Publishing resumes Aug. 31
Saturday, July 31, 2010 Last Update: 04:35 am
Publishing resumes Aug. 31
Saturday, July 31, 2010 Last Update: 04:35 am
A half-smile rose up the right side of Dustin Frost’s face as he chuckled near the back of the Billings auditorium.
His red hair rose above the button shirts and military uniforms searching for seats at a Veterans Day celebration. When his boss, U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, stepped up to the podium, Dustin moved forward to take pictures.
After the ceremony, as people chatted with friends from the service or with Rehberg and U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, one man congratulated Dustin on his campaign back to health. With the left corner of his mouth anchored, Dustin thanked him and gave a crooked smile.
His unusual grin is a reminder of a terrible accident a little more than three months ago.
“I remember the day certainly. That was the day we were up in Polson,” Frost said. “I don’t remember a crash or anything like that. Frankly, I wish I could even remember that, but I don’t.”
Dustin, a University of Montana grad and Rehberg’s state director, remembers traveling to Polson. There, he, Deputy Chief of Staff Kristin Smith and Rehberg met with the leadership at St. Joseph Medical Center and the Indian Health Service. After, they drove to Wayfarers State Park for dinner near Flathead Lake.
But Dustin doesn’t remember the rest of Aug. 27.
He doesn’t remember state Sen. Greg Barkus driving the 22-foot speedboat into a cliff that dark night.
He doesn’t remember how he ended up face down in the water.
He doesn’t remember squeezing the hand of a camper who pulled him out of the lake shortly after 10 p.m.
The first thing Dustin recalls is the ambulance ride from Kalispell Regional Medical Center to the inpatient therapy program at Missoula’s Community Medical Center two weeks later.
“I remember waking up and I had this tube in my stomach, but other than that I felt pretty good,” Dustin said. “So they had to talk me through and tell me what was wrong with me.”
Though Dustin can’t remember the accident itself, he said he will not forget the sacrifices made by friends and family who sat at his bedside as he lay in a coma for 10 days, who helped fill the memory gaps and continue to support his recovery.
“It’s absolutely amazing to me what they’ve all done,” Dustin said from his Billings office, the phone pressed to his right ear instead of the usual left. “The worst thing they dealt with was probably those first ten days when things were a lot worse.”
A confusing call
Dustin’s father, Rod Frost, remembers the confusion that followed the 1:50 a.m. phone call on Aug. 28.
A chaplain from Kalispell Regional Medical Center told Rod his son had been in a boat accident earlier that night. She said the neurologist urged them to drive to the hospital as soon as possible.
Because Dustin’s work often includes extensive driving, Rod had earlier considered the possibility of his son having an accident while traveling. Yet, the news caught him by surprise.
“The weird thing was to get the phone call and to say he’d been in a boat accident,” Rod said.
His family was not a “boat family,” and in the northern landlocked state of Montana the idea seemed a little odd anyway. When the chaplain said “neurologist,” he worried his son had drowned and been revived. His fears of paralysis eased when a relative called to say he saw Dustin’s arms and legs moving.
Rod called Dustin’s younger sister, Kyla, and brother-in-law, Brian Rauch. He told them about the accident and said he would pick them up at their Missoula home. With the exception of the call from a relative who had driven to the hospital to check on Dustin, the car ride was solemn and quiet. Rod just tried to focus on not speeding too much on the dark road to Kalispell.
“I concentrated on the driving and I’m not sure that Brian and Kyla didn’t concentrate on the praying,” Rod said. “You are almost speechless. There isn’t anything to say. There’s no information to digest, so I think we were all there with our own thoughts for the most part. It’s a longer drive than you think it is from here to Kalispell.”
The tired group arrived two hours after the phone call and immediately visited Dustin’s room in Intensive Care. Soon, they spoke with the neurologist.
“Later on in some of the press releases, he called them ‘survivable injuries,’” Rod said. “Right then he used the term ‘lethal.’ We knew it was bad.”
When the boat hit the cliff at 45 miles per hour, nearby campers heard the crash.
Dustin fractured his skull, damaged both sides of his brain, and severed a facial nerve. He gulped for air when three people pulled him from the lake. Though he was found facedown, he had no water in his lungs. One 26-year-old woman noticed he was bleeding from his left ear and asked him to squeeze her hand. He clutched tightly for a moment before his eyes closed and his grip loosened. He slipped into a coma.
Books and gym shorts
With his 27-year-old son in serious condition, Rod and the others began calling friends and family from the busy waiting room. It was filled with curious reporters, candid medical staff, protective law enforcement and the families of other victims.
Stacey Graham received no phone call, but was already worried about her boyfriend of nearly three years when she woke to her ringing doorbell shortly after sunrise and saw her mother in the doorway.
“He always texts or calls me on the road,” Stacey said. “He didn’t call me that night, so I woke up with that weird feeling. As soon as I saw her standing there, I knew something was wrong.”
She cried for half an hour.
In shock, Stacey quickly packed and then rode with her mother to Dustin’s house on the other side of Billings.
She collected items to help make Dustin more comfortable during his hospital stay. She knew Dustin had been reading the non-fiction hunting thriller, “The Old Man and the Boy,” but he had forgotten to pack it for his latest travels. It was one of the first things she grabbed.
“I knew that if he woke up he would want his books,” Stacey said. “So I went to his house and got him gym shorts and T-shirts and books.”
On the long drive to Kalispell, Stacey tried to stay calm but was anxious to arrive. She wanted to know more about the accident and Dustin’s condition, but her mother knew very little and the call from Rod was brief. Stacey didn’t fully understand the severity of his condition until Rod and Kyla led her to Dustin’s room in Kalispell.
The neurologist had inserted a probe into Dustin’s head to gauge brain pressure. An IV in his arm hydrated him. Wires wound from his chest to a heart monitor. Breathing tubes assisted Dustin until he had a tracheotomy in his neck later that week. Later, a feeding tube coiled from his abdomen.
Despite the dismal array of medical machinery, Dustin’s persistent character gave Stacey hope.
“He was too stubborn to be a victim,” she said.
Clear the books
Despite the optimism Dustin’s family in Kalispell tried to express as they updated others, some of his friends were not satisfied. Dustin’s longtime friend Jake Eaton tired of waiting for phone calls and text messages, so he headed to Kalispell after cutting short a business trip to Chicago.
Jake had met Dustin through UM College Republicans. They quickly developed a friendship setting up yard signs for local campaigns and organizing debates on campus for the student group. In College Republicans, Jake saw Dustin develop a passion for helping people through politics.
While still pursuing a wildlife biology major, Dustin accepted a college internship with Rehberg in his Missoula office. After Dustin graduated in 2004, Rehberg hired him to work on his campaign, eventually promoting him to manager. Dustin went through basic training for the National Guard after the elections and then returned to Rehberg’s office as a field representative.
He was asked to run a second campaign for Rehberg about the same time Jake returned from service in Iraq in late 2005. Both worked on campaigns that year. The two college buddies moved into a shoebox Billings apartment together.
Because some candidates were sharing campaign space, the two staffers ended up in the same small office cluttered with two desks, file cabinets, paperwork, yard signs and other promotional materials.
“There are not a lot of people anybody could spend 24 hours a day with, but we did it,” Jake said. “I would shoot rubber bands at him. It was a great source of entertainment for me.”
Dustin, too, playfully distracted his friend from work.
“You are on the phone trying to get contributions out of somebody and he’s making faces at me,” Jake said, quieting his voice. “That was a pretty rough time because it was about the same time he lost his mom.”
Robin Frost died November 2006 after battling serious illness for years.
Before she died, Robin nicknamed Jake “Little Jakey” in response to his jokes that he was her favorite son, adopting the friend into the family. Jake remembers helping Dustin cope with the loss, talking on the phone almost every day when Jake moved to Helena and Dustin took a short break from politics in early 2007. Dustin returned that summer as Rehberg’s new state director.
After the boat crash, Jake again helped in any way he could.
He stayed with the Frost family in Kalispell, indefinitely leaving his home in Helena.
“After a day and a half not being there and literally pacing around in circles waiting for updates, I needed to be up there,” Jake said. “It was a lot easier on me than being a thousand miles away. At first, I think I was there as much for me personally as I was for him.”
CaringBridge
Upon arrival, Jake urged the family to establish a Web profile through CaringBridge.org that would allow them to keep a journal of Dustin’s progress for others to read and comment on.
The group in Kalispell uploaded photos of Dustin smiling in his National Guard uniform, hunting pheasant with his father, standing next to Bob Dole, playing Guitar Hero with a young relative and watching an Atlanta Braves game with Stacey.
Rod, Jake, Stacey and Kyla took turns with the daily updates that largely focused on the positives, adding more humor as Dustin improved. Friends, family and strangers extended prayers, shared stories and offered assistance:
• Soldier on Special Frost. Soldier On!
• You have to get better and run for office so I can tell people I voted for a Republican.
• I can only imagine Dustin’s relief to finally see some familiar faces . . . even if one of them was Jakey.
• We are so sorry that such a wonderful young man like you has had this enforced vacation.
• I have noticed that ever since the word “hunting” had been mentioned that Dustin’s condition began to improve in leaps and bounds.
• I have prayed for you, thought and talked about you, but until yesterday I didn’t know you.
• I’ve always heard that laughter is the best medicine, and I have no doubt Dustin that you are being heavily medicated!
Those messages helped Rod discover more about the man his son had become.
“We think our kids are offshoots of us and they just take our life and move on with what we’ve given them,” Rod said. “I realized, well, Dustin isn’t just my son. He’s my son, but he’s also his own person.”
Often Jake or Stacey would give life to the unfamiliar names for Rod. They were people thankful for Dustin’s help or encouragement during their own times of need. Those he befriended after only one or two meetings. Men from his National Guard unit. Republicans and Democrats. High school teachers from Sunburst. College buddies. Strangers.
“He’s that guy that always goes out of his way to help people and does the right thing,” Jake said. “Whenever somebody gets hurt, they always say nice things, but you’d be hard pressed to find a person saying bad about him.”
Rod, Kyla and others said this growing network of encouragement helped soothe their turbulent emotions. It also led to the establishment of “Team Ginger.”
Team Ginger
Jake joined a handful of others who claimed a corner of the waiting room, huddled under blankets and sometimes clutching pillows. The group of family and friends rearranged the chairs covered in purple vinyl and grandmotherly floral prints around laptops, cell phones and various chargers. Where people did not sit, care packages with Kleenex, cookies and packets of Emergen-C filled the seats. Flowers and cards from friends and strangers alike covered the nearby tables between the soda cans and coffee cups strewn across plastic placemats.
“I don’t know how the hospital got away with not having the health department condemn our corner,” Rod said, chuckling. “There were half consumed cups of coffee, empty to half-empty pop cans, and the notorious and dangerous spit bottles that Jake kept filled. No one would pick up a pop can if he had set it down and walked away from it.”
Overnight security guards added the clustered corner to their regular rounds, stopping to ask for updates on Dustin’s progress and stories from the day.
The women working the hospital coffee shop would also visit after their shifts, always offering their assistance and some good humor.
Upon hearing that Kyla and her husband canceled a trip to Disney World because of the accident, hospital staff called to have the hotel rooms, plane tickets and gate passes reimbursed.
“Any time you are in a hospital, there are always one or two people who seem to really care, but up there it was everybody,” Jake said. “I’ve really never seen a hospital where you have such a level of emotional involvement. It’s pretty incredible.”
Between tears and laughter, Team Ginger was born in that waiting room corner. The term honored Dustin’s “South Park”-inspired nickname and recognized his growing network of support.
“I was joking around, saying that when we get out of here we needed to get him a shirt that said, ‘I spent so many weeks at the Kalispell Regional Medical Center and all I got was this lousy shirt,’” Jake said.
Team Ginger made their own shirts. Jake commissioned a good friend of Dustin’s to create a logo and, within an hour, Jake had the T-shirt design and began looking for a screen printer. Eventually, the shirts were sold on cafepress.com to help defray the costs of the family’s stay in Kalispell.
Eyes squinted and teeth bared, a Calvin-and-Hobbes-esque kid in a striped red top flexes both his arms on the front of each Team Ginger shirt.
The back was inspired by the Sunburst high school where Dustin played basketball, ran cross country, entered science fairs and helped lead Family, Career, and Community Leaders of America. It reads “The Pride of North Toole County High School” and depicts the same little kid flexing his non-existent muscles in nothing but dino-print underwear.
But support for Dustin’s family spread beyond those wearing freshly printed T-shirts.
Team Ginger, in turn, was part of a bigger unit nicknamed “The Boat Family.” Barkus coined the term to describe all the families affected by his boat crash. Rod said the families helped each other cope, building bonds with once-strangers that would last past their shared time in the hospital.
And though Dustin’s hospitalization was easily the longest and his injuries the worst, Rod said he feels no resentment or anger toward Barkus for the accident because he believes it was exactly that: an accident.
“I have compassion for the Barkus family. They were both physically hurt and they hurt for everybody else,” Rod said. “Alcohol aside, I know how I would feel if I was in an accident and someone was hurt.”
For the Boat Family and Team Ginger, it is easiest to remember the hospital downtime that was filled with jokes, stories about Dustin and the newest YouTube videos. But Kyla and Jake also remember helping each other through emotional rough patches.
“It’s one of those deals where you try to laugh so you don’t cry,” Jake said. “Everybody had their moments when everything was too much and we would take turns consoling each other.”
Time lost its usual reliability. It became a challenge, just as humor became a tool and patience a necessary skill.
Waiting, uncertainty and worry stretched time.
So, someone reminded the group about Dustin’s insistence that golf is not a sport but a skill, sparking debate and laughter. They Googled unfamiliar terms used by the doctors. Comforting hugs made friends into family.
But all those magnified moments were condensed into one whirlwind memory by the surprising pace and quality of Dustin’s recovery.
Ten days after falling into his coma, Dustin woke up.
Water, please
After spending nearly two weeks in the hospital that included her birthday and three-year anniversary with Dustin, Stacey was considering a short trip home for her father’s wedding over Labor Day weekend.
While she held Dustin’s hand, he gave her an answer: He opened his eyes, looked up at her and reached to touch her face.
“I was just bawling,” Stacey said. “I knew I was where I needed to be. It was amazing to know he was in there.”
Dustin had opened his eyes just a couple days earlier. When the nurse’s aid changed the TV from a UM Grizzly football game to music, he moved a bit and gave her a confused look.
“I guess when he woke up, you were so thankful he’s awake but you wonder and question what he’ll be capable of,” Kyla said. “You temper your excitement with reality.”
Nurses would take shifts watching Dustin to make sure he didn’t hurt himself as he kicked and turned in agitation as his body and mind continued to wake up. In a Web post, Rod joked that Dustin must still have some strength left because occasionally he would “arm wrestle” three nurses at once.
“He would be trying to get the end of the breathing tube or later on the trach tube,” Rod said. “His legs would — almost on their own — be crawling to get over the rails of the bed to get out.”
One day, the progress was particularly promising.
“He got better and better just even hour by hour. I mean, you could see it,” Rod said. “So for us, we got to skip over a bunch of that slow, long recovery time.”
Kyla remembers her brother’s eyes following people who moved in the room. When they would speak to him, sometimes he would mouth the word “what,” as if
asking, “What is going on?” or “What did you say?”
Doctors removed Dustin from the ventilator and fitted him with a special trach collar. He later responded to commands with two fingers as part of an initial evaluation by rehab specialists. He then sat up and spoke his first words.
Mouth dry, he begged for water.
But because doctors weren’t sure if he could swallow, no one could give him a drink. Until they could be sure, the IV tube in his arm kept him hydrated.
Jake was running errands when Dustin first spoke, but when he entered the room later that day, Dustin called him by name and asked for water.
“The fact he knew who I was just tore me up,” Jake said.
As a test of his memory, the doctor in the room asked Dustin if he knew the man and to please introduce him if he did.
“He said, ‘Yeah, that’s my best friend Jake Eaton, the hero of the Iraq War,’” Jake said, laughing at the memory. “After ten days of just seeing him there in a coma, it was pretty special for me. I started to laugh a little bit at the ‘hero of the Iraq War’ line, though. Just the fact he was talking and that’s the first thing he would say about me was incredibly overwhelming.”
Even before he could speak, Dustin gave his family reason to hope for the best as he slowly regained awareness.
Sensing the side of the bed where his father stood, Dustin would raise his arm as a signal for a hug. He would wrap that arm around Rod’s neck and gently bring him down by his head where it rested on the bed. Rod and the others would then talk to him, waiting to see if he would shake or nod his head in response.
“As I think back about it, that was perhaps even more emotional and touching than even when he first started to talk because you knew he was there and recognized you and that he had emotion,” Rod said. “You looked forward to getting his hug when you went in there.”
After gaining consciousness, Dustin was moved out of Intensive Care. He could eat soft foods and drink water. Then, with the help of a walker, he would take short walks down the hospital halls before crashing into long naps.
Just four days after gaining consciousness, he was ready to be transferred to an inpatient therapy program at Missoula’s Community Medical Center. Hospital staff loaded the excited and chatty Dustin into an ambulance for the journey.
“I think he thought he was going home and we didn’t correct him,” Kyla said.
Though summer temperatures were beginning to fade into cooler fall days, this was a beautiful day for Team Ginger.
Rod remembers the sun that day, which seemed aware of his uplifted mood. It glittered white on the surface of Flathead Lake as the ambulance passed on its way south. Evergreens lined the water and the summits of nearby mountains, silhouetted against the pale blue sky. That sunny autumn day would be one of Dustin’s first memories after the crash on the same lake. Rod was just glad to be returning home, his bright-eyed son behind him in the ambulance.
Home and humility
After waking up, Dustin would occasionally try to convince doctors and family members that he should be released from the hospital. He didn’t remember the accident or many of the recent days and since he felt largely normal, he didn’t understand why he couldn’t leave.
“I was certainly convinced on day one, and I think I told a doctor this, that there was nothing wrong with me and he needed to send me home,” Dustin said. “So they had to tell me a little more about it.”
Jake walked into a therapy session in Missoula when Dustin was again trying to convince hospital staff to send him home. Seeing his friend, Dustin turned and asked for help.
“Have you seen yourself in the mirror lately?” Jake asked in return.
Walking to a mirror, Dustin paused to consider his reflection.
“My lip was kinda down and it was kinda sagging over there on the left side of my face and I realized that I couldn’t blink my left eye,” Dustin said. “So he kinda taught me that, ‘Hey, things aren’t normal right now, buddy.’”
Because his left eye wouldn’t close, Dustin wore a patch while he slept to protect it.
Rehab specialists worked to improve his listening comprehension and help him relearn forgotten daily tasks. He was asked to identify objects on flashcards, memorize the names of faces therapists showed him and repeat short stories as accurately as he could after waiting several minutes.
In one exercise, a therapist handed Dustin a map of Missoula’s Mountain Line bus system and tasked him with planning the quickest route between various points. Dustin jokingly responded that he wouldn’t use the confusing bus system, but instead call one of many friends in town who would happily give him a ride.
Jake saw Dustin’s normal personality and humor resurface, like the day he walked without assistance for the first time during a physical therapy session. Dustin approached Jake, rubbed his stomach and joked that maybe he should work with his physical therapist, too.
“I’ve worked in politics where you are always trying to oversell every little accomplishment, but these speech therapists really undersell themselves with their titles and work,” Jake said.
Though Dustin could eat, walk and talk, his memory was slower to recover.
“At one point in the hospital they brought him dinner and it was roast beef and mashed potatoes and broccoli,” Jake said. “He knew what it was but he couldn’t think what the name of broccoli was.”
Dustin can’t sufficiently describe what it’s like to know what an object is, but not be able to name it. He just knows that it is unpredictable.
“I thought it odd that there wasn’t a problem with shaving. Like, I could shave and it was fine. Why is it that I can do that?” Dustin said. “In therapy one day, they showed me a picture of a camel and for the life of me I couldn’t remember what a camel was called.”
Medical milkshakes
Rod prepared a big sausage and sauerkraut dinner in his Dutch oven ten days after returning home. His son had just been released from the hospital and was on orders to gain weight.
Dustin was ready to slowly integrate back into normal life, but still needed therapy and rest.
“Dustin was basically letting all of us wait on him. He didn’t do very much. To get him to dump the garbage was more of an effort than to just go dump it yourself,” Rod said, chuckling. “He was playing the brain-injured card on us, he really was.”
Other times, Dustin used the doctor’s order as an excuse to hoard the goodies sent by friends, even though he was offered other options for gaining weight.
“We couldn’t have any of it because of the order,” Jake said, laughing before he added, “I didn’t want to have him go through it alone. I think I gained more weight than he did. I offered many times to give him a transplant. He could have 10 or 15 pounds if he wanted it.”
One of the easiest ways for the group to gain weight in step with Dustin was to make daily trips to Big Dipper for a huckleberry milkshake.
Dustin’s memory and reaction time continued to improve as his body gained strength. He could remember the right words more often. Slowly, he gained more control over the left side of his face.
Dustin took day trips with Team Ginger on his days off from therapy to visit old Missoula friends or shop for hunting rifles, even though doctors wouldn’t clear him to shoot again for several weeks.
In early October, Team Ginger made a surprise visit to the Missoula Pachyderms — local Republicans — meeting. The group was easily identified by its magnetic pull; people surrounded the tall redhead. Dustin listened and spoke to those who congratulated him on his recovery one at a time. He was still adjusting to being in crowds. And the ecstatic mass waited patiently.
Homecoming
When a friend offered Dustin and Stacey tickets to the Homecoming Grizzly football game, they gladly accepted.
“The one thing he wasn’t allowed to do was sit next to the cannon and our seats were right next to the cannon,” Stacey said.
So instead of sitting only six rows from the blasts, they joined other friends in a box.
Between talking with friends and cheering for the Griz, Dustin persistently joked with Stacey about her alma mater.
“I was a Bobcat and going to the Missoula game,” Stacey said. “He thought it was hysterical I was missing MSU’s homecoming to see Griz homecoming.”
But Dustin wasn’t completely unsympathetic.
“Being in the box allowed Stacey to watch her Bobcats on a television — with the sound off,” Dustin said.
Despite the freezing cold, they opened the window of the box to hear the sounds of a packed stadium. Dustin earnestly joined the cheers that followed the cannon’s five blasts and the boos that accompanied the opponent’s touchdowns. The announcers’ voices rolled over the crowd to his good ear. Stacey wondered if the box was any quieter than their seats near the cannon would have been.
Dustin’s own homecoming was greeted with cheers from Team Ginger.
He returned home to Billings just a week later. His life was nearly normal again as he resettled into his home and a shortened daily routine. Until his stamina recovered, the doctor limited him to working four hours a day. Dustin was excited and relieved to get back into the swing of things, if only bit-by-bit.
His first day back at work, he greeted his coworkers and a caramel mocha cheesecake with his half-smile. After enjoying a slice of his favorite dessert and chatting a bit, he began catching up on everything he’d missed.
He began by archiving e-mails that filled his inbox past its viewable limit. Some of the messages were sent by friends and colleagues offering their support. A few shared their own recovery stories after sustaining brain injuries in car accidents or falling off ladders. Some were simply work-related. With the help of his associates, he resumed his usual duties for Rehberg.
Just before Thanksgiving, Dustin was grateful to hear his Missoula doctor say that he will continue to gain more control over his full face and that the hearing in his left ear should return without surgery. He could work full-time and he could start shooting his .22 at the range.
His excitement at the news was like the zeal Stacey saw at the Homecoming game. She will always remember that day, not because of the raucous crowd or the Griz victory, but because she saw Dustin joking around with friends as though nothing had changed.
“He’s got that grin and his eyes were lit up,” Stacey said. “He didn’t stop smiling.”
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