by Chris Norton
The doctor couldn’t have pained me more if he’d pulled out his scalpel, cut the skin along my torso, cracked my ribs wide open, and ripped the beating heart from my chest. Without thought, without even a glance at my family, I fell forward onto my knees and started sobbing. Whimpers tore from my lips as my body shook with grief. Three percent chance? Three percent chance? How could that be? How could the doctor be talking about my son? About Chris? Hours ago he had everything going for him, and now he only had a 3 percent chance of ever moving?
Livid with the doctor for sucking all the wind out of my sails, I somehow reined in the anger that threatened to explode at his blunt and meticulous prognosis. I’d rather Chris have a great surgeon who didn’t have the best bedside manner than a doctor with a great bedside manner and lesser skills as a surgeon. And, really, how could he have couched his diagnosis or phrased it in a way that made it palatable?
The news flattened Deb; she began to weep, unable to hold her emotions in check. Everything we’d feared from the instant Chris went down hit us like a shot blast to the gut. And my mom, the strongest woman I knew, had tears streaming down her face. That moment was a big turning point in my faith. I could almost hear God whisper, Do you trust me?
I always believed God existed. I believed Jesus Christ walked the earth. I believed everything I’d ever learned from the Bible. But did I really trust? Could I put all of my faith in Jesus Christ knowing I had no control over the outcome? It was easy to say I believed all those things, but I’d never been put in a position where I had to trust that he was with me at all times regardless of the circumstances. It was easy to trust when nothing in my life had ever gone so terribly wrong. I knelt in front of my family and the man who’d given me the worst news of my life because I had to decide right then. Did I trust God or not?
I’m going to trust God, I’m going to trust there will be a positive outcome. Suddenly, I went from feeling like somebody had hit me with a baseball bat to being wrapped in a blanket of calm. I’d given everything over to God, and he had my back.
I got up, dried my tears, and with Jesus and my family by my side, faced the future head on.
* * *
So be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid and do not panic before them. For the LORD your God will personally go ahead of you. He will neither fail you nor abandon you.
~Deuteronomy 31:6 NLT
* * *
I PRIED my eyes open and everything appeared blurry. My muddled mind attempted to fire as I tried to get my bearings. Where am I? Noises beeped in my ears. My eyes fluttered, adjusting to the light, as reality surfaced like a submarine emerging from the darkest depths of the ocean. Everything that had happened flashed before me in an instant. I was injured on the football field, taken by helicopter to Minnesota, and rushed into emergency surgery.
I lay flat on my back in a hospital bed. A TV hung in the corner of the room, a chair sat to the side of the bed, and a bunch of medical boxes and IV stands perched on each side of the bed feeding liquids through the assortment of tubes and wires attached to my body. The curtain in front of the bed was closed. I was alone in the room except for a nurse looking at the monitors, checking my heart rate, and noting the stats the noisy machines recorded.
A giant tube down my throat helped me breathe. I could feel it in my throat where physical sense remained. I didn’t like it. I moved my head around, trying to spit it up; I put my tongue on the tube and tried to move it. But I moved my head too much, and a painful shockwave reverberated throughout my body from my surgery site.
The nurse came up to my face. “No, no, no. You have to keep that in. Don’t move the tube around.”
I knew I could bring air into my lungs on my own and push it back out without the tube in my mouth, so I ignored her and kept moving it around with my tongue.
“No, don’t touch it,” the nurse said. “It’s helping you. Don’t do that.”
I dozed off and woke up maybe thirty minutes later, and my mom and dad were there with me. They looked tired, upset, and very concerned. They asked if I was feeling okay, but I couldn’t answer because of the tube down my throat.
I still felt confused. I had no idea what the surgery accomplished and what to expect next. I didn’t ask for answers or demand to know what was going on because of the breathing tube, and I figured they’d eventually tell us.
The surgeon came in for a consultation with my family. I didn’t doubt their support or their commitment to my health and recovery, so whatever happened, whatever lay ahead, I knew I wouldn’t face it alone. But that also meant everything I faced moving forward would also affect them. The surgeon, directing his attention to both me and my parents, explained that the operation went well. He started off with some encouraging facts: he thought it would take between five and six hours to complete the surgery, but it only took three; they thought they’d have to operate from the back and the front of my neck, but they only had to go in from the back; and they removed a piece of my hip bone and put it in my neck to replace a bone, and to help fuse my C2, C3, and C4 vertebrae. Screws and the bone piece now fused my C2-4 vertebrae.
* * *
“It is hard to put into words what I felt walking into the room and seeing Chris for the first time. He was lying on the bed with a breathing tube in his mouth not looking like my brother at all.”
~ Katie Norton, Chris’s sister
* * *
As loopy as I felt, the specifics amounted to information overload. The only part that registered was “removing a piece of my hipbone.” Why had they taken a piece of my hipbone and put it in my neck? The children’s song about bones echoed in my brain. The thighbone connected to the hipbone. The hipbone connected to the backbone. The backbone connected to the neck bone…
The surgeon continued giving me the lowdown on how I’d suffered a grade four dislocation. I had a fractured break of my C3 and C4 vertebrae indicating an American Spinal Cord Injury Association (ASIA) classification of A, which meant a complete injury, or no feeling or movement below the injury site.
After the surgeon explained all the technical aspects of the procedure, he looked me straight in the eye and explained in his serious, measured tone that the X-rays showed extensive damage to my C3 and C4 vertebrae. Due to the lack of sensation and movement below the site of the injury, he initially ruled my injury complete. Some of my responses elevated my injury to incomplete, or ASIA B, but considering my current lack of motion and feeling, he’d still give me an approximate 3 percent chance of recovery below the injury site.
I must have heard him wrong. He couldn’t have said three, as in one-two-three. But the look on my family’s faces told me there wasn’t anything wrong with my hearing. My vision went white, my ears began to ring, and if I’d had any feeling in my stomach, it would have felt like a sucker punch. A 3 percent chance? I squeezed my eyes shut as the room began to spin. When I opened them, I was still there, still flat on my back in a room I didn’t recognize, unable to move my body.
No. Just no.
The thunderbolt I felt when I moved my head, that’s the same kind of shock I felt when I heard the doctor’s prediction. As soon as I heard his prognosis, as soon as I realized he wasn’t kidding, I knew right away I couldn’t accept that as my fate. The news went in one ear, jolted my system, and went right back out the other. As long as I had breath in my body and blood pumping through my veins, I wasn’t going to let that happen. I would beat the odds.
All the questions they’d asked before surgery started up again: How do you feel overall? Can you squeeze your hand? Make a fist? Wiggle your toes? Not much registered beyond the doctor’s horrific prediction. My brain was too foggy and full of disbelief, and I didn’t want to hear anything that couldn’t help me get better. I tried to feel what I could feel, and move what I could move. I was both excited and mad when all I could manage was a little shoulder shrug.
“That’s awesome,” the doctor said. “That’s huge.” He seemed really impressed by the movement.
By shrugging my shoulder, I immediately defied the 3 percent odds. That was great and all, but that little sliver of good was overridden by the surreal nature of the experience. I was still struggling to believe I was really in the hospital, unable to move my body, and not simply stuck in a nightmare that wouldn’t end. I had to keep repeating to myself this is my life, this is really happening, this is my life, because my mind kept screaming No! No! No!
What would my future look like? What would recovery entail? I had so many questions. There weren’t enough answers, and no one seemed to know anything. The doctors and nurses weren’t keeping anything from me—they were up front and honest about everything, and they answered every question my parents or I asked to the best of their abilities—but unfortunately they just didn’t know. My first reaction was anger. How could they not know? They were doctors—professionals—and they should’ve known when or if I’d ever be able to move again.
I quickly learned that recovering from a spinal cord injury was basically a waiting game. I naïvely assumed that doctors had all the answers, but the moment they admitted they didn’t, it threw me. The outcome for my kind of spinal cord injury was very inconsistent. Doctors couldn’t predict how my body would react once the swelling went down and the healing began. No one knew, and the vague answers were difficult to stomach; the more nebulous the answers, the more I became distraught. How was this happening? Why me? Why did this happen to me? And how could I possibly spend the next four weeks in the hospital? I had school, and a life…
It soon became crystal clear the best thing I could do, the only thing I could do, was turn to God. I reverted back to my faith. Just like when I prayed and asked God for help when I was first injured, after receiving the devastating news from the doctor, rejecting it, and then nearly suffocating from worry, there was nothing left to do but pray.
* * *
“[Chris] is a man of great faith, trusting in a greater plan for us all and making the most of the new journey he has begun.”
~ Brian Solberg M.A. L.A.T., Assoc. Professor of Health and Physical Education, Program Director of Athletic Training
* * *
I prayed for God to give everyone—my family, the doctors, and the medical staff—the confidence, strength, and focus they needed to help me. I had to put my trust in everyone who worked on me, because at that time, I had no control over my future. I didn’t have a clear understanding of what the doctors and nurses were doing, so I just had to pray they did the right thing.
No matter what people told me, or how they tried to comfort me, the only thing that brought comfort was asking God for help, strength, and direction.
“It’s all going to be okay,” my parents and family told me. “We’re here for you.”
“We’re going to do the best we can,” the doctor said.
None of those statements gave me comfort. Putting my faith in God and knowing that his strength and will would see me through was the only thing that helped keep me together. The injury happened for a reason; I believed that. It was planned. I didn’t know the reason or the plan, but I knew I had to trust God.
Both before and after the surgery, I wondered about the purpose of the accident. I wanted to know why it had happened, because I couldn’t simply accept that it had. I trusted God, and I did have faith, but I wanted to know the reason immediately in order to ease the pain and the sadness of being so disappointed. I asked God to please fill me in on what he had in mind for my life going forward, and for the answer to why this was happening. I didn’t doubt my faith, but I wanted to fast forward to the point where the meaning behind my situation was clear. Somehow, I thought knowing the purpose behind the accident would make swallowing my fate easier, because at that moment, I felt like every choice I had for the rest of my life was gone.
* * *
I truly believe the saying that life is about 10 percent of what happens to us, and 90 percent how we deal with it. We are not going to let the 10 percent determine our 90 percent.
~Terry Norton, CaringBridge, October 20, 2010
* * *
EVEN WITH my faith, the 3 percent chance almost broke me physically and emotionally. It hit me so hard that I just went off into my own little world for a second, just God and me. I mentally returned to the hospital and glanced at my mom—my rock. It killed me to see her crying. Deb was sobbing, her body wracked with grief; Alex was teary-eyed and trying to absorb the news.
The surgeon got up, said he’d give us some time, and left. We sat in our seats, shattered and uncertain, but there wasn’t time to break down. Chris was headed into surgery and we had to be strong for him. I gave the family a little pep talk about how young people were killed in car accidents all the time, and how thankful we should feel that Chris was still with us. No matter what happened to him physically, he was the same kid we knew and loved.
Before Chris went into surgery, we kissed his head, told him we were there, and that we’d see him when it was over. As he was wheeled away, the doctor told us to expect the wait to last anywhere from five to six hours, depending on whether they had to operate from both the front and back of his neck. We had a long night ahead. Drained, exhausted, and ever fearful, we made our way to the waiting room.
* * *
“We then were able to see him right before surgery, trying to remain as strong and positive as possible, pretending we hadn’t just been told some of the worse news that nearly broke us.”
~ Alex Norton, Chris’s sister
* * *
Before long, parents, players, and friends of Chris’s and ours started arriving at the hospital. People were streaming in, people were praying. It was a mob scene. Everybody—teammates, parents, and our family friends—surrounded us with love. Katie finally made it to the hospital with Tina Hargis and our minister, Peter Mitchell. Katie sat on my lap in the waiting room, hugging me. My teenage daughter was somewhat affectionate, but it wasn’t exactly normal for her to plop in my lap. The shock of her big brother’s injury hit her hard.
The president of Luther College, Rick Torgerson, and his wife were there, along with the football coach, Mike Durnin, and his wife, Karen. Mike and Karen were very thoughtful; they went to a drug store and bought us toothbrushes, deodorant, and some necessities because they understood we weren’t prepared to stay at the hospital.
The waiting room was mayhem. Luther recruited a lot of Minnesota students, so many people stopped by on their way home after the game. Our good friends from home like Bob and Kate Burrows started arriving at that time. To be honest, hearing the grim diagnosis from the surgeon was the lowest point for us; we’d hit rock bottom. Everything that came after felt like little positive baby steps, and the most meaningful to Deb and me was the support of friends, family, and near strangers.
I told Pat Vickers, Chris’s roommate’s dad, that they didn’t need to stay.
Pat turned to me with a look of steel in his eyes. “Terry, if you want me to leave, I’ll give you some privacy and move away from you. But we’re not leaving the hospital until Chris is out of surgery.”
That kind of loyalty and friendship felt like the arms of Jesus reaching out to hold me. I was grateful Pat stayed, and I asked him to help me find a hotel room. We were back before Chris was out of surgery.
I told Mike Durnin, Luther’s head football coach, that he could head home.
“He’s my family too,” Mike said. “I’m not leaving.”
To this very day, those words and the sentiment behind them bring a smile to my face. Deb and I greeted and updated people as they came in. All the love and support they offered felt overwhelming.
I didn’t know anyone who’d ever had spinal cord damage, so we had no idea what Chris’s injury really meant for our day-to-day lives. Even after hearing the grim prognosis, it kind of bounced off of us because we were convinced the doctor wasn’t talking about our son. His condition just refused to penetrate, even after we told his story over and over again.
Deb and I
didn’t have time to go off and process everything that had happened and what it meant for the future. Even if we’d had the time, I’m not sure we would have because saying it out loud, and making plans beyond the then and there, would have validated the reality of the situation. I think subconsciously we didn’t want to face what was happening.
While Chris was in surgery, I tried to picture him living from the neck up. What would his life be like? Would he get married? Would he have kids? Would he have to live at home forever? Not that we would mind, but I just couldn’t wrap my mind around a young, vibrant person like Chris having to live with his parents for the rest of his life. There were so many unanswered questions. Would he finish college? How could he ever work? What could he do for a job? All those things started flashing through my mind.
Whenever I thought of a person in a wheelchair, I thought of someone with legs that didn’t function. I imagined someone in a wheelchair participating in wheelchair basketball or wheeling themselves around with the use of their arms, like a student I once knew. He wheeled himself up to his car, transferred himself into the vehicle, grabbed his chair, folded it up, put it in the back seat, and drove away. When the doctor talked about Chris not moving from the neck down, it was both horrifying and overwhelming.
Deb looked shattered, like a shell of her happy self held together by sheer force of her will. Her eyes laser-focused on me; I had to portray confidence and be a rock because my reactions affected her. Deb was a strong woman, but she was crushed emotionally after losing her dad—I knew she needed my strength and encouragement now.