Free The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome by Shonda Schilling, Curt Schilling Page B

I knew what everyone had been watching all night.
    “His foot is bleeding!” she said. “They keep showing his foot on television.” I had horrible visions of those stitches being ripped out and that ankle swollen something fierce. But there was too much excitement for Curt to worry about his foot. Something special was in the air.
    Even though we were winning by a lot, the wives from last year knew better than to relax. They had been in the same exact situation the year before when the Yankees had won. There would be no such fate for our rivals from New York this year. We went on to win game six, which Curt had pitched, as well as the decisive game seven the following day.
    When the last out was made the celebration began, but it didn’t last long, because we had to get on a plane and go home. Later that night I asked Curt, “Hey, where’s the sock?”
    “I threw it in the garbage!” He hadn’t realized that the whole world had been focused on that sock.
    Next stop: the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. The first two games were at home. The Sox went ahead the first game and were up in the series 1–0. Everyone around us was thrilled. I had never seen so much excitement over a team in all my years in baseball. People put up signs all over our driveway and actually set up lawn chairs at the end of it. Homemade signs were posted by locals along the entire route Curt would travel to the ballpark—signs that read, “Bring us a ring, we will make you king!” The kids’ playground at school was a sea of Red Sox shirts.
    Curt decided to do the surgery one more time. He was in pain and uncomfortable, which was to be expected considering that the procedure was performed on a table in the clubhouse, but the night before he was to pitch again,Curt and I stuck to his routine so that he could get into game mode. Mostly that meant him going to bed late, then reading reports in the morning and getting his game face ready. I put the kids to bed and went to bed myself. No matter how much fun the World Series might be, I still had to get enough sleep because the kids had to be at school in the morning.
    I woke up at 6 A.M. that morning to find Curt wide awake and staring at me, which was very unusual for him on the morning of a game.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “I’m in so much pain,” he replied, “I can’t walk. I was up the whole night. My ankle is swollen and it’s killing me.”
    “Why didn’t you wake me?” I begged.
    “I didn’t want you to not sleep either,” he said.
    It was frightening enough to see Curt up before noon on a day when he was pitching. But to see him in sheer agony left me feeling helpless.
    “Who can I call?” I offered. “What do you need me to do?”
    I had been with this man for fifteen years. I knew two things for certain: one, he wanted more than anything to pitch, and two, he must really be in pain if he was up this early. I got him some pain medicine and put an ice pack on his ankle. He called the trainer, told him there was no way he would be able to pitch that night, and went back to sleep. When he woke at one in the afternoon, he was still in agony.
    “Is there anything I can do?” I asked him.
    “I just have to go to the ballpark,” he said. “I’m so uncomfortable, there’s no way I’m going to pitch. I can’t even walk.”
    I carried his stuff to the car and he left. There were none of the usual goodluck kisses, none of the silly, rhymie little poems I liked to give him to make him laugh. He looked like a kid who’d been waiting all week to go to the carnival and got sick on the day. I tried to think of something to lift his spirits, but I knew deep down that there was nothing I could do. I knew it was going to kill him to go down the driveway and come across the fans holdingtheir signs, waiting to wave him goodbye. It was cool for me to see them, and I wasn’t even pitching, but in Curt’s state that day, he probably felt like he was about to let