Portrait of a Marriage: "Forget Me Not"

A virus threatened to take Chris Maxwell's life. Instead, it took his mind, and left Chris and Debbie scrambling to pick up the pieces.

By Corrie Cutrer

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The week of March 6, 1996, started out normal for Chris Maxwell. The driven pastor of a small, tight-knit church, he lived in Orlando with his wife, Debbie, and their three sons, Taylor, Aaron, and Graham. But within days, Chris began to suffer from excruciating headaches and a fever. Both Chris and Debbie thought it was just the flu, but Chris was rarely sick. "He never missed a day of work or an appointment. He never took medicine," Debbie says.

Then Chris began to experience episodes of fainting. He also became delusional. "He thought he saw rabbits running through the house," Debbie remembers. "He called the associate pastor and became upset about the steeple on our church. We didn't have a steeple."

After dropping off their kids at her parents' house, Debbie rushed Chris to the hospital, where physicians ran a battery of tests. "They had me talk to a psychiatrist about Chris," says Debbie. "They thought maybe he'd had a breakdown."

They also suspected a drug overdose. "I was so messed up mentally," Chris recalls. "My face was twitching. My eyes watering." He felt trapped inside his own body, not realizing how seriously ill he'd become. "I remember my first MRI," he says. "All these women were standing and staring at me. Then they put me in this tunnel. Why are they doing this to me? I thought. They've kidnapped me. There's nothing wrong with me."

Yet within hours Chris couldn't even form coherent sentences. "He would try to talk," says Debbie. "But his sentences weren't words; they were syllables. It was like scrambled eggs. Nothing made sense. That really scared me, and I kept thinking, What's wrong with him?"

"I thought they'd just give me a shot and I'd be on my way home," says Chris. "So I became angry and argued against every test. I couldn't understand why they were treating me as if I were going to die."

Even though Debbie was worried, she had moved into denial. Until they performed a spinal tap. "I couldn't deny it, then. I knew Chris was seriously in trouble. And I became terrified."

"I wanted my Chris back. And I was upset that I couldn't have him. That I was stuck with this new Chris."

Eventually, doctors diagnosed Chris with viral encephalitis, the medical term for inflammation of the brain. But this wasn't the external kind that comes from a mosquito bite. This was the internal virus. No one could explain how Chris had contracted it. They knew only that for some reason his immune system was unable to fight the virus.

The layout of a normal, healthy brain is similar to that of a roadmap, with straight lines, streets, and roads. But imagine someone using a thick marker to cover that neatly drawn map with haphazard scribbles. Instead of seeing lines, the only thing visible are patches of white. That would closely describe the MRI scan and condition of the left temporal lobe of Chris's brain.

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Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 2006, Fall, Page 50

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