s more prone to act her age than Vigil, but being around her fiancee opens her up. He ribs her, she giggles. Once they lock gazes they don’t look away.

“I’m just thankful you’re here,” he says.

“Where else would I be?” she says.

http://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/articles/2009/02/08/news/today/news00.txt