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As a result of the brain damage caused by encephalitis, Chris began to suffer seizures and was diagnosed with epilepsy.

Chris stayed in the hospital ten days. Debbie sat faithfully by his bed. "I began to wonder, How am I going to make it? How can I keep it all together? How is Chris going to be different? I didn't want to question God; I really tried to trust him—but some days it was so difficult." One day Debbie was so overwhelmed, she drove to her mother's house. "He can't die. He's just so sick," she sobbed. "He doesn't know me. He thinks everybody's out to get him."

Then there was the day when Chris reached for some ice cream with a fork. "You ever tasted this before?" he stuttered to Debbie. "This is good!"

"Yes," she replied. "It's ice cream. You like it."

Poking his fingers into the spaghetti, he complained, "This is messy."

Debbie handed Chris the fork and said, "Try using this."

Chris had to relearn so many things. Debbie had to educate him on the purpose of toilets and toilet paper and showers.

"I thought once they diagnosed him and treated the virus, Chris would revert to his old self," Debbie says. "But this new self was the one sticking around."

When Chris was finally released from the hospital, he and Debbie believed the worst was behind them. Yet the months and years to come would prove to be equally, if not more, challenging.

Debbie swallowed most of the emotions she faced regarding how different Chris had become. "I was the one holding the family together," she says. She took over the household and parenting responsibilities, as well as becoming a full-time caregiver.

Chris wasn't allowed to drive and had a difficult time speaking normally for the first six months following his illness. While regular speech therapy helped him eventually regain many basic language skills, he struggled to remember the simplest words—including the names of his kids.

But it was Chris's out-of-control emotions, a result of both the brain injury and the seizure medication, that most wearied and frustrated Debbie.

"He'd get very angry with the boys—almost violent," Debbie says. "It was so difficult to support him as a wife yet help him see that he'd gone overboard with his anger. He'd also cry all the time—at commercials, at television shows. Sometimes he'd cry for no reason. In the first 15 years of our marriage, I think I saw him cry twice. Suddenly I was seeing him cry daily."

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