In simplest terms, Grim loved to test his limits. Those who knew him best called him an athletic specimen, a workaholic fueled by competition and driven by the joy of completing races few in their right minds would dare to even start.
The Oxford native went on 24-hour mountain bike races, often returning home bloodied after tumbling over the handlebars. He ran, canoed, biked and climbed walls during American Gladiator-like adventure races, swatting away hornets and shrugging off bee stings as he went. He found the most grueling ski slopes, the tallest mountains. He even ran a few marathons, and finished them too.
Was it chaotic? Yes. Extreme? Sometimes. A constant push-and-tug between what was fun and what was safe? Perhaps.
But it made sense.
His life, up to the early morning hours of May 3, 2007, always made sense. And it’s one reason why everything since that fateful May morning has been so maddening, so frustrating, so senseless.
How does a man who never stopped moving go to bed one blissful evening in St. Maarten and suddenly — stop?
How can a body that runs like a brand new sports car suddenly break down for no good reason and begin a process that would eventually lead to paralysis?
How can some of the best doctors in the area look him in the eye and tell him the same three words over and over, those three dreaded words:
I don’t know.
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Had Grim, 35, been injured in a mountain biking accident, doctors might have understood what they were dealing with. Had something happened to him on a drop-off-a-helicopter-in-the-middle-of-nowhere ski slope, it would at least be explainable, if tragic.
But a mysterious illness that can’t be diagnosed and that has left a super athlete fighting to regain all motor functions?
There are no answers. For some, there might also have been no hope.
But here in Chester County, an ocean away from where his life turned upside down, Dusty Grim sees hope every day — his tragedy having triggered a burning drive inside him, the drive that used to come out when exhaustion would set in, the determination that would whisper: It doesn’t matter what the race is … only that you finish it.
“He views this as an obstacle,” says his mother, Sherry, choking back tears. “His hardest one yet.”
This is the most grueling, challenging, seemingly never-ending race in Dusty Grim’s life: the race to walk again.
LET HIM WAKE UP AND BE FINE
Ann Grim pulls a Snickers bar out of her pocketbook, takes a tiny bite and puts it back. She can’t taste it. She tries a sip of Coke, but she might as well be drinking baking soda. It’s nauseating.
Every three hours, she follows the same routine because she knows she must eat … but eating is the last thing on her mind as she sits in a hole-in-the-wall, open-air hospital in the middle of the Caribbean with her husband on life support, her phone dead and hardly anyone nearby who can speak English.
In so many ways, she is alone on an island. And how she got to this point, she can’t even say.
She can tell you about the vacation to St. Maarten — how she and her husband, Dusty, used their timeshare in 2006 to find a hotel room on Simpson Bay, a deserted beach on the Dutch side of the Caribbean island, and how they liked it so much they decided to come back last spring.
She can tell you how her husband told her he wanted to do nothing during the trip except lie on the beach — even though “nothing” for him still meant running on a treadmill every day.
She can tell you about the restaurant they went to on the evening of May 2 — she even has pictures of it — and how, after returning to their hotel, they both went to bed about midnight, eager for a sunset cruise the following day.
But then, life delivered a sucker punch, a cheap shot she never saw coming.
At 4 in the morning, she awoke, walked into the bathroom and found her husband lying on the floor, unconscious, motionless.
She tried to wake him, shouting in his ear. No response
She tried reviving him by giving mouth-to-mouth until she realized he had a pulse and was blowing air back at her.
She called to the front desk for an ambulance … called again to speed them up … and again … 10 minutes seems like forever when you believe your husband is dying ... and again ... and why did they have to come to an island where they say there are two speeds: slow and slower? … and again before the paramedics finally arrived, taking her husband to the St. Maarten Medical Center.
The emergency room doctor took a CAT scan and found nothing. A spinal tap likewise revealed nothing.
“He probably just hit his head,” she remembers the doctor telling her. “He’ll wake up.”
But hours passed by, and her husband did no such thing.
First the nurses told her she must eat. Then they told her something much more serious: that she needed to transport her husband back to the United States.
“How do you airlift someone from St. Maarten?” the patient’s frightened mother asked after receiving the frantic phone call from her daughter-in-law more than 1,000 miles away.
Good question.
People at the hospital said the insurance company must call an air ambulance, while people at the insurance company said the hospital had to do it. But there was no time to bicker. Taking matters into their own hands, Sherry and her husband, Larry, found an air ambulance company on the Internet and wired them enough money to cover the expense.
At 9 p.m. that day Ann took a taxi to the hotel, shoved all of their things into a suitcase and went to the airport to board a prop plane to the Dominican Republic with her husband, two pilots, a paramedic and a doctor. No one spoke English. She sat in a corner, shivering and praying before someone — she can’t remember who — handed her a blanket.
“I was just thinking, let him wake up and be fine,” she recalls.
The air ambulance, with an American crew, met them at the Dominican airport. From there, Dusty was transported to one of the nearest U.S. hospitals, the Aventura Medical Center in southern Florida.
Returning to American soil, however, did little to ease Ann’s anxiety. Throughout the following day, she sat in the waiting room of the Florida hospital. And the waiting was driving her mad.
She was waiting to sleep and to eat.
Waiting for anyone from her family to arrive.
Waiting for her husband to wake up and end this nightmare.
Waiting for answers that, sadly, never came.
THEY CAN’T TELL US WHAT IT IS
In the days following Dusty’s admission to Aventura Medical Center, Ann’s sister and Dusty’s parents arrived in Florida — but a cure did not. Dusty underwent an MRI and a lumbar puncture as doctors searched for a diagnosis, but all they could tell the family was what didn’t happen.
It couldn’t be a stroke, they said.
No signs of head trauma.
Doesn’t look like an infectious disease.
But even as doctors looked in vain for the problem, which naturally they hoped would lead to a solution, Dusty began to mount a comeback, the same way he used to on a bike path or a tennis court.
Slowly, his mind came back — and his sense of humor was not far behind.
On Sunday, two days after being admitted to Aventura, Dusty kicked his mother on command and grinned about it. He pointed to a glass of iced tea to indicate thirst. He began to slightly move his left leg and arm. He was taken off oxygen.
Less than a week later, Dusty’s family decided to move him to the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania, where he could be treated by one of the country’s best neurology teams.
But even at HUP, where they performed test after test, the medical mystery could not be solved. Although he continued to regain some of his cognitive skills, Dusty had managed to stump some of the best doctors in the world.
And they’re still stumped today.
“They can’t tell us what it is; only what it isn’t,” Ann says. “That’s frustrating for a couple of reasons. We just want to know curiosity-wise. And could it happen again? That’s another fear. What if two years from now, he’s completely recovered, then it happens again because doctors don’t know what caused it?
“But I do believe it was the best care we could have gotten. I don’t believe there’s anything left behind. There’s no antidote or magic pill. Knowing is good to satisfy your curiosity and from an academic standpoint for the doctor. But it’s not going to change anything going on with him right now.”
And so, the family coped with not knowing. Dusty did, too. He remained at HUP for about two weeks before transferring to Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital in Malvern, where doctors began to wean him off the sedatives and the high-dose steroids they had been pumping through his body.
Within a few days, Dusty became even more responsive, following simple commands and vocalizing much better than he had been.
Less than a month later, he began to speak very clearly while focusing his eyes. He performed simple math problems. He read.
One time his frustration boiled over and he told his wife, “I’m so tired of hearing ‘I don’t know.’” But more often than not, he remained positive, hopeful that his motor functions will eventually catch up with his mind and that the long hours of physical rehab will one day help him walk again.
“Only hope will help him with the recovery,” Ann says. “He’s willing to really work at it while some people may have given up by this point. But he’s not. He’s tough, and he’s got such great spirit. He’s upbeat about the whole thing, even sometimes when I think the rest of us have broken down. He doesn’t say, ‘Why me? I don’t want to get out of bed this morning. What’s the use?’ You just don’t hear things like that from him. It’s always, ‘Let’s go, I’m ready.’”
CAN YOU MAKE IT TO THE WINDOW?
By their very nature, athletes come in all shapes and sizes.
People at Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital know this because the best athlete in their care is a 130-pound man who wears SpongeBob pajama pants and rolls around in a wheelchair.
“Can you make it to the window?” physical therapist Ted Barron asked Dusty Grim one day earlier this year.
Barron’s charge, who continued his rehabilitation at Bryn Mawr after a three-month stay as an inpatient, looks down the hall to the window.
It’s about 20 feet away.
With the help of Barron and two other therapists, Grim stands up, wraps his fingers tightly around a grocery cart and doesn’t hesitate with his answer.
“Probably,” he says with a grin.
The window? Please.
Here’s a guy who used to run 10 miles in his sleep. He played soccer for his father’s team as a kid. He grew up on the tennis courts. He won a Southern Chester County League singles championship for Oxford High in 1990.
The window?
After graduating high school in 1991, Grim remained an athletic demon. He didn’t go out for varsity sports at UMass, but he played intramural ice hockey, continued to run like someone was chasing him and took up karate because, he says, “It was something else to do.”
The window?
Long after college, when most people his age were content to eat Twinkies and paint the deck, Dusty remained as active as a puppy in a park. Sometimes he’d come home from a long day at work and immediately ride a stationary bike because not a day could go by when he didn’t work out, even if it was close to midnight and he had to do it all over again tomorrow.
The window?
After a while, he turned an active lifestyle into an extreme one. He ran the Boston Marathon with his sister, then convinced her to participate in an adventure race in Richmond, Va., that included running, canoeing, bicycling and, oddly enough, doing puzzles blindfolded. By the end of the race, his sister was so drained, he practically had to carry her over the final 12-foot wall. “I don’t think she’d do it again,” he says, grinning.
But that was nothing compared to the time he went to Big Bear, W.Va., for a 24-hour mountain bike relay race. Following a bike path at night for hours at a time while taking turns sleeping and living off PowerBars can take quite a toll. Grim recalls his teammate started having hallucinations and had to be put to bed.
So, yes, when Barron asks the best athlete at Bryn Mawr if he can get to the window, he quickly notices the competitive drive that lives inside his patient. He sees it in his eyes. Nothing will stop him.
“Because of his background in athletics, he knows how to push himself,” Barron says. “He knows the price of hard work. He’s handled it in the past, and he can push through it.”
But this is a whole new ballgame. And when he leans against that grocery cart, his legs begin to wobble and his arms begin to shake. After a few steps, Barron looks concerned.
“I don’t think we’re going to make it to the window,” Barron says. “Do you need to sit?”
“No.”
The three therapists continue to help him push his legs ahead, lifting one at a time, but soon the pain becomes too much, even for Dusty. They take a break, a quick one, before helping the patient back to his feet. Dusty takes a few more steps, almost to that window.
“Do your ankles hurt?” Ted asks.
They do. It doesn’t matter.
“One more step,” Dusty says.
The window? Please.
With determined steps, Dusty pushes the grocery cart way past it, damn near the entire length of the hallway.
I’M GOING TO GET BETTER
All around him, people are suffering. Dusty sees pain every day, in his wife and parents, who are always by his side; in the therapists and doctors, who desperately want to cure him; in the other patients at the hospital, some of whom are worse off than he is.
He hears their pain, too. But he says the howls at night only make him stronger. Others can give up, but he can’t. His mind doesn’t have that function programmed into it. And even in a world so grim, this Grim has enough strength to crack jokes, no easy feat for someone who can’t even eat or bathe without assistance.
One time, a few months ago, a doctor visited his room after learning something was amiss.
“My water bed’s leaking,” Dusty deadpanned.
His catheter was leaking.
“It makes it so much easier on everyone,” says his father, Larry. “He’s so upbeat and positive. He has not been depressed at all. I’m pretty sure he’s certain he’ll be out skiing again.”
Naturally, it didn’t take long for Dusty to become a favorite patient at Bryn Mawr.
“Face it, it sucks to be here,” Barron says. “You realize how random it is. Did he do anything different than I might have done? How would I be if it happened to me? It’s not like he was holding up a bank and got shot in the process ...
“But he lets us know he’s accepting of the challenges and he can ride through it. He’s not withdrawing into a shell.”
Of course, the randomness of it all still stings. It doesn’t make sense how such a gifted athlete could suffer such an awful fate.
“Part of the reason why this injury is so crazy is that all the stuff he did — skydiving, rock climbing, mountain biking at night with headlights on, road biking — you would have thought for sure he would have gotten injured,” his wife says. “And here we are on vacation, and I find him on the bathroom floor at 4 in the morning. And nothing has happened.”
But Dusty doesn’t have to make sense of his condition.
Forget the why. He wants to know how — as in how to walk again.
A combination of his two most admirable qualities — his sense of humor and his ambition to return to an active lifestyle — inspired him to write his own holiday jingle toward the end of last year: “All I want for Christmas,” he said in a sing-song voice, “is flat feet.”
A few weeks later, on Jan. 23, his Christmas wish came true when he underwent a surgical procedure at HUP that lengthened his Achilles tendon — because, doctors said, his contracted right heel was making his ankle roll out, which in turn prevented him from walking.
Or, in simpler terms, his feet weren’t flat.
The surgery was a success, and although he is still in a walking boot, doctors are hopeful he will walk again.
And more than doctors have helped with his recovery process.
Dusty and his wife have moved from their home in Landenberg to his parents’ house in Oxford, which is closer to the hospital and wheelchair accessible. Larry and Sherry have also kept their family-run engineering company up and running, even putting their son to work at times when he’s up for it. And his friends have lent their support, morally and financially.
A few days before Dusty’s surgery, Avon Grove High School tennis coach Debbie Ward and the Avon Grove Tennis Association organized the Dusty Grim Tennis Benefit to offset some of his medical costs. The event raised nearly $10,000 for the Grims, who were both very active in the tennis community.
“It’s been great,” Dusty says of the support. “That’s what’s kept me going.”
In truth, it’s not pain he sees everywhere. It’s motivation he sees in his wife and his parents, in the doctors and physical therapists challenging him to get out of bed every day, and in all the other hospital patients — the ones who get better and especially the ones who don’t.
But most of all, he finds motivation in himself because in his heart he knows it will take more than a freak accident to stop him from walking — and skiing, biking, rock climbing, playing tennis and racing so hard and so fast that he can finally leave St. Maarten behind.
So even when he’s lying on his hospital bed, his old world having crumbled nearly a year ago, his words ring true when he says, in a soft but determined voice, “I’m going to get better.”
You’d be crazy not to believe he’ll one day find his finish line.
By DAVE ZEITLIN, Staff Writer
To contact staff writer Dave Zeitlin, e-mail dzeitlin@dailylocal.com
