This post is a continuation from Part 1.
It seemed like it took a while for the ambulance to arrive, but it was probably less than five minutes. Time moves slowly when you can hear the pounding of every heartbeat. I don’t remember much of those few minutes, other than feeling cold. There was too much going on to feel scared, but I knew something was wrong with my body.
When the ambulance arrived, the EMT ran up and looked at me through the shattered driver window. She asked me if I could move, and I shook my head no. She gave a firm tug on the driver door to see if it would open. It barely moved. One of her teammates brought the ‘jaws of life’ machine over to pry the door open, but couldn’t fit it underneath the edge of the door. No luck.
Then they told me that they were going to try to pull me out from the passenger side of the car. Considering the growing feeling of numbness in my midsection and lower extremities, nothing about this idea excited me. But I shook my head yes and said “OK”, knowing I had to get out of the car and get to a hospital.
One of the EMTs leaned into the car from the passenger door and told me to hold on around his neck and shoulders. He tugged me a bit so I could break free from under the caved-in driver door. Ouch. When he pulled me out through the passenger door, my legs dragged across the center console and another jolt of soul-wrenching pain swept through my body. I felt it in my teeth, again. They loaded me onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.
I was badly injured but I couldn’t tell where the pain was coming from. No blood or visible injuries. I was hurting inside. I tried to describe to the EMTs how my body was feeling but it was difficult to put in words. I couldn’t move my legs very well and instinctively stopped myself from rolling onto my left side. The EMTs checked my vitals, stabilized my lower body and told me not to move. I felt cold like I had guzzled an ice cold drink on a hot summer day.
We arrived at the emergency room within minutes and they wheeled me inside. The ER was buzzing with activity. All the ER triage areas were full with other patients, so they set my stretcher up in the hallway where nurses and doctors started asking me a barrage of questions. I again struggled to describe how my body felt and at that point felt completely numb. And cold. At some point, they hooked me up to an IV and gave me pain killers. For the next several hours, they wheeled me off to administer all sorts of tests and x-rays, trying to determine what was going on.
Throughout those first hours, I kept asking for a phone to call my mother. Because I was stationed in the hallway instead of a proper patient area, it was hard for them to find a phone for me to use. Eventually, one of the hospital porters – who overheard my repeated requests to use a phone – slipped me a cordless telephone and I called the hospital in Charleston where my mother worked in management. She didn’t answer the phone at her desk, so I left a message. I called back to her hospital’s operator and asked her to get a message to my mom and let her know where I was.
I really wanted to speak to my mom. She was smart, sharp, and always seemed to know what to do in a crisis.
Somehow, my mom never received my messages. Later that afternoon, she got a call from the car insurance company to ask her questions about the accident. She put two-and-two together and called my brother who lived in a closer city, who drove down immediately. She soon followed and within a few hours they both arrived at the hospital to check on me.
By that time, it was later in the evening and I was out of the ER and had my own room at the hospital. The doctors informed me that I had a massive fracture in my left hip socket which splintered my pelvis front and back. This helped me make sense of my numb pain or lack-of-pain feeling. My mom told me that it was one of the most serious orthopedic injuries anyone could suffer. She was really concerned. This was serious.
My mom became a flurry of activity within the hospital unit. Once a nurse herself, she started coordinating with the staff and wrote down everyone’s name. It was as if she was back in her nursing days. I had seen her take over situations like this before, but now her son was the patient. Her adrenaline was up; I could hear it in her voice.
She later told me that I was so gaunt that first night that she wasn’t sure whether I would live through the night.
I was bleeding internally. The medical staff was worried that the hip socket fracture could tear into the arteries running through my hip area, so I was instructed to try not to move at all. Tall task. There was also the risk that my injuries could cause a blood clot in my legs, which can be fatal, so they put compression machines over my legs that would squeeze my legs tightly and then release. The machine persistently squeezed my legs to the point of intense discomfort, but the upside was that it further immobilized me.
This experience took me back to when I was a toddler. When I was about two-and-a-half years old, I had an infection in my right hip socket (the other hip) and was diagnosed with Legg Perthes disease. I had surgery to clean out the hip socket, and during recovery I had to wear casted boots with weights hanging off the end of my bed at night. I was too young to remember the surgery, but I remember having to lay completely still at night and not being able to roll over. If I did, I would fall down between the bed and the wall, pulled from the weights down to the floor. In fact, that was probably my earliest memory. I had been here before. Try not to move.
During that first night after the accident – the first night of the rest of my life – I was one part scared and one part calm. I read the look on my mom’s face and knew that I might not live through the night. I was totally helpless, completely at the mercy of the doctors, and God. I could only pray that everything would work out OK.
I talked to God more that night than I ever have in my life, before or since.
My adrenaline wore off and I started slipping in and out of consciousness. It felt like my spirit elevated above my body and I could look down on myself lying in the middle of the hospital room. Was I slipping away? Was I dying? Was I asleep, awake, or somewhere in between?In my own way, I ‘saw the light’ that night and went into a different realm. I saw the other side of the coin. It was quiet, peaceful and serene. I felt totally still and decided to let go. I surrendered to fate.
(AutoBio Aug-2002) The Car Crash That Saved My Life Series: