The Accident, Part 2
As the doctors loaded me into an ambulance headed for Dallas, I remember being given a morphine pill to start tapering down the strength of my drugs. At Brook Army Medical Center I was on a morphine drip with “the button”. I could press the button any time I felt pain, and mostly I just pressed it because I was afraid of the idea of pain. The ride back home to North Texas was uneventful. I slept most of the time, Mom holding my hand as she rode alongside my stretcher.
Home for the foreseeable future was Plano Rehabilitation Hospital. Nurses wheeled me into a big white room with two white hospital beds and a big window overlooking the parking lot. Everyone was very nice, seemingly excited to see a young person for once. As I started my regimen of occupational therapy, speech therapy, and physical therapy, I noticed I was the youngest patient there. Plano Rehab was full of heart-attack and stroke victims, and a fifteen-year-old was an anomaly.
Being back in Dallas meant I could see my friends again. So many people from school and church came to visit. Some people made banners to put in my room and brought flowers and cards. Others got their whole youth group to write me letters. An elementary class drew pictures and sent individual notes. My school, Trinity Christian Academy, generously organized weeks and weeks of cooked dinners for my family. Our church gave us a journal full of prayers and thoughts people had written during a prayer meeting right after the accident. One time the worship band even came to the hospital to have a night of praise & worship.
Rehab was awful. I think anyone who has to do it hates it. Having a head injury meant I had to complete a certain amount of speech therapy. The phrase “speech therapy” really annoyed me because I didn’t have any trouble talking. It felt condescending. Mostly we worked on short-term memory exercises. Occupational therapy and physical therapy blend together in my mind. For a while I did exercises from my wheelchair, then as my broken femur started to heal, I was allowed to put a certain amount of weight on my right leg while using crutches. It is amazing how quickly unused muscles atrophy. The pictures from BAMC show a recognizable me with a partially shaved head. The pictures from Plano Rehab don’t even really look like me, I’m so skinny. Relearning to walk was strange. I will always have empathy for anyone in a wheelchair, or babies learning to walk.
I began to notice the way people stared at me. Family and friends had this sort of amazed look when they’d see me the first time, or the second, or the third. They kept calling me a miracle. I knew the Lord was working through all of this, I knew I was a miracle. Jesus saved me TWICE. I felt loved and grateful, to God and the people around me. But I was tired of being the center of attention. I wanted to be normal. Every kid wants to be normal, but I was desperate to be normal. I’d always felt different, but now I was so different. I felt coddled, which I hated. But I was also emotionally fragile and wanted special treatment. I remember arguing with my mom and sister over inconsequential things. I bossed my whole family around, sometimes even using the accident as an excuse.
I lived at Plano Rehab for around three weeks. I exercised, ate, and watched The Frugal Gourmet. My drug strength lessened from morphine, to Percocet, to Vicodin, and eventually ibuprofen. Then on Thanksgiving I was allowed to take my first day trip home. To our house. It was wonderful. Soon I moved home permanently. My bedroom was upstairs, but I lived on the first floor because I was still on crutches. Then I learned to climb stairs on crutches. Eventually I didn’t have to use crutches anymore. In December, not two months after the accident, I could walk with equal weight distributed on both of my legs. I had no brain damage. I could eat normal food.
Just a persistent, nagging pain in my left knee remained. I thought being allowed to put my full weight on both legs would fix it, but it didn’t. My “leg doctor” in Dallas, Dr. Simpson, recommended a knee specialist to check it out. After an MRI, Dr. Barber, now my “knee doctor”, suggested an arthroscopic surgery. He suspected it was some loose cartilage floating around my knee, but he couldn’t be certain without taking a peek inside. We scheduled a day surgery for December 29, 1995.
I do not recommend opting for day surgery, ever. Once Dr. Barber had the tiny cameras through tiny incisions in my knee, he saw that my ACL was completely torn. After quickly getting my parents permission to reconstruct the ligament, Dr. Barber performed the surgery. I knew something was different when I woke up in the recovery room. Dr. Barber and my parents explained what an ACL was, and I went home that day as planned. But not before bleeding through every bandage and weeping because of the pain. The knee surgery was by far the worst one I’d had.
I lived downstairs again for a few weeks, on crutches and Vicodin again. I watched reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard and Remington Steele. My friend Tori came over on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball drop in Times Square. 1996 arrived. I wanted to go back to school.
Two weeks after the knee surgery, I went back to the 9th grade. I was on crutches and wore baseball hats to cover my strange haircut. Only one teacher stopped me for breaking the dress code. Our private school was small, and we wore uniforms. I politely explained to her that I was in a car accident and had permission from the dean to wear the hat. Coach Morrill invited me to share my testimony in chapel one morning. I sat on stage in front of 400 high school students and told them what happened, how God was healing me. Good thing I took speech class right before the accident.
All of my teachers were really gracious. I had done off-season basketball before the accident and would’ve made the team if it hadn’t happened. When I came back to school they let me do off-campus PE for credit. Mrs. Allen said I could read the two books I’d missed in History/English the following summer. Coach Adams excused me from doing the worldview assignment in biology. Algebra was the only subject I had difficulty with. Every concept builds upon the previous, so there’s no skipping a section. I met with Mr. Pendleton for months trying to catch up in math. I believe that people are either good at algebra or geometry. I like geometry.
In February of 1996 I got a pixie haircut. The shaved part had grown out enough, and I wanted a change. Something to signify a new season of life. Three friends from school came with me to the salon when Ron, my hairdresser for the next 12 years, fixed it. We all talked about the older high school boys we liked. We left the salon, and Mom drove us to a TCA baseball game at Jesuit.
That spring I took studio art with Mr. Millet. He was the head of the Art Department and had been my teacher in 7th grade too. For our linoleum print assignment (pictured above), I took the concepts from pieces I’d made in Millet’s previous class and elaborated them: Michaelangelo’s self-portrait in the Sistine Chapel became my own; monkeys aloft became one lonely monkey. I incorporated every scar I had from the accident as iconography in the print, every broken bone, and a few coded messages to myself. I wish I could remember what they say.
I finished 9th grade with my class. I don’t remember much from that summer. Just getting over a gigantic crush I’d had on a boy since 7th grade. Working at St. Mark’s Day Camp with my friend Lindsay. Moving into a new house with my family. Turning sixteen. Getting my driver’s license. Life seemed like it was getting back to normal.
To be continued…
