Stephanie Salter

By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

Among the truths Joan Ryan shares in her book, “The Water Giver,” is this: “You don’t need to go to a monastery in Tibet to learn about living in the moment. Just spend a month in an ICU.”



Ryan’s book is subtitled, “The Story of a Mother, a Son, and Their Second Chance.” It details an unlikely and beautiful purification born of the kind of accident every parent fears.



Not that Ryan realized in August 2006 how badly her 16-year-old son was hurt when a call informed her he had wiped out on his skateboard.



“There was no blood. No obvious injury,” she writes of the scene a few blocks from home. "... My stomach didn’t lurch. My heart didn’t stop. I didn’t feel what I had always heard you felt in the moment that your life changes.”



Sitting in the waiting area of the hospital’s ER, Ryan and her husband, Fox sportscaster Barry Tompkins, figured their only child was in for a few stitches, a headache and a scolding for not wearing his helmet.

That was until the first person to come out and speak to them was the hospital chaplain.



Ryan is a career journalist who began covering sports in Florida, continued in that vein when she moved to the San Francisco area, then expanded her horizons to the world at large as a columnist and reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her 1995 book, “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes,” was the first in-depth revelation of the pressurized world of elite young gymnasts and figure skaters.

Capable, accomplished, happily married and living in an upscale village north of San Francisco, Ryan admits she had harbored a secret few ever suspected: She doubted her worth as a mother.



She and Tompkins adopted their son, whom they named Ryan, as an infant in June 1990. From the time he began walking, “Ryan didn’t seem to respond to consequences.”



Struggling with what later would be diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Ryan was often sweet, wistful, curious and creative. (When he was 4, he asked his mother if only God is real and people are “just his dream.”) But he was much bigger than kids his age, clumsy and had anger issues.



Joan Ryan’s initial reaction: “What was wrong with this kid? And how do we fix him?" Like many parents of special needs children, she had to accept the primary lesson of letting go in a way she says her husband “has always known: How to love people for who they are, without fear or reservation.”



That lesson came with her son’s massive head injury.



Whatever challenges Joan and Barry faced in Ryan’s first 16 years were dwarfed by the boy’s traumatized brain. From reporting on wounded Iraq soldiers, Joan knew about 60,000 people in the United States die each year from traumatic brain injuries. Some 70,000 to 90,000 “emerge with significant disabilities,” accounting for an estimated 5.3 Americans who live with a disability caused by such severe brain trauma.



The statistics for children are grim, as Ryan and Tompkins learned.

In one study, only 10 percent of children with a severe brain injury had normal neurological exams a year later. Less than 30 percent had a normal IQ, about half experienced considerable behavioral problems, and three-quarters required special education services.



Ryan and Tompkins knew none of this as their son fought for his life. Setbacks and surgeries came at them like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, only they were four times four times four. Drains, shunts, temporary removal of sections of skull, pinpointed medications. Every step forward seemed to ensure two or three back.

Their mantra became: “Today is just today. It is what it is.”



And it went on for months.



The miraculous thing about “The Water Giver” is that, as the author describes a grueling journey, the details do not repulse or numb. Years of newspaper writing have honed Joan Ryan into an expert storyteller who is spare with her adjectives but rich with facts and observations that matter. Along with its poignancy, the account of her son’s cataclysmic accident and its aftermath is a medical thriller.



It is also deeply moving in its intimate candor. As her iron-fisted, reform-minded judgmentalism drops away in the face of her boy’s fragility, Ryan drags her own demons from their hiding places.

Perhaps the most important quality of her book is its redefinition of a happy ending. Ryan Tompkins survives his injury and regains much of his life, but he will be forever affected by literal and figurative scars.



Joan Ryan’s embrace of that reality is the “happy,” believable ending.

It does not look like a television movie with a swell of music as the credits roll. It looks like a comatose son’s answer to his mother’s early plea in an ICU room:

“‘You can’t do this,’ I whispered in my son’s ear. I was crying. ‘I can handle anything. But I can’t handle losing you, Ryan. I can’t survive that.’”



Stephanie Salter writes for The Tribune Star in Terre Haute, Ind. E-mail her at stephanie.salter@tribstar.com. CNHI News Service distributes her column.