Norfolk's manager tending to a job and an ill spouse

Regina Williams with her husband at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. (Chris Tyree photos | The Virginian-Pilot)

By Harry Minium
The Virginian-Pilot

Baltimore

It's 4:30 a.m. and Regina V.K. Williams has been awake for half an hour. Dressed in sweats and Nike flip-flops, with a canned protein drink in hand, she sits down before her computer and begins reading e-mails, reports and proposals.

She is the Norfolk city manager, the CEO of a $1.2 billion organization with nearly 5,000 employees. Yet on this August morning, she is running City Hall from 241 miles away, in an apartment next to Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Williams has spent most of the past four months in Baltimore while her husband, Drew, has battled a life-threatening illness.

In December, Drew Williams walked into Sentara Norfolk General Hospital with what he thought was a bad cold. An active man who in recent years traveled from coast to coast to play in tennis tournaments, he hasn't walked since.

Drew Williams

Diagnosed with a severe infection of the colon, he has been through surgery twice, has suffered repeated kidney failure, and has spent months on a breathing machine in intensive care.

In late May, desperate to help him, Regina Williams transferred her husband from Norfolk to the hospital in Maryland. She remained at his side, placing Assistant City Manager Stanley A. Stein in charge of day-to-day operations. Yet she hardly relinquished control. A hands-on manager, Williams scrutinizes every major decision at City Hall.

Critics call her a micro manager, a charge she vehemently denies.

Although the mayor suggested she take a leave of absence, she didn't.

Vice Mayor Anthony L. Burfoot said he thinks he knows why: "She's afraid she would lose her job. The last two years, people have really been after her."

If anything, the demands on her have increased during her husband's illness - a taxpayer revolt, challenges with major developments downtown, rising violent crime.

Williams acknowledges she is under immense pressure but shrugs it off. "Whenever I start to feel sorry for myself," she said, "I think about a man who hasn't walked since December."

Before visiting her husband, Drew, in Johns Hopkins Hospital, Regina V.K. Williams prays. “Things happen for a reason,” she said. “We got him to Baltimore at the right time.”

NORFOLK

It was Dec. 15, and the Williams family was preparing for its fifth consecutive Christmas on a cruise ship.

Drew had been under the weather with what everyone thought was a cold. Go to the doctor, Regina told her husband as she headed out to finish Christmas shopping. I'm not going on a cruise with a sick puppy.

Later that afternoon, her son, Drew Michael Williams, called to say doctors had sent his father to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. "You need to get right there," he said.

Doctors discovered he had an infection, called diverticulosis. He was so dehydrated his kidneys had shut down.

Drew, 66, has diabetes and had undergone heart bypass surgery a few years earlier.

But those problems did not completely explain why the infection, which should have been cured with antibiotics, kept getting worse.

He had surgery New Year's Eve. The infection was so bad doctors could not complete the operation. We'll try to cure him with antibiotics, they said.

It was the busiest time of year for a city manager: budget season. A protest group called the Norfolk Tea Party II was demanding a large real estate tax cut, saying the city's budget was bloated. The attacks at times became harsh and personal.

As Regina sat on the stage at Granby High School at a tax rate hearing, speakers looked her in the eyes and criticized not just her spending priorities, but her supposed lack of caring for homeowners hit hard by rising taxes. Some called for her to resign.

At another meeting, in the midst of her speech, hundreds got up and left in protest.

Regina, city manager since January 1999, is accustomed to being under fire. She has been rebuked by City Council members for leaving key positions in city government vacant too long. It took her two years to hire a planning director, three years for a new recreation director.

As she toiled in her office, family, friends and half a dozen city employees came by the hospital to sit with Drew.

For every bit of progress he made, a setback followed. One afternoon, she watched nurses put a respirator tube down his throat and thought, "Oh God, he just doesn't deserve to go through this."

Finally, in March, he began to improve. Doctors thought they had cured the infection and sent him home in April. But 16 days later, as a group of relatives wheeled him around their Lafayette Shores neighborhood, his daughter-in-law, a nurse, noticed that he appeared far too listless. She took his blood pressure, which was alarmingly low. She called 911.

Doctors determined that he had another infection and sent him back to intensive care. Doctors told the family they would try more antibiotics.

Regina began to wonder: "How many times can your body rally?" Friends urged her to move Drew to Johns Hopkins.

A week later, their newest grandchild arrived - a girl, Drew Brooklyn. In that joyous moment, a fear entered Regina's mind: "Every time a baby is born, he or she replaces somebody who dies."

"You start to think about that, then you say, 'Stop it,' and you go on."

By early May, City Council had agreed on a 16-cent reduction in the real estate tax rate, the largest in South Hampton Roads. That eased criticism from the Tea Party.

After finishing the budget and getting the approval from doctors in Norfolk, Regina headed to Baltimore with her husband.

BALTIMORE

It was June, and dressed in a yellow hospital gown, her hands covered in latex gloves to prevent the spread of infection, Regina ben t over the bed and smile d at her husband. The look of affection he return ed besp oke a lifetime spent together.

"Love you," she sa id.

"Love you more," Drew rasp ed weakly through the respirator tube inserted down his throat.

They have been through much in their 39 years of marriage. Three kids, 10 grandchildren, jobs in their native Detroit and Richmond, San Jose, Calif., and now Norfolk.

But the crisis they faced when he arrived in Baltimore was more daunting tha n either had ever experienced. Drew arrived terribly weak from the bumpy, five-hour ambulance ride from Norfolk. He had so little strength that he could not even turn over in bed.

He found himself on the same frustrating yo-yo that had bedeviled him in Norfolk - he would get better for a few days or weeks, then go back to intensive care. On Memorial Day, he was up and playing board games with his sister. A few days later, he was back on a respirator.

Doctors wanted to do surgery, but, like the doctors in Norfolk, they feared he was too weak. Finally, on Father's Day, they determined that they needed to do surgery or he would not survive.

It was a complicated procedure in which surgeons cut out massive amounts of infected tissue - "the seven longest hours of my life," Regina said.

Would it be enough?

NORFOLK

As spring turned into summer, and Regina remained in Baltimore, the pressure from Norfolk increased.

An investigation into the possible misuse of funds by a non profit group was savaged as a "whitewash" by some council members. A deadly attack by a mob in East Ocean View heightened complaints about police protection and city services in that area. Delays launching a redevelopment plan for neighborhoods near Wards Corner drew criticism.

Privately, some council members began to suggest it might be time for Regina to go. At a community meeting in East Ocean View, a longtime neighborhood activist called for her ouster.

That infuriated daughter Traci Massie.

"How can they be so callous?" she said. "If you were in the same position, you would put family first.

"She works so hard for this city. She loves Norfolk. Can't they see that?"

Regina continued working at her extended-stay hotel suite in Baltimore, staying up as late as 2 a.m. and rising again two hours later.

In the course of a two-hour interview, her BlackBerry beeped 37 times to announce incoming e-mail and rang six more times with phone calls.

She seemed confident she could juggle it all. "I have enough pride in my work that if I thought the city was suffering, I would step down," she said.

Yet she acknowledged that the decision to continue working was a "selfish" one. "Work is a respite for me. When Drew was the most critical, there was nothing I could do. It was in the hands of the doctors and of God. For very selfish reasons, I needed to keep working. I needed to do something other than sit and mope."

Since Drew's surgery, he has made slow but sure progress.

In early August, when it was clear that Drew was improving and the City Council summer vacation was about to end, Mayor Paul Fraim met with Regina. The city needed her back full time - soon, he said.

The three Williams children agreed to take turns staying with their father during the week so their mother could return to work full time.

"We've come up with a rotation so that he doesn't go a day without a visitor," Massie said. "It's important to us, to my mom, that he not feel abandoned."

Regina returned to Norfolk full time two weeks ago and now spends her weekends in Baltimore. Drew's recovery could take up to a year.

"The physical therapists tell us that for every day you've been in bed, it takes approximately four days to recover," she said. "And he's been in bed almost nine months."

She hopes that next month, he will be transferred to a rehabilitation center in Hampton Roads.

Three weeks ago, nurses wheeled him outside for the first time since May. "He had this glow; his eyes were sparkling," Regina said. "He looked almost angelic."

Later that night, a childhood friend flew in from Detroit and surprised Drew. "It was a wonderful day," Regina said.

The next day, he got weaker and was back on the breathing machine temporarily. Two steps forward, one step back.

Regina said she has no regrets for not taking him to Johns Hopkins sooner. Had it been necessary, she said, she would have quit her job to take him there.

"Things happen for a reason," she said. "We got him to Baltimore at the right time."

The past nine months have left her exhausted, she conceded. Yet she doesn't plan to retire anytime soon.

She said her time in Baltimore has reinforced her determination to change the dynamic in so many Norfolk neighborhoods, where the poor are isolated from the better-off and from broader opportunity.

The city has no formal policy encouraging affordable housing in upscale projects.

"We shouldn't set aside a four-block area for public housing," she said. "It should be integrated into the community. I want to craft a housing policy and do something to better the lives of our public housing residents before I leave."

That, and watch her husband walk through their front door.

Harry Minium, (757) 446-2371, harry.minium@pilotonline.com

Timeline

Dec. 15

Doctors discover that Drew Williams has an infection called diverticulosis. He is so dehydrated that his kidneys have shut down.

Dec. 31

Drew has surgery. The infection is so bad that doctors cannot complete the operation. They opt to try to cure him with antibiotics.

Winter-spring