My chief trauma surgeon, Dr. Kaplan, later told me that the chaplain was holding my hand because they thought I would be a DOA—dead on arrival. They were pretty amazed that I was still not only alert, but coherent and actively belligerent. Still, they knew there was no way that could last. My body was torn apart and I barely had any blood left in it.
“Let go of her hand. She’s going to code any second,” he told the chaplain—but she refused to let go. She kept praying out loud.
Finally I shut up and flatlined.
“Thank God,” said the surgeon. “Let’s get to work.”
They started CPR and ran fluids through my IV. A trauma nurse ordered more and more blood, running it constantly. The chaplain still wouldn’t leave until the doctor screamed at her to “Get out!” because she was in the way. It was chaos. No one knew where to even start on me.
For the next six to eight hours, I kept dying.
I would flatline, someone would do CPR, and they’d pull me back from the abyss again. People had to keep rotating because keeping me alive was exhausting work. At the same time workers were doing CPR, changing bags of blood, and running monitors, the orthopedic trauma surgeon and his team were there debriding my insides—cleaning out the gravel and rocks and debris. My stomach was ripped open, my backside was ripped open, my right iliac crest—the big, elephant-ear-shaped pelvic bone—was severed. The pelvis holds all the vital organs up, so when it’s compromised, internal hemorrhaging doesn’t stop.
On top of that, my femoral artery was severed. They were trying to clean out all the junk while not causing me to bleed out any further, and I just kept right on dying. The blood would run through me and right out again, over and over. I can’t even imagine the mess.
They moved me to a state-of-the-art trauma table that few hospitals had yet. If we were lucky and I lived through the experience, it would help them screw me back together more precisely. But of course, the odds were against my making it through surgery at all. And Sean had no idea.
Chapter 9
Level I Trauma
YOU DON’T KNOW ME, but your wife has been in an accident. She got hit by a truck and it looks like her leg is broken. She needs you to come to the hospital.”
That’s what the person on the side of the road told Sean. The man lived nearby and had come out when he heard all the commotion. He was the one who was nearest when I yelled out Sean’s number. It was unusual for Sean to pick up the phone when he didn’t know the number on caller ID…we were lucky that he decided to answer this time.
“Where are they taking her?” Sean asked.
“Yale New Haven.”
“Why are they taking her there? That’s an hour away!”
“I don’t know, man.”
“Is she okay?”
“Sorry, I have to go…the police want to talk to me.”
Sean was doing mail deliveries at the time, so he rushed back to the post office to drop off the mail truck, told his manager that he had to leave, and got into his car. He called ahead to the ER, but they had no information on me yet because I was still en route.
So he raced over there, praying all the way, and ran in. When he spotted a police officer working on a computer behind a podium, Sean asked if he knew where I was. The officer didn’t, but went to ask the receptionist.
Sean saw her mouth the word “Trauma.” That’s when he started freaking out.
No wonder they’d taken me to Yale. It was the closest hospital with a Level I trauma center—the level they assign to hospitals that are equipped and staffed to deal with major injuries twenty-four hours a day. In Sean’s mind prior to that, a truck had grazed my bike and I had possibly fallen off and broken my leg. It quickly occurred to him that this might be something far worse—but no one was talking. The most he could get out of anyone right away was that I’d been on my bike and collided with a truck. No other details were forthcoming.
“Sir, just wait here and as soon as we find out what’s going on with your wife, we’ll let you know. Don’t worry,” the police officer told him.
Don’t worry? Did those words ever actually stop anyone from worrying in a situation like this?
Finally, about an hour after Sean arrived, they sent a woman in a business suit out to tell him that I was okay.
“What’s wrong?”
“We don’t have all the information yet, but I’m going to take you to a family lounge and someone will come talk to you as soon as possible,” she said.
“As soon as possible” turned out to be more than another hour.
In between, they kept shuffling him between the family lounge and the more private SICU (Surgical Intensive Care Unit) lounge, because they were sure several times over that they were about to have to send someone to tell him that I had died. The SICU lounge, it turns out, is the place to hear that news.
The next time the woman in the business suit reappeared, Sean realized she was the hospital chaplain. She was there to tell him that the doctors were still working and that I was in good hands, but the more she tried to console him, the more agitated he got. The only thing he figured for certain by then was that whatever had happened, it must have been very bad.
The chief surgeon, Dr. Kaplan, emerged into the hallway for a minute and gave Sean a slightly clearer picture.
“She’s on the operating table. I can’t say she’s okay yet, but right now she’s stable. I have to get back in there and monitor her to make sure she stays under control.”
“Thank you for taking care of my wife. What happened to her? She got hit by a truck?”
“No, she was run over.”
That was beyond Sean’s worst thoughts.
Not hit, run over. There was a big difference between those two things.
As quickly as Dr. Kaplan had entered, he left again, and Sean was alone to figure out the thousand things that you have to figure out at a time like this. He called my parents to fill them in on the little he knew; by then they lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and they started driving immediately. He called our landlord to ask him to feed our pets. He let his work know that he wouldn’t be in the next day. And he prayed. Over and over, he prayed that I would be okay.
Of course, I was not okay. My heart was barely beating and I was unconscious and split open all over my body. Twelve hours after I left for work that morning, they finally let Sean come in to see me in the ICU. Even as he tried to prepare himself, he couldn’t.
The flesh was ripped off my left thigh down past my knee, exposing my bones. Tubes ran into my nose and mouth, and monitors beeped and whirred everywhere. I wore a neck brace. I was bloodied and swollen everywhere, with a belly distended out so far that it looked like I was pregnant with triplets.
We were just starting to try to have a baby, he thought.
Instead, here he was, looking at the incredibly broken body of the woman he’d seen whole earlier that morning. Everything had changed and we would never be able to go back.
Sean gingerly took my cut-up hand in his and tried to send his love through my body. He had been by my side for only a minute when a nurse saw red fluids staining my gown.
“You need to leave. We have to keep working on her now,” she said firmly. He kissed my forehead and said a quick prayer before being ushered back to the SICU lounge. He knew from my conversations with him about life as an EMT that you don’t mess with hospital personnel—you follow their orders, period. Ask too many questions or show yourself as too demanding and you can expect a lot more silence. Linger too long after they tell you to leave and you won’t be invited back in. So he did as he was told and he didn’t show anger or insist on more information at any point, even though it was maddening to have no idea what procedures they had done, were about to do, or what my prognosis looked like at that point.
He didn’t allow himself to dwell on the idea that I could die, although I’m sure I looked like that was very possible. He fought to remain positive, and hung on every small reassurance the medical te
am offered afterward—that I was stable, that I had made it through another surgery, that they were just keeping me sedated for pain relief.
At about two a.m., he called Gail in Maine.
“Colleen’s been in an accident,” he told her. “The doctor said she’s going to be okay, but she’s pretty banged up. She’s had surgeries already and she’s intubated.”
Gail was too shaken up to drive. Instead, she lay in bed and cried and waited until friends could drive her. My parents, brothers, and sister-in-law were already at the hospital when she arrived, and they told her she could go in and see me in the ICU alone if she wanted to.
Now a paramedic, Gail had seen a lot. But what she saw in that room scared the crap out of her.
Unlike Sean, Gail knew the signs of impending death. She saw how bloated I was all over and how low my blood pressure was. She saw all the bandages, the blood pressure medications, and the machines keeping me alive. She saw all of that…and she said goodbye to me.
Not out loud, of course. But what she saw in me looked just like the last time she saw her uncle before his death. She walked out of that room devastated, believing she would never see me alive again. And she had no idea what to say to Sean, because he was still so optimistic.
He just doesn’t understand how bad this is, she thought. And I’m not going to be the one to break it to him.
She couldn’t make eye contact with him; she just hurried out and said she would be back soon. None of my family knew what Gail knew. She could look at me and see kidney damage, brain damage…she had an insider’s view that the rest of them didn’t, and it was a heavy burden.
Over the next few days, while I remained medically sedated, I was in and out of surgery several times, and not out of the woods by any stretch. Once they had stopped the bleeding and I wasn’t going into cardiac arrest anymore, the bigger threat was infection. With all of these huge open wounds, the risk of infection was enormous, and my body wouldn’t have the ability to fight back the way a healthy body could.
One time, I woke up just as the surgeon was starting to operate on me. It was absolutely terrifying. I saw a bright light and masked faces hovering over me, and I couldn’t breathe. I remember my chest rising and falling, but I couldn’t take a breath. As I woke, the pain hit hard, but I couldn’t move or communicate no matter how hard I tried. Well, except for my fingers.
“Her fingers are moving,” someone in the room said.
“There’s no way her fingers could be moving. She’s out,” someone else said.
I’m right here! I wanted to scream. I can hear you! I tried even harder to wiggle my fingers, to move anything to let them know that I was awake.
“Maybe she’s having a seizure.”
Then another masked face appeared right in front of my face, and I remember a strange smell, and then everything went dark again. They wrote down “mild seizure” in my chart.
My father and Sean posted on Facebook to let my friends and family know what was happening, and there was a huge outpouring of love from far and wide. No one wanted to explain just how grave things were, though, so they focused more on the small positives—which mostly amounted to “She’s still stable” and “Her body is responding properly to the medications.”
There wasn’t much else to tell because I was in an induced coma, a life-saving step doctors take to slow down brain function to preserve the brain after a trauma or severe illness, and to bring down swelling to prevent or lessen brain damage.
People have the wrong idea about what a medically induced coma is. They think it means you’re totally unconscious, unable to see or hear or respond in any way. But that’s not how it actually is. For weeks after the trauma, I felt like I was locked in a nightmare, imprisoned in my body. Sometimes I was unconscious, but other times I existed in a state that has no easy comparison—it was my “coma state.”
I couldn’t focus on anyone or anything, but I could hear sounds and feel sensations. I was so hot all the time that I felt like my body was on fire. All I could think about was how much I wanted a glass of water. I began having thoughts that were almost hallucinations about lying in a pool of water.
Occasionally I would hear a familiar voice, and that brought some measure of comfort. Whenever Sean came into the room, he would call out, “Hey, honey, I’m here.” I know that only because he’s told me so since then, not because I actually remember it. He says I would open my eyes and look around like I was looking right through him. (Yes, you can even open your eyes in a medical coma.) My brother Erin drove up from Florida in a fury when he got the news, and I had no idea. My parents would talk to me when they came to visit, too, and I’d just stare around the room then, too. I was too out of it to think, Oh, that’s Sean, or That’s my mom, but I did sense the familiarity. My fear levels would elevate or drop according to who was in the room. I relished when someone would hold my hand, stroke my head, or comb my hair. That was the only good part.
The dreams were the bad part. Over and over, I had graphic nightmares about being violently raped and sodomized. My only lucid memory of those first couple of weeks after the trauma, even after lots of therapy, is of those nightmares. There was nothing I could do, no way to escape. It felt like one long panic attack and such a horrific intrusion. I had no idea what was actually happening at the time to cause these horrible images, but now I know that they came when the medical staff were doing “wound changes.”
My rectum was ripped all the way up to the sacrum, and my vagina was ripped apart, too. The nurses spent hours every day cleaning my wounds and changing the medication and bandages. Even though I was heavily sedated and had a breathing tube down my throat, my blood pressure would spike during wound changes and they would see my face grimacing. Even in that state, I recognized the pain but couldn’t process it, so my brain turned it into the only thing that made sense: rape.
That’s what a medically induced coma really is like; nothing can take away all the pain without being extremely dangerous. It just makes it confusing and dulled enough so that you don’t actually die from the shock of it all. But overmedicating can kill you, too—so they try to sedate you with just enough anesthesia to keep your body as strong as possible to protect the vital organs for surgery. Then they also have to add medication to increase blood pressure because the anesthesia drops the blood pressure dangerously low. It’s a delicate balance.
So it becomes this otherworldly haze of an experience where your brain tries to put the puzzle together under the influence of heavy drugs. It’s not like a trauma-induced coma where you’re fully unconscious while your brain resets itself, more like a deep dream state with moments of partial awareness. Other people who’ve been through it also describe vivid “dreams” where the brain is desperately trying to put together some kind of narrative to explain the foggy signals coming through.
No one had mentioned my probable brain injury to Sean or my family at that point. Miraculously, my face was nearly unscathed and my helmet hadn’t cracked, so they didn’t worry much about my head. My obvious injuries were all on my lower half, but anytime you have a hard hit like the one I had, you have the likelihood of a concussion and long-term damage. They did determine that there was no internal hemorrhaging in my brain, but they couldn’t do cognitive tests on me while I was so out of it, so there was no official determination about how extensive my brain injury might be.
There is so little of that time that I remember clearly. I’m told I was in a lovely corner room with windows, and that my family and Sean decorated the walls with cards and pictures. What I remember mostly was just the sound of the ticking clock.
I learned later that a friend named Susan, who had been a PeaceJam board member, stopped by nearly every day and read poetry to me from a book compiled by Caroline Kennedy. She would later give me the book.
Sean didn’t want to leave my room at all. He watched everything that was happening with me and tried to be my advocate. He had to approve surgeries and he watched for any sign
that something was wrong. The first time he saw me trying to scream was awful for him. During a wound change, my eyes were screwed shut and my mouth was open in a screaming position, but no sound came out. That’s when he knew beyond all doubt that I was in tremendous pain and that I was locked inside my body.
It happened several times a day, and there was little he could do except try to soothe me with his words and his touch—but he took that job very seriously. He refused to leave the hospital for a week, and the staff provided him a cot to camp out in the SICU lounge. After that first week, he headed home for a shower and some fresh clothes, but he found it unbearable to be there. The house was too empty; not only was I in the hospital, still in a coma, but our landlord was taking care of our dog, Sedona, and a neighbor was fostering our cat, Luna.
He cried in the shower and vowed he wouldn’t spend a night there until I was home—and he stayed true to his word.
Every night, he slept in that SICU lounge, sometimes with other people around, sometimes alone. He witnessed a few cases where a doctor had to deliver the awful news that a loved one had died. Only then did he understand that that’s how close he had come to getting the same news in that same little room.
After another week passed, he realized that we had no money coming in and some pretty significant medical bills about to arrive—so he knew he was going to have to work somehow. Every minute away was stressful, though. Just a week earlier, I was still hemorrhaging internally and doctors had finally located the bleed: One of my arteries was split and the only way to fix it was to insert a titanium coil into the artery to close it off. The coil, which looked like a long, skinny piece of pasta, would stay in my body permanently.
Then there was the fact that I was losing weight, the controversy about whether or not they’d do a tracheotomy (doctors mulled it over, but decided the risk outweighed the benefit), the infections…Every couple of days they would have to cut away dead skin and tissue from my leg, hips, and stomach and rebandage it up to ward off infection.
Gratitude in Motion Page 8