****WARNING******
THIS POST HAS GRAPHIC PICTURES
A year ago tomorrow, I was in a car accident. My daughter was in the back seat, and I was 6 months pregnant. Here's what happened:
Mark had just wrapped up another busy tax season, so we planned to take a trip up north to his brother's cabin. He and his brothers like to take a cross-country atv ride to get to the cabin. It's 65 miles and, in order to do it, they have to be dropped off at a starting point and the truck and trailer driven by highway to the cabin. Lyla and I had dropped them off and was about an hour down the highway when my right rear tire blew. I was on a 2 lane divided highway, going the speed limit (75 mph) which is pretty fast for a wreck. When the tire blew, it veered my truck to the right and I hit a berm of dirt which caused the truck to roll. We were told a variety of different stories about how many times the truck rolled (by eye witnesses) but what we THINK is it rolled once. I was wearing my seatbelt, but probably because of the way the it rolled my head became pinned under the driver side door post. The truck was on the driver side. To make matters more complicated for the first responders,my truck was also wedged between two posts of this sign:
An incredible combination of people stopped to help me. A pediatrician, a registered nurse, a couple of off duty police officers. A few months after the accident, Mark and I were lucky enough to have the chance to call and personally thank each of these individuals. THAT's a set of stories for a different time. Lyla was in the back seat, middle in her car seat. She was asleep when it happened. I am told she never even cried. The pediatrician immediately pulled her from the truck. She didn't have a single bump, bruise, or cut. She was completely unscathed. She was sent by ambulance to the closest hospital north.
Meanwhile Mark was reaching a spot with cell service. Bystanders were trying hard to reach him. (On a side note- Lyla was wearing something called a Road ID. Its a velcro band that has an ID tag with her name and contact phone numbers in the event that she ever gets lost. I always imagined it would be of use if I ever lost her at the zoo. When the paramedics took her clothes off to check her over, they found it on her ankle, and thus the calls to family started.) Mark finally gets the call that I had been in an accident and he needed to come. No one at the scene would tell him how bad I was. They weren't sure I was going to live. Can you blame them? Look at the truck:
I'm told it took somewhere between 1-2 hours to extract me from the truck. They had to wait for all the right equipment, an ambulance and a helicopter to be in place before they could pull me out because of how I was pinned. Even though I'm told I was awake and alert the entire time, I consider it a huge blessing that I have almost no recollection of this time.
I say almost no recollection, because I have a few memories, and they are very, very painful. In the emotional sense. The physical pain of total body trauma is nothing compared to the emotional pain of not knowing the state of your child. Especially when YOUR state is NOT.VERY. PROMISING.
Mark still had to ride 2 hours to their destination, get Lyla from the hospital, and then drive south back to Phoenix. My heart aches for the pain and worry he suffered during this time. Not knowing if he was going to make it to me or what he would find once he got to me. Relief is not a strong enough word to describe how he felt to get Lyla.
There was a lot of confusion and miscommunication surrounding my transport to the hospital. There are 3 hospitals with the same name here in Phoenix, so my family had difficulty getting accurate information, which I'm sure was frustrating.
My greatest blessing is the preservation of my babies. Considering how badly injured my body was, it is a miracle that my little Max is the healthy, happy baby he is today.
Considering how badly my scalp was injured I am incredibly blessed that my skull was not fractured. There was no brain damage. I know there are couples who have to face that trial, but I am SO grateful that 6 years into our marriage Mark isn't married to a vegetable.
Mark and his brother had been in the truck just an hour earlier. I am so grateful they were not in the truck when the tire blew. It's hard to say how things would have been different, but I am grateful I was the only one injured.
Somehow I managed to not hit any other traffic. There had been vehicles around me on the road. I am grateful no one else was involved.
My parents were supposed to be with my brothers in California on a vacation but last minute my dad had to go on a business trip, he had just returned the night before. They were able to be at my side right away.
Even though I sustained a spinal cord injury, I am not paralyzed. My leg healed almost immediately, and even though my left arm is slow to recover, it is making progress all the time. Also, typically spinal cord injuries affect both sides of the body but for some reason only one side of my body was affected. My injuries present more like a stroke.
Speaking of which, there is an artery that goes from your neck to your head that was crushed in the accident. (There is one on each side). It could have potentially caused a stroke, but did not.
My head is shaved and put back together, but I wound up with a plastic surgeon who did the best job possible to keep my scars down. If one day I feel up to it, he can do reconstructive surgery to minimize those scars. Right now it is no where near a priority.
I have so many other reasons to be grateful. But you get the idea.
I don't feel this is an exercise in finding ways to be grateful in the face of adversity. I just feel truly grateful.
Once at the hospital, they determined my neck was broken. They put me in traction. Modern medicine has come a long way, but this is by no means sophisticated. They clamp a vice to your head. And I mean right through your scalp to your skull. Then they start hanging weights on it to pull your head away from your shoulders and straighten your spine.
This was to prep me for spinal surgery. You can't move. Movement such as turning your head is not only ridiculously painful, but could result in severing your spinal cord....paralysis. I spent 36 hours like this. See my face and hair? Yeah, they didn't clean me up hardly at all. My scalp was still, um, open. I know. Ew.
This is the type of hardware I now have in my spine. The blue plate fuses the two vertebrae into one, held together by some serious screws.
This is the day after the surgery. My head is shaved and scalp all put back together. Still no sign of movement in my left arm. It is such a strange sensation to tell your body to do something and have zero response. The doctor would say squeeze my hand, and I would fully expect my hand to squeeze, and nothing. My baby is still moving inside my belly, so I'm still ok.
This was a few more days later. Probably in between bandage changes. I don't think there was anything on me that WASN'T swollen.
As Mark puts it - I joined a very exclusive gym.
I worked really hard to get strength and movement back in my body. Now listen, when you live in the Inpatient Neuro Rehab unit at Barrow's neurological hospital, you see lots of people who are worse than you. We are talking para and quadriplegics for life. But a lot of the staff felt extra bad for me because of that tiny baby going for the ride inside me.
I tried hard not to lose my sense of humor. I'm told that I wasn't a lot of fun to be with in the beginning. I blame it on the drugs. Anyway, I took a bunch of trips to the plastic surgeon who stitched up my head and neck incision. Of course I checked out the breast implants while I was there.
Friends, family, members of our church came to visit me while I was in the hospital. The kindness that was shown to us is overwhelming. Even now, a year later. But one of my favorite visitors was my baby girl.
This is a hard thing to articulate. I wanted to see her, and I wanted her to come. But when she came, she didn't want me and I was in so much pain still that it was hard to be near her. She wanted to climb and squirm and touch, and I wanted to do all the opposite of those things.
Regardless, she came and walked the halls with me. She shared my snacks and was just there. In all her not injured perfection.
Most places I went, I felt I was an eye sore. Shaved head, neck brace, cane, and big pregnant belly. What must people think. We actually had people straight out ask me what happened a couple of times. There was one place I went that I never stuck out....Walmart! I worked really hard for about 3 months in out-patient therapy.
. And then.....
I had a baby.
The delivery was scary. We had planned on a c-section anyway, but I had a placental abruption, meaning that the placenta tore completely away from the uterus, leaving the baby with no blood supply. Because of this, the calm planned c-section turned into an emergency. Time being of the essence, I was put all the way under for the procedure. Max was born not breathing, and there was talk of signs of brain damage in the hours after his birth.
Once I woke up and started to recover from anesthesia, not quite an hour after my c-section I was wheeled into the NICU to see my baby for the first time.
Several days, tests, and many many prayers later, we learned that Max showed no signs of brain damage and was healthy. He has never looked back.
I continue to have set backs and challenges, but I am grateful to be alive to feel my daughter's hand on my face, hear the soft snores of my baby boy, and get wrapped up in my husband's arms.
April 25th is the day I got a second chance. I didn't have to say good-bye. I think that's worth celebrating.
