Steve Abbott, a veteran South Elgin police officer, loved softball and the outdoors. But Lou Gehrig’s disease robbed him of the use of his body. Now bedridden and unable to speak, Abbott lives each day to its fullest in a new way and refuses to give up on life.
Steve Abbott and his wife Louise. | Photo by Kathy Plonka
By Dennis Robaugh
Steve Abbott’s dreams are cruel.
Some nights, with his service revolver hugging his right hip, Abbott steers his squad car through the streets of his hometown. The comforting, familiar landmarks of South Elgin are always there, as are the out of the ordinary sights invisible to all but the eye of a seasoned cop.
These are the same streets where he looked down a gun barrel at almost certain death. The same streets he played in as a child.
Even with his eyes closed, Abbott knows exactly where he is.
Other nights, he hears the satisfying ding of an aluminum softball bat blasting another pitch over the heads of his opponents, far over the outfield, over the fence and beyond.
But when these dreams fade with the night and morning’s first light drills into his room, Abbott wakes, much as he has every morning for the last three years, and he does not move.
“I always dream that I’m healthy and still working and doing everything that I used to do,” Abbott says. “Sometimes it’s difficult when I awaken to the reality that I’m unable to do them.”
Five years ago, Abbott came down with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS — a little-understood, degenerative and fatal disease of the nervous system. Abbott is among the 20 percent of ALS patients who live more than three years after diagnosis. The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is another.
ALS has stripped Abbott of his muscle and seized his lungs. Bedridden now, machines and plastic tubes help perform his bodily functions. Abbott is fed three times a day through a tube in his stomach, and a ventilator pumps air directly into his trachea. He comes down with pneumonia frequently and must take strong antibiotics.
Last year, he spent more than five months in Sherman Hospital. He’s been hospitalized three times this year, most recently last week.
“Steve is in constant pain. A constant stiffness,” says his wife Louise. “It’s an icky type of pain.”
Some folks who face a shortened life in agony or an incurable disease decide to make their peace with this life and move forward with death. But Abbott fervently disagrees with those who give up or give in, especially those who choose assistant suicide with a Kevorkian contraption or a mercy killing at the hands of a loved one.
Abbott — passionate in his decision to live, to endure the pain and the non-existent prospects for a recovery — represents another side to how a man determines the quality of his life. It’s a rare viewpoint provided by a man in an exceptionally rare circumstance.
“I’ve had a good life, but I’m not ready to quit,” Abbott says, painstakingly putting his thoughts into words, letter by letter, on a computer screen. “This is better than the alternative.”
Abbott, 44, lays almost completely immobile now, his pale, bone-thin arms stretched out across his sheets. Behind a pair of eyeglasses, his bright-blue eyes are free to roam. He speaks through a computer called a Communimate. He spells out what he wants to say — sometimes one letter at a time — by pointing a laser light clicker at an alphabet grid on a screen. He manipulates the clicker, affixed to a headband, with the muscles beneath his brow.
Abbott, however, also communicates vividly with his limited range of facial expressions. Raised eyebrows, smiling eyes and even tears are striking substitutes for the deep voice people could once hear over the din of a noisy room.
“You should never give up,” Abbott says. “You should always hope.
“I feel (Dr. Kevorkian) is taking advantage of people that have given up and should not. … It makes me angry because you only hear one side. You always hear how he’s helping people.
“I always put up a fight.”
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| Patrolman Steve Abbott |
The Lucky Policeman
Before ALS, an episode in 1976 may have been the fight of his life.
Three days after the new year, Patrolman Steve Abbott responded to a break-in at a home on Mark Street. Another officer went in the front door and Abbott — still a newcomer on South Elgin’s police force — went into the back yard to prevent the man from fleeing. After a few minutes, Abbott went through the back door and found the other officer on the floor fighting with the intruder.
“I saw that he had (the officer’s) revolver in his hand so I slid across the floor toward him to take away the gun,” Abbott told a reporter a few days later. “As I approached him, he turned his wrist, pointed the gun at me and pulled the trigger. I was no more than a few feet away when he fired.”
The revolver clicked twice.
“Later, we found out that somehow during the struggle the cylinder of the gun had opened and all the bullets fell out of the gun before it snapped closed again.”
Abbott — a brawny, physical man — took down the suspect but not before taking a knee to the groin.
“That night wasn’t my time,” says Abbott today, reflecting on whether he lives now on borrowed time. “I was very lucky.”
More than 6-foot tall and 220 pounds, the young, blond patrolman cut an imposing figure.
“I always wanted to be a police officer,” Abbott says. He served on the force for 17 years. “I was an MP in the Army. I always liked helping people.”
“He commanded a lot of respect, too,” Louise says. “Not just for his size but for his personality, too.”
An eager Abbott spent his first day of police work with Larry Jones, who’s now a lieutenant. The two men had gone to Larkin High School together, and Abbott was best man at Jones’ wedding.
“He was here when I got to work,” Jones recalls. “And I got the feeling he’d been waiting a long time.”
Eventually, Abbott worked as the juvenile officer. Jones remembers one group of mischief-making kids who were playing football with a ratty, old ball.
“Steve went out and got them a better football,” he says. “He can be very loud and very gruff. But he had a certain soft side to him, too.
“You know, he’s still the same way that he was — caustic. When I go to see him and he types on that computer, he still cuts on people.”
Signs of a rugged lifestyle are still evident on Abbott’s body.
A thick, white scar cuts across the back of his head, a keepsake from pool cute wielded in a bar fight many years ago.
Another scar runs across his right knee, the result of a football injury during his Army days. The wound has been aggravated several times by his many hours on the softball field.
Abbott loved playing softball. He helped to build South Elgin’s ballfields. He loved doing anything outdoors.
Not until the ALS diagnosis did Abbott and his wife understand what it means to live.
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| Steve Abbott communicates with this small device on his forehead. Photo by Kathy Plonka |
Frightening Moments
“I took things for granted. Being able to get up in the morning, have coffee with my wife, get ready for work,” Abbott says. “This all came to an abrupt end early in 1990, when after a fall in my driveway I began having trouble with my balance and loss of strength in my arms and legs.”
After several examinations, doctors identified ALS as the culprit.
“I had to retire. This was very difficult for me and the first of many changes my life would take.”
Friends surprised Abbott and his wife with a 10-day trip to Hawaii that summer.
“After our return home, we resumed our attempt at a normal, day-to-day life,” Abbott recalls. “The summer was spent in our backyard swimming pool. Louise and I were in the pool every possible moment. As I look back, that summer was the best but it went by much too quickly.”
New obstacles came in the fall as the disease stole from his body. Less strength and balance. More frustration.
“The holidays came and went,” Abbott says. “I found myself becoming more and more emotional and less able to do the everyday things all of us take for granted.”
By the summer of ’91, Abbott could no longer walk. Speaking became increasingly difficult.
“It was becoming more apparent to me how important each day was that I did get out of bed and to make the most of it,” Abbott says.
ALS afflicts each patient differently, and the sufferer must go through a series of acceptances. Each loss of ability forced another change in Abbott’s attitude, another emotional adjustment.
The summer of 1992 proved to be the most difficult and the most frightening.
“All of a sudden I had trouble breathing, and my wife had to call the paramedics,” Abbott recalls. “I was hospital bound and scared more than I had ever been in my life, thinking each breath might be my last.”
Confused and frightened, Abbott fought the doctors and nurses who were trying to insert a tube down his throat to help him breathe. The docs fought back, knocking out one of Abbott’s teeth.
“They had to say, ‘If we don’t do this you’re going to die,’” Louise recalls. “He fought so hard. That’s why he got his tooth knocked out.”
Abbott would be in and out of the hospital several times that year. He came close to dying several times because of pneumonia and bleeding in his right lung. Doctors eventually removed two-thirds of that lung, closed his esophagus — cutting off his waning speech — and sent him home. Now, almost completely bereft of the use of his body, Abbott faced new worries.
“At this point, I began to worry about Louise,” Abbott says, “and all the upcoming problems and how they would be handled.”
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| Photo by Kathy Plonka |
Dearly Beloved
Louise is a slight woman of 45 with long, brown hair. Her husband’s ALS changed her, too, as if every bit of strength he lost found its way to her.
“I used to be too nice, too quiet. Now I just say what I want to say and I don’t think about it,” she says. “I am stronger now.”
The bond between them grew as his body diminished. They met about 16 years ago when she babysat the police chief’s children. This summer, they celebrated nine years of marriage.
“For our anniversary,” Louise whispers as she opens a photo album, “he gave me a tiger. I’ve always loved tigers. They brought it to the house and into the front door. She was mine for two hours.
“How many people get to have their fantasies come true?”
Abbott dispatches friends on his errands, like the tiger quest. Almost every day, there's a vase of flowers waiting for Louise, brought by a friend.
“He gets more done from that bed than most people do going out every day,” Louise says.
The bed is surrounded with reminders of a sportsman’s life and signs of life with ALS. A first-place trophy from a benefit softball tournament two years ago in Abbott’s honor sits on a table to his right, beside the ventilator that helps him breathe.
Collector plates of baseball greats line one part of his wall. An Old Style beer salute to Old Comiskey Park hangs on another. A cockatiel perches in a cage near the doorway. Their dog Buffy sleeps on the floor near the foot of the bed. Everywhere, there are photos.
Next to the wall opposite the bed, an entertainment center holds softball trophies and a TV for the Cubs games. On a shelf beneath his collection of records, action movies and other films sit boxes of oversized Q-tips, drain sponges and cleaning kits.
“Steve is the same person. His body has changed,” Louise says, placing his limp, slender hand in hers. “But his mind is the same.
“His mind has become very sharp because that’s all he can use. Which is a good thing,” Louis says, laughing, “because I’m getting older and I think I’m losing mine.”
Since getting sick, life is more mental and emotional than physical. Abbott and his wife fill their days with new undertakings and interests.
“Now we do the things we can do,” she says. “Instead of him playing a softball game and me watching, we collect the plates and watch videos of sports. … He reads sports trivia of any kind.
“We listen to a lot of music,” she says. “I like classical music and once in a while I can slip one of those in on him.”
These proxies are pale substitutes for a robust life of action, and the days drag on — especially ones where he’s suffering more pain than usual.
“You keep your mind busy and hope for the best,” Abbott says.
He writes now, too, because putting feelings into words helps to ease his mind.
“Steve found out Mickey Mantle was having a transplant and he wrote him a letter,” Louis says. “He writes to friends, thank-you notes to paramedics, to the barber who comes in and trims his beard. A few weeks ago, he began a book about his experiences.”
“I still have to write about the good years,” Abbott says, “before getting sick.”
They share moments of despair, but they get through them together.
“If he can give me a smile, I’m OK,” says Louise, her voice softening as she looks into her husband’s eyes. “How can you not get strength from something like that?
“I need him as much as he needs me. … He gives me the same things he always did — the love, the strength, the friendship, the caring. He’s still the strongest person I know. That part hasn’t changed. When you look at other people’s marriages, I always feel really lucky.
“Yep, he’s a keeper.”
Sometimes Louise sleeps on Abbott’s bed, and he will nudge her with the toes of his left foot when he needs something.
“He’ll wake up with a real sweet expression on his face, and I’ll ask him if he’s had a sweet dream.”
Though there are new, experimental ALS therapies for which the Abbotts are being considered, there is no cure. Louise strokes her husband’s arm and holds his hand as he explains why — despite the debilitation and pain — he wants to keep living.
“All the time I’ve been bedridden, I dream of the day when there will be a cure found for this disease, and I’ll be able to get back to some kind of normal life and the ability to leave the house and go to somewhere besides the hospital.”
His lips fluttering slightly, his eyes wet and his brow working furiously to type, Abbott’s mind and his heart race so much faster than he can spell.
“Honey, I love you with all my everything and I could not or would not want to live without you. You are the reason I’m fighting day after day to beat this damn disease.”
Postscript: Steve Abbott died on Oct. 19, 1995, almost three months after this feature was published.