Long, Tough Road to Recovery :...

For Charlotte English, the cruel reality check hit home on the day two repairmen arrived to fix some odds and ends.

Normally, the light switch adjustments and tinkering with the downstairs toilet would have been child’s play for her husband, Jim--a capable do-it-yourselfer and Navy electronics veteran who eagerly spent most weekends keeping his house in rural East San Diego County ship-shape.

But that was before “the mishap,” as Charlotte calls it--the day in late January when Robert Mack, a disgruntled General Dynamics assembly worker whom James English had fired only nine days earlier, allegedly returned to put a bullet in his head and fatally gun-down a second employee.

Three months after parts of his brain were removed by surgeons, a subdued English is struggling through severe loss of vision and memory toward a near-normal life.

“I definitely feel that I have a will to live,” English said. “Through every step of this thing, I’ve been a fighter.”

Charlotte English shares his hopes for recovery--but sometimes finds herself locked in silent combat with her doubts. Like the day those repairmen left a $193 bill for work Jim once could have done in his sleep.

“I remember thinking that day how frustrating it was not to have Jim around to help me,” she recalled. “It’s like he was gone, that this other man I used to know had just picked up and left. And there’s a different man living here now.”

Day by day, through simple tasks at which he sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, Jim English is discovering his new self. Whether he tries to balance his checkbook or take a neighborhood stroll with his wife, the proud man is forced to struggle with newfound limitations that have knocked him from the pedestal of being head of his own household.

And it has stripped him of his cherished independence.

For his own safety, his wife restricted him from certain areas of the couple’s rock-hewn back yard. Recently, English fell while leading his Doberman pinscher down the back steps, an accident that required two stitches in his head.

His chain saw is forbidden to him. And, when he stubbornly insisted on helping Charlotte carry groceries up the steps--two bags at a time, like always--she held onto the back of his belt to keep him from falling.

“If you’re a hardhead like me,” he said, “well, it just hurts to know that your wife can’t trust you after all these years--even with simple tasks of moving from here to there.”

But in his first interview since being felled by a bullet on that sunny Friday afternoon in January, the 53-year-old talks like a fighter who--although knocked against the ropes--has returned to fight again.

Every morning, he thanks God that he is still alive, taking satisfaction in the knowledge that Robert Mack’s bullet narrowly missed its fatal mark. And, although his recovery has been slow after an extraordinary start, he holds fast to the belief that the broken pieces of his life eventually will come together.

“I feel that, if I was a quitter, I’d be dead right now,” said English, a former operations supervisor for General Dynamics’ advanced cruise-missile program.

Along with daily physical and psychological therapy, he does push-ups and sit-ups in a bullish effort to regain his strength. He pushes doctors and therapists for more freedom to test his mind and body.

“All through the surgery and the rehabilitation, the doctors and nurses have all commented about how hard I work,” he said. “And I tell them all: ‘I’ve got something to work for. To get my life back to what it was before this thing ever happened, or as close to it as I possibly can.’ ”

The devastating shot, fired into his head from less than 2 feet away, was a hollow-point bullet designed to break up on impact and increase the damage to bone and tissue.

Luckily, doctors say, the projectile barely missed the vital brain stem, which would have killed English instantly.

But, in their efforts to remove the bullet and debris, trauma surgeons at UC San Diego Medical Center also cut away a portion of English’s brain that affects his vision and depth perception.

He emerged from the surgery with other parts of his brain impaired--areas that control his memory, hearing, balance, concentration and personality, said Dr. David Barba, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at UCSD, who supervised English’s surgery.

“The bullet did its share of damage,” he said. “And, if it had hit the brain stem, the party would have been over. But that round also sent damaging shock waves through the brain. And those waves have caused most of the trouble.”

Since leaving the hospital in late February, English has struggled with recurring lapses in equilibrium that cause him to lose his balance.

And, although the eyes themselves were not damaged, doctors now consider English legally blind, with less than 10% of his field of vision intact, and much of the view to the left now gone. The reason, they say, is that the back side of his wounded brain--the occipital lobe--has lost much of its ability to translate the visual images it receives, casting him into a nether world of lines and shadows.

Worse, English’s short-term memory has shown signs of damage. The effect, his family says, is like a cassette tape that is erased each evening of key bits of information recorded during the day.

The day after watching his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers play baseball on television, his son says, English will have trouble recalling that he even witnessed the game.

He struggles to balance his checkbook because he often forgets the numbers he must carry in his mind for simple arithmetic.

But the bullet made perhaps its darkest mark on English’s reasoning processes, his wife says, leaving him unable to make many judgments--particularly when it comes to his own safety.

With a gentle, guiding hand, Charlotte English now accompanies her husband almost constantly. She makes sure he has his glasses and notebook before he leaves each day for therapy.

On walks around the neighborhood, she guards against his straying into the middle of the road. She hovers nervously even when he pulls weeds from his cherished front garden.

“It’s just hard for Jim to accept that he’s disabled,” Charlotte said. “Because he always wanted to be the best in everything he did. If he wasn’t No. 1, he wanted to know why, and who was, and how he could improve.”

Lionel English, the older of the couple’s two sons, has trouble watching his once-confident father struggle to lead a normal life.

“Dad always used to be in the center of things. But now he prefers to sit quietly in the background and watch what’s going on,” said the 25-year-old college student who moved back home to help his father.

A serious-minded family man who once enjoyed spending spare time plotting investment strategies, English now seems disinterested in such complicated matters.

“He used to make the decisions--now he just listens to what my Mom wants,” Lionel said. “It’s like he’s gotten much older all of a sudden. Sometimes, it’s almost like visiting with my grandfather, not my father.”

These strange new limitations have become a bitter pill for the once-avid outdoorsman who loved to hunt and fish, who worked hard and expected his dinner on the table when he got home from work.

Sometimes, Charlotte hears him on the telephone telling friends that he did tasks around the house she actually had to do for him. Indeed, for Jim English, his swallowed pride has gone down in hard gulps.

“It’s just hard to have to have Charlotte feel that she has to watch over me, to protect me,” he said, walking outside the house in rural Crest that he and his wife bought in 1989.

The dark changes, English knows, have come courtesy of Robert Mack, who is accused of unleashing his anger Jan. 24 in a courtyard at the General Dynamics Convair Division plant near Lindbergh Field.

A veteran machinist who had worked for General Dynamics his entire adult life, Mack, 42, had been summoned for a routine status hearing after being fired from his job just nine days earlier.

Moments after the session ended at 2:30 p.m., however, Mack allegedly brandished a .38 caliber handgun and began to wreak his revenge.

As other employees scurried for cover, Mack allegedly chased down and fatally shot labor negotiator Michael M. Koonz, 25, moments after firing a single shot into the back of English’s head.

English cannot recall the day of the hearing, let alone the shooting. His mind draws a blank from the day he fired Mack for repeated unexplained absences until he regained consciousness a week after his surgery.

Charlotte English, however, recalls all too vividly how the most terrible day of her life unfolded.

She was in the kitchen when the first call came from Jim’s sister, Jacque, to tell her about the shootings at General Dynamics. A short time later, she learned that Jim had been one of those hit.

As the anxiety-stricken wife waited for her brother-in-law to arrive to take her to the hospital, she displayed signs of the emotional tenacity that has carried her through the months of doubt.

She calmly called Jim’s primary care doctor to inform him of the shooting. Then she changed clothes and waited at the curb, dragging in two trash cans that had been left in front of the house.

Arriving at the hospital, she received the first good news of the long day and night to follow: Before he was whisked off into surgery, doctors had been amazed that Jim sat up and talked--even with a bullet in his brain.

After midnight, following more than four hours of touch-and-go surgery, Charlotte recalled, Barba emerged from the operating room with the words that would make her day:

“He told me that Jim could still die,” she recalled. “But he said that, if he survived, he would be more like a person than a vegetable.”

Later, along with son, Lionel, and other family members, Charlotte got her first look at her wounded husband. Although nurses had prepared her for the worst, Charlotte was still shocked.

Jim’s head was covered with bandages, and his eyes bulged eerily as though under great pressure. A breathing tube had been inserted into his throat, and his face showed sickly shades of yellow, blue and green.

He told his wife: “I feel like the tip of my head is coming off.”

In the hours to come, Jim English would continue to wage his battle of recovery. He flashed the thumbs-up signal and began speaking with relatives who had been advised not to show any emotion for fear of upsetting him.

But he still had little clue as to where he was or what had happened to him, Charlotte recalled.

At first, English believed he was in Virginia, then Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and finally, San Diego--telling nurses he was in the hospital because of old age. He also insisted that the year was 1989. When asked why, he would reply: “Because it was a good year.”

Meanwhile, a sign hung over his bed to remind him: “My name is James English. I have a gunshot wound to the head.”

Finally, one morning while son Brett sat by his hospital bed, English seized upon reality with a sobering dash of humor. He asked about the shooting--and when told who had pulled the trigger, he facetiously replied: “My good buddy, Mack.”

When Brett guessed how angry Mack would be to know English was still alive, his father lay in bed silently, flashing a beaming smile.

After that, English was zipping his wheelchair around the hospital floor and soon steadied himself on the chair to take his first faltering steps.

“When I saw him walking just weeks after that terrible day, well, there’s no word of sufficient magnitude to express it,” said fellow General Dynamics supervisor Mike Kilman. “The closest thing is miraculous, and I’m not that religious. It’s the fighter in him. Jim English is simply tenacious.”

English left the hospital Feb. 18 for three weeks at a rehabilitation center.

Since going home, he has attended a day treatment center where he rides a stationary bike, tests his mind on computer tasks, always volunteering for extra therapy.

And he has zeroed in on a key element to his new life--the anger he bears for his assailant.

Watching videotapes of the newscasts of his attack, English at first became upset each time reporters raised points sympathetic to Mack’s plight. But he says he won’t attend Mack’s trial in June--he’ll be too busy with his therapy.

“It’s something you’re going to think about forever,” he said about the shooting. “I think I’ve gotten over it. But I still have this anger for Robert Mack. I feel sorry for his family. But I sure as hell don’t feel sorry for him. He has said I took his life away from him. I wasn’t the one who did that. He is.”

As English’s recovery begins to slow, his family prays that he will be able to accept his new limitations.

The family declines to discuss what financial arrangements General Dynamics has made to provide for them.

For now, insurance and worker’s compensation have covered the many medical bills. But relatives know changes will come. Many wonder whether the family eventually will be forced to sell their house, built next to a huge rock that consumes the back yard and can make footing perilous.

And they hold their tongues when Jim talks of returning to his old job at the General Dynamics plant, defiantly saying that he wouldn’t “return to just any old flunky job.”

Doctors, too, can only watch and wait.

“Alot of his future hangs in the balance now,” said Betty Joan Maly, the physician overseeing English’s recovery. “Right now, he isn’t fully aware of the losses. It might be too soon for him to face the full picture of it.”

But Dr. Barba knows his star patient isn’t down for the count just yet.

“There’s no crystal ball,” he said. “He’s going to have problems. Can he overcome them? Time will tell. But he’s come a long way already. So I wouldn’t count him out.”

On a recent night, walking in his tree-filled front yard, Jim English talked about finally getting those pesky gophers that have pockmarked the place.

Stopping to choose his words carefully, he said he sees the past months of recovery as time stolen from him. Time he will eventually gain back.

“The doctors might not all agree with me, but most of them thought I wouldn’t get out of the hospital bed,” he said.

He stooped to pick a weed from among Charlotte’s flowers.

“We’ll just go a day at a time, steady and determined, just like my steps.”