By Kimberly Hosey
Darrell Ankarlo, former host of “Ankarlo Mornings” on 92.3 FM KTAR, has won numerous talk-radio awards. He’s done music radio, appeared on Emmy award-winning TV programs, worked with many notable celebrities and spearheaded community initiatives by mobilizing his large base of loyal listeners. He’s flown an F-16 fighter jet, attended a Slipknot concert, married, raised four kids, crossed the southern border to prove a point, written books, raised millions of dollars, inspired hundreds of thousands, and pissed off just as many.
Today, he would just like to write a letter. Drive. Walk. Wake up without a pounding headache.
As his listeners came to know, Ankarlo suffered a traumatic brain injury in an automobile accident on April 8, 2009. In retrospect he says that ironically, it was his decision to embrace more of life’s opportunities that eventually led to the freak accident that would ultimately derail the life and career of the popular conservative radio jock.
“I’d seen the Jim Carrey movie Yes Man, and I nudged my wife, and I said, ‘That’s me,’” he said. Ankarlo said his celebrity status had caused him to trust people only reluctantly, and to decline most offers and invitations as a matter of course.
“You kind of create a bubble around yourself because you have thousands of people around you who want something,” he said. He says he was chagrined that he identified so strongly with the movie’s protagonist, and so he decided to follow the character’s lead. On his show the following day, Ankarlo became “Yes Man.” The idea was that if it wasn’t illegal or immoral, listeners could ask, and he’d do it. Over the next hour he agreed to, among other things, a dinner with a Valley family, a run for elected office, extreme paintball, a Slipknot concert and to attend a Diamondbacks baseball game with a Valley listener and her mother.
He was game, though sometimes a bit out of his element, like at the Slipknot concert. The mosh pit was a bit much, he said, but Ankarlo was pleasantly surprised when he went backstage to discover some of the band members were listeners of his show.
Next on his list, Darrell had agreed to help a listener treat her mother to a Diamondbacks game, arranging for tickets in one of Chase Field’s luxury suites. “We had a great time,” he said.
Darrell’s wife, Laurie, had just driven back from California and joined her husband at the game. Darrell suggested she leave her car at a midway point and ride to the game with him. After the game, Laurie decided to pick up her car and follow Darryl home. The decision might have saved her life – but it left her with a front-row seat to her husband’s horrific accident.
Laurie says it was as though the events unfolding in front of her were “in slow motion.” Since that instant, the Ankarlos’ lives have never been the same.
Darrell had just turned from 7th Street onto Thunderbird Road, was almost home, and was on top of the world. On the seat next to him was a contract renewal for three more years at KTAR. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” blasted from his car stereo, Ankarlo bellowing along. The top was down on his small convertible as Laurie watched him from behind. Other drivers laughed, some even sang along.
The next second, a truck exiting a Safeway parking lot darted across multiple lanes of traffic. Darrell was in the middle lane.
“Everybody’s slamming on their brakes, swerving around, and he’s in the middle lane, so there was nowhere for him to go, nothing for him to do,” Laurie recalls. “I see this huge pickup truck, and I see Darrell’s small car...”
She could do nothing but watch, horrified, as the truck smashed into the passenger side of Darrell’s car.
Darrell’s memory of the accident ends there. He was knocked unconscious for several minutes. In the minutes that followed he came in and out of consciousness and was only dimly aware of his surroundings.
“It really is like Swiss cheese,” Darrell says of the memory. “You still have the flavor, and you have the form and the texture, but there are all these holes in it.”
Laurie and several witnesses rushed to Darrell’s aid. Someone was praying. Darrell dimly recalls hearing him say, “Help him, Jesus, help him!” Paramedics arrived, removed him from the car and placed him onto a stretcher. Several of the emergency responders knew Darrell through his relationships with local fire and police departments.
A trip to the emergency room for an examination, CT scans and other tests revealed no obvious injuries, and Darrell was sent home, frightened, but feeling lucky.
The following Monday, he returned to his radio show. While on the air, he got a case of the hiccups, but they wouldn’t stop. This was his second severe case of hiccups since the injury.
At first, he tried to laugh it off. He even worked it into his show. “Call in – How do you get rid of hiccups?”
Eventually, a listener called and pointed out that hiccups can be triggered by brain injuries. As a precaution, Darrell scheduled an appointment to see his doctor for the following day. In the meantime, his condition continued to worsen.
“By then he was slurring his speech, having trouble remembering simple things. It was like a tumbleweed,” Laurie recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘What is going on?’ It was frightening, because here I thought he was fine, and all of a sudden it just fell apart.”
“Words came out, but they were all jumbled; they didn’t make any sense,” Darrell said.
The malady continued until eventually he was taken off the air by management during one of his shows.
After consulting doctors at the Barrow Neurological Institute Darrell learned that he had injured the complex structures in his inner-ear, which is responsible for balance, so he was unable to walk without stumbling. He had injured his brain and even sustained a bend in his brain stem, and had been left with pain, speech problems, difficulty processing information, and problems regulating his emotions.
Ambitious, Darrell attempted to power through it. He told KTAR he’d like to come back in May, but management decided it was too early. He later agreed to push for a July return, but his doctor would not give him the green light.
Traumatic brain injuries – about 25 percent of which go undiagnosed – are often called “invisible injuries.” Outsiders can’t see the effects, but with even mild traumatic brain injuries, 10 to 15 percent of patients will have long-term, often lifelong, disabilities. With moderate and severe injuries, the percentage is much higher.
Darrell talked himself back onto the air late in 2009. He knew he was done a couple of months later. He officially parted ways with KTAR in April this year.
“I knew it was over at that point,” he said. “You only get one chance in this business to be taken off the air and come back.”
The parting of ways was amicable Darrell says, but he is still angry with the circumstances.
“I’m good at my game, and I do get very angry that it’s been snatched from me,” he said. “The doctor keeps saying, ‘It’s a chapter, Darrell. This isn’t life. It’s just a chapter. It’s not the end.’”
Dealing with it hasn’t been easy. First, there’s the paradoxical nature of recovery from a traumatic brain injury: how do you mentally get over something when the organ responsible for mental processes is the thing that’s injured? Often, brain-injury patients have a difficult time realizing the full extent of their injuries. It’s enough to make anyone angry, adding to the irritability and aggression that can also be symptoms.
“It’s not me; it’s not my interior voice,” Darrell said of his occasional outbursts. “It’s like the filters all came down.”
Darrell and his family have also had to deal with his impulsiveness and lowered inhibition as a result of the injury. Loss of impulse control is common in traumatic brain-injury patients.
Darrell and Laurie have a good laugh about that one, though. Early in his recovery, Darrell had decided to accompany his wife to the plant nursery. While she browsed, he waited at the front. When Laurie returned, Darrell informed her they would be having a delivery – he’d just purchased $1,300 in palm trees.
“I was like, what the heck are you doing?” Laurie said.
The next day, Darrell and Laurie went to a meeting for traumatic brain-injury patients and their families. The therapists tentatively suggested that Laurie might want to take charge of financial matters. They were afraid Darrell would be offended.
“We burst out laughing,” Laurie recalled. “They said, ‘Oh, no. We’re too late, aren’t we?’”
“We got some nice palm trees, though!” Darrell added.
It’s become a family joke, but the incident illustrates how Darrell and Laurie have learned to cope with their lives for the past 16 months – with humor, faith, a strong partnership and with a bit of added weight on Laurie’s shoulders.
“I’ve had to kind of come in and watch out for him,” she says. “It’s hard to have to be the top dog when you’re used to being in a partnership.”
What Laurie has really taken exception to, she said, is the “common knowledge” that a marriage in which one partner has suffered a brain injury is probably on the rocks. They’re reminded that “there’s still a long road,” as if, even if they’re fine now, they won’t be months or years from now.
“I keep saying, ‘Can’t you understand? We don’t have a typical marriage,’” Laurie said. “We’ve gone through hardships, and we’ll get through this.”
An ongoing source of support for both Darrell and Laurie has been their ability to provide support to others. Neither can stand the thought of stagnating or of not giving back.
“We feel like, as long as we can give, we’re guilty if we don’t give,” Laurie said.
“We’ve always been an outlet,” Darrell added. “We’ve lived our whole adult lives believing that you give. Giving back on the air has always been the goal. Sure, the goal is entertaining people, being provocative, but it’s helping people along the way.”
This is his lifeblood, but this is also where the problem is, Darrell said.
“Sitting on the sidelines makes me angry. There have got to be other things to do to help people until I get another show or write another book,” he said.
Darrell is frustrated he can’t nurture his connection with his listeners. On the one hand, they’ve helped facilitate his recovery. On the other, Darrell fears they may not always understand when he isn’t able to communicate.
“Listeners have really helped in the healing process, sending emails and Facebook. They’ll send letters to the station and the station will forward them, and you know what? Every day you get up and you prepare a show, and part of it’s based on the news today, and another part of it’s based on just entertaining and having a good time – but most of it is just who I am. It’s how I relate to you and you to me. It’s really nice to see listeners return that.”
However, Darrell has a hard time keeping in touch with his listener base, and not just because he’s off the air. Visual strain, fatigue, chronic pain and difficulties processing information, all common symptoms of traumatic brain injuries, impede communication.
“There are thousands on Twitter, thousands on Facebook, and they all write,” he said, sounding both touched and fatigued. “I’m not at a place where I can write that much back yet. Things get so overwhelming that I just shut down.”
While there isn’t anything that Darrell would consider good about his injury, it’s unsurprising that his relentless nature finds a few bright spots in its aftermath. For one, he has a closer bond with his son, Adam, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after an explosive device went off while he was serving as a Marine Lance Corporal in Iraq.
Traumatic brain injuries are fairly common among military personnel, but they’re often missed, especially if the person isn’t knocked unconscious, and they tend to be lumped in with other “head and neck” injuries.
“It’s not something that’s talked about; it’s not acknowledged,” Laurie said. “They still don’t have anyone here telling them, ‘Okay, this is what you can expect; I know what you’re going through.’”
Darrell and Adam, unlike many sufferers of this type of injury, have someone else who understands. Darrell said he would like to raise awareness about traumatic brain injuries as well as other difficulties military personnel endure.
The injury may have compromised some of Darrell’s radio talents, but it’s knocked a whole new awareness into his heart.
“That’s one big thing. I’ve always wanted to help, from a head and heart point of view, and as an outlet of my faith,” he said. “But now it’s really there in my heart. I can look at someone with this injury and say, ‘I know what you’re going through.’”
Understanding, connections, is what it’s all about, he says. The ability to feel the plight of others more acutely only makes him more frustrated that he can’t get back into his element. His says his desire to get back on the air is heightened by the issues currently facing our state. Darrell’s latest book, Illegals: The Unacceptable Cost of America’s Failure to Control Its Borders, hits stores this month.
“How about being an American first? Heck, how about being a human first, and let the rest of the stuff kind of break down around that?” he suggested. This is the outlook that has flourished in the forge of his struggles, he said.
“I’d be back on radio right this second, if a position opened and doctors said I was ready to go,” Darrell said. “I hope listeners know that I appreciate the time they invested in me, and I’m not done. Something else is going to open up.”
