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…
The Accident, Part 1
Sixteen years ago I almost died.
In late October 1995 my uncle Ron died suddenly of a heart attack, so my mom, dad, eighteen-year-old sister, and I (then fifteen) went to San Antonio for the funeral. The morning after the funeral, on Halloween, my family headed back to Dallas in our Nissan Altima. It was a drizzly morning, and I remember waving to my mom’s mom, Grandmacita, as we pulled out of her driveway. She always stood out in her front yard when we’d leave, holding one arm up with the other as she waved a long goodbye.
When we got on the highway, the rain started coming down harder, and soon it pummeled the car in sheets. We were near the Walzem Road exit on I-35 when we hit the truck. There was a big patch of standing water on the highway because of a stopped-up drain. A woman in a pick-up truck had almost gotten hit by an 18-wheeler that was jack-knifing, so she pulled over to the left-hand emergency lane. When we ran over the water, our Altima hydroplaned too, and we slammed into the back of the woman’s pick-up truck. The airbags deployed, and the car filled with smoke and powder. We’d never had a car with airbags before, so Mom & Dad thought it was on fire. They told my sister, Jenny, and me to get out of the car immediately. I got out on the left near the median, and Jenny exited on the right near traffic. Mom & Dad’s doors wouldn’t open in the front, so they climbed into the back to get out.
A Methodist minister driving his daughter’s Chevy Blazer hydroplaned next. I was walking away from our car when he hit me, then hit the back of the Altima. Mom & Dad heard me scream, and Jenny saw me get hit; but no one knew where I was. Then out of the corner of his eye, my dad saw me through the chain-linked fence on the south-bound side of the highway. We guess that the impact of the Blazer on my body threw me over the eight-food median. Mom, Dad, & Jenny climbed the fence and found me very broken and bleeding. My eyes were closed, and I looked dead.
Our family was in the middle of a difficult few years at this point: we’d lost our home the previous year, my sister and parents had very little trust between them, and I watched things bubble up and simmer down repeatedly, trying not to get in anyone’s way. As I lay on the highway, seemingly dead, my mom prayed Job’s prayer: “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). Right then I opened my eyes. Then my sister got on her knees, on the highway, and started confessing and repenting from all the things she’d been involved in the past few years. Jenny was convinced the accident wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t walked away from relationship with God. Of course it wasn’t her fault, but it was an important moment for her and for our whole family.
Jeff & Anne Marie Creekmore, a deputy sheriff and former paramedic, were on their way to Oklahoma to visit family when they saw us on the highway. They stopped immediately, climbed the fence, and helped us. Anne Marie tried to assess my wounds while she asked me my name and age. I could only respond in unintelligible groans. Jeff directed traffic away from us. A hispanic pastor stopped to pray with my parents. Pretty soon the paramedics came and took me away to Brook Army Medical Center. Daddy stayed with me, while Mom & Jenny were taken to another hospital for their more minor injuries.
At BAMC things progressed quickly. Initially there was a line for the CT-scan, so I waited, sedated, since I had fought the doctors trying to examine me at the accident scene. Then my blood pressure dropped suddenly. Doctors took a sample of my stomach fluid and found a tremendous amount of bad bacteria, so they rushed me into the CT-scan. It showed that my liver was lacerated and bleeding, and that means you’re going to die. So the doctors prepped for immediate surgery. Once inside of my abdomen, they saw that my liver was perfect, completely unscathed. We believe the Lord healed it instantly. My pancreas, just behind the duodenum, was completely intact. My duodenum, however, had exploded. So the doctors re-routed my intestines. In an experimental surgery I will be forever grateful for, they put in a false part to work while my duodenum healed; but once it healed, the false part would shut down. Ostensibly I’d never have to have another stomach surgery.
My skull was cracked in two places, so the doctors shaved a quarter of my head and drilled a hole to release the brain pressure. My right femur was broken into three pieces, so they inserted a titanium rod down the shaft of the bone to hold the pieces together, the rod held in place with screws in my hip and near my knee (pictured above). My left leg was incredibly swollen, but at this point the doctors couldn’t tell if there was any serious damage. Three teams of surgeons worked for two days to stabilize me. I was in a partially medically-induced coma, and there was no guarantee I’d survive, or even come out of the coma.
The doctors at BAMC were realistic with my parents: people don’t just wake up from this kind of head trauma. If she survives, Mandy’s most likely going to be in a coma. If she’s not in a coma, she’ll likely have amnesia. Expect the worst. But Mom & Dad refused to accept this. They prayed. Our whole extended family in San Antonio prayed. Our church, my school, and all our friends in Dallas prayed. Friends in California flew to Texas to stand with us in prayer. Friends from Florida did the same. Our story got on the 700 Club prayer list. Churches and youth groups all over the country were praying for us. And it worked. God answered.
After five days in a coma, I woke up. My dad’s youngest brother, Mark, was in the ICU room with me when it happened. I looked up at him and said, “Hi Uncle Mark.” Soon my parents were with me, praising God for a miracle. One of the first things I remember is singing The Doxology by myself in the room.
After I woke up from the coma, they moved me to a regular room. It was small, with only room for my hospital bed and an awkward recliner my family took turns sleeping on every night. I was on a lot of morphine at this point, so I don’t remember much, but I do remember watching a Fabian movie on the television in my room. Jeff & Anne Marie brought me a model of a red VW bug. The Walkers came from California to see me. All of my nurses were big Army men in fatigues. My sister bought me The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour and the soundtrack to Bye Bye Love on tape to play on my Walkman. I dreamt that God wanted me to go on the roof of the hospital and throw down balloons like basketballs. And I remember Lieutenant Colonel Murray, my head surgeon, telling my parents and me that I was a testament to the power of prayer and the greatest medical technology they could offer me. My recovery was going miraculously and quickly. Ten days after the accident, it was time to move me back to Dallas.
To be continued…
Bee Spears Sings “Okie from Muskogee”
Ladies and gentlemen, this is my cousin. He is this awesome in real life.
