My cheeks were sunken in and my eyes were bulging out of their sockets. My teeth looked huge compared to my shriveled mouth. I looked like a skeleton draped in skin. I barely recognized myself…I had aged decades in six weeks. My weight, normally around 130 pounds, was now 105.
Through sobs, I said, “Please put food in me.”
“You’re gonna be okay, honey,” the nurse said. “You’ve been on a feeding tube for a long time, but we’re going to get you fixed up. Let’s start with your hair.”
She moved me away from the mirror and leaned me over the sink, caringly sudsing up my hair while I tried to make sense of my new reality. I hadn’t eaten more than a few bites of food, I hadn’t made a bowel movement on my own, I hadn’t walked or changed my own clothes in a month and a half…other people and machines had been doing everything for my body, and that was such a vulnerable and scary feeling. I was a person who put a lot of value on my independence; of course this would be horrible for anyone to go through, but being a control freak didn’t make things any easier.
The physical pain of the experience was one thing, but the absolute humiliation of it all was in some ways worse. Every day, strangers were seeing my naked, ripped-apart body and having to do the most disgusting, personal things to it. They were shoving packing into giant wounds in my rectum and stomach. They were lifting up the skin on my thigh, which you could open like a giant flap, to clean it out and suction out the fluid. They were changing the nasty, ugly, smelly bodily fluids that accumulated all over me: the wound vac, the catheter, the colostomy. Everything leaked. Everything left pools of blood and fluids all over my bed, my gowns, my floor.
My body was a constant source of disgust to me. All the processes that are supposed to happen inside the body were happening outside mine, and strangers were not only witnessing it but becoming intimately involved with it.
Sean watched every wound change he could and took part as soon as he was allowed; he would have to take over one day anyway, but he wanted to spare me as much humiliation as possible. It was hard to know what was worse at first—either strangers could do this intimate job, or my husband could see me this way. How would he ever look at me romantically again when he had stuffed gauze into a giant, bloody hole in my butt?
He’s going to leave me, I thought. He had to. There was no way someone could put up with this for the long term and see me as a man is supposed to see his wife ever again. He was so good to me, so devoted, and yet I was convinced it couldn’t last.
Every morning when he’d leave for work, sometime between five thirty and seven, depending on his route, he’d kiss me goodbye and tell me, “I love you and I’ll see you as soon as I’m done.”
Then he’d go, and my mind would wander into terrible daydreams where a woman would stand by her mailbox and wait for him to show up so she could flash him her perfect, unbroken body and jump into his mail truck. In my mind, beautiful women were all over his mail route and he had all day to do whatever he wanted with them. Obviously I wasn’t going to get out of bed to check up on him, so it was a perfect opportunity.
He’s probably cheating on me right now. I don’t blame him.
My heart kept breaking. He’d done nothing to invite my suspicions; it’s just that I was so disgusted with me that I couldn’t imagine anyone not being just as disgusted. I didn’t know who I was anymore. We had been an active couple who ran and cycled together and who made love every night, and now I was an emaciated, sexless, bedridden person with no prospects of ever looking or feeling the same again.
When Sean was at work, I felt totally lost. I frequently rang that call button and asked for someone to come give me a hug.
“What’s your goal for today?” one of the nurses asked me one day. I thought she was crazy.
“Well, I can’t get out of bed, I can’t keep food down, and I’m stuck to a cardiac monitor with electrodes all over my body. What is my goal?”
“Then maybe it’s just to get through your wound care and get through the day and see that the sun comes up again tomorrow.”
She was teaching me something about gratitude even in the midst of my bucket of sorrow. It’s not easy to be appreciative when you’re in the muck—far easier to do it in retrospect. But setting any kind of small goal and achieving it was something to feel good about. Making it through another round meant I was closer to walking out of the hospital. There’s an adjustment that goes along with life-altering events; you have to learn to celebrate everything, even things that sounded ridiculous to celebrate before. Rolling over. Eating a piece of food. A decent sleep. The fact that you woke up that day still breathing.
After about a week at Gaylord, three nurses came to my room to help me up out of my wheelchair and told me it was time for me to try walking.
As they helped me stand, the same concrete feeling returned. It’s like my head was a helium balloon and the rest of me was a thousand-pound statue. It took everything I had in me just to move one leg forward. When I did, blood and bodily fluid gushed out of the wound in my backside.
The equivalent of six rolls of gauze was stuffed into that wound, and it was all covered in a plastic wrap, but it didn’t matter—I would bleed and ooze right through it all the time. But at least it was usually hidden underneath me when I was sitting or lying in bed. Now I felt the hot liquid flowing out and running down the backs of my legs and then pooling below me.
“Oh!” I said, looking down in white-hot shame.
“That’s okay! Don’t worry about that!” one of the nurses said. “You just keep walking. You’re doing great.”
I took just three or four agonizing steps, then I felt too light-headed to continue, and my face went pale. They helped me back into my wheelchair.
It was almost unbearably humiliating, and yet by later that evening, I wanted to try again. I asked them to wrap me up better, so they tried—a nurse patted down all my wounds and then wrapped basically my entire lower body in plastic film. It didn’t matter. No matter what they did, I dripped when I walked. My wounds were going to drain all over the floor, and I couldn’t bend over to clean up after myself, so I was leaving this trail of disgustingness under me for a nurse to have to wipe up.
I hated myself. For two weeks, I refused to leave my room unless I was seated with bed pads under me because at least I could keep my fluids contained there—I didn’t want to run into anyone in the hallways, where other rehab patients were practicing their walking or being wheeled through.
Meanwhile, the driver who’d hit me was already back at work. His entire punishment at that point was an infraction for failing to stop at a stop sign. Life went on as usual for him, while mine was blown apart.
Wound care and ambulation were my two main tasks in the beginning at Gaylord, and then we added working on motor skills. I had trouble with various tasks, which I assumed was because I’d been in a coma for so long and my brain wasn’t communicating well yet; I didn’t think much about the fact that I had a brain injury, but that’s what it was. My eyes were moving separately; I wouldn’t be able to read the clock, for instance, because I couldn’t get the muscles of my eyes to move in unison. Then there were other problems with the brain/body signal—I had trouble making my body do the things my brain wanted it to do.
They’d move me to a room with a long table where other people were also working on simple motor tasks. In front of me were my tools for the day, which looked a lot like items from a preschooler’s classroom: cards that I was supposed to sort, rings that I was supposed to put together. Then there was a wall with boxes built in that had different-shaped holes—I had to pick up the matching shapes and put them into the right holes, like a toddler’s sorting cube.
Around me were two or three other adults in their wheelchairs doing the same sort of things. We were working individually with our own physical therapists, but in the same space. I found it humiliating. It didn’t matter that they were all also sorting blocks and rings—I just hated that anyone could see me in this comp
romised state.
There was a ramp in the room where we learned to walk up and down, a bar where we practiced standing, another bar where we improved our balance, and a set of steps to practice on. Then there was the thing that freaked me out every time I looked at it: half of a car, for those of us with car traumas to practice getting comfortable getting in and out of cars again. A lot of my therapy consisted of me pushing my wheelchair over to the car and just trying not to panic while opening the door. In my wheelchair, I was at eye level with the tires and just kept imagining getting run over again.
As time went on, they wanted me to try to walk with a walker. It was so difficult and painful.
“Am I ever going to walk normally again?” I asked.
“We don’t know, but we’re going to work on it,” the therapist said.
They were so damn honest. I just wanted them to say, “Yes! You will walk, and bike, and make love with your husband. Everything is going to be fine in time.” But no one could or would say that to me. They never took away my hope, but they never gave me false hope, either. They would put a lot of the responsibility back on me.
“We’re in this together,” the therapist said. “Are you willing to be committed to this and set a new goal for yourself every day?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. Nothing mattered more, even though it would have been a lot more comfortable physically and emotionally to stay in bed.
“We won’t know where you’re going to end up. All we know is how you’re progressing today, and what we’re continuing to work on. You’ll keep building on your foundation of strength a little every day.”
In a way, it was empowering to know that I had some role in my own recovery—it wasn’t all up to chance. Some of it was out of anyone’s control, but some of it was about my grit and willingness to push through the pain and embarrassment to relearn these simple tasks again. And I was pretty full of grit.
I never got used to the wound cleaning and dressing changes that happened twice a day, every day. Every time I was log-rolled to lie on my side, I knew what was coming and I sobbed and I shook in pain and humiliation. At night, they would wait for Sean to get back from work as often as they could, so that he could be with me. He’d sit on the other side of the bed and hold on to my head and put his other hand on my “good” leg. Then he’d pray out loud while they were fishing around and while I was crying. He was everything at once: a nurse, a psychologist, and my best friend, even as I unfairly distrusted him.
Gail also came to visit again from Maine, and she helped take care of me because of her paramedic training. She admired the all-female team who’d managed to keep me alive in transport and she began talking with them. I mostly just cried through her visit, too.
“This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to be your big sister and take care of you,” I’d say.
“Colleen, this is where the tables turn. Now I’m your mentor!” she would say.
“I just hate that you’re seeing me like this.”
“I’m a paramedic. I see boobies and butts all day. I meet someone and thirty seconds later, I’m taking their shirt off. You have nothing to worry about with me.”
It was beautiful to have her show up, and to have other family and friends show up, too, which they did in large numbers. Neighbors, childhood friends, coworkers, family, all sorts of people would visit to cheer me up. A couple of friends even flew out from across the country. Gaylord didn’t have many strict rules about visitors—I could even have friends come chat with me during physical therapy if I wanted.
I liked having people around to hug and hold hands, even though it was also humiliating to be seen the way I was, no matter how anyone tried to be reassuring about it. I was in such a vulnerable position without control over my functions. We’d be in the middle of talking, and then there would be a big fart sound and smell from my colostomy bag, or a gurgling noise from my wound vac. No one really escaped it; if you were coming to see me, you were going to smell poop and hear really gross things. People were cool about it, even if they were inwardly horrified.
Because my eyes wouldn’t move in unison, I had a lot of trouble focusing on people and it made me nauseated to keep trying—like a weird seasickness. Sometimes I had to close my eyes and just listen. And sometimes I was so hopped up on Dilaudid that I remembered none of the conversation afterward.
I never felt unloved; there was a lot of support out there for us from the moment I can remember waking up. Most of the time, people just let me cry, and I asked them to pray with me. Human connections were so important. It was gratifying to have people show up whom I had not known well before the trauma, and instantly bond as they looked into my eyes and held my hands and prayed with me.
But one thing several people said started to grate on me: “At least you’re alive.”
“At least I’m alive”? I’m pooping in a bag, I can’t move, I’m in constant pain, I feel like I’m having one long panic attack, my body is torn apart, my husband is sleeping in a recliner instead of next to me in our bed, dozens of strangers have touched my naked body, I’m having unrelenting nightmares…there was no “at least” anything. Every sentence that began with “At least” felt belittling. At least you’re conscious; at least the surgery went well. Even worse was “You should feel grateful.” “Be grateful you’re still here.” No, thank you. I couldn’t listen to the bright side of anything—it all felt phony. I was just trying to make it through each day, and I did not feel grateful for anything. Especially not for cheery little platitudes.
A housekeeper came in one day to mop and called out as she left, “Hope you feel better!”
Steam came pouring out of my ears. “Hope you feel better” is what you say when someone has the flu. Not when someone’s been run over by a freight truck and just got out of a coma. I just wanted people to acknowledge the complete suckiness of the situation, not belittle it with empty words. There was so much that people just didn’t understand or acknowledge. I hadn’t taken a shower in months. Months. Having a nurse wash my hair once a week (often while I was in bed) was my biggest bliss, but I still couldn’t feel the water on my body like I’d always taken for granted. I was limited to careful sponge baths because of my many open wounds. There were so many blatantly ordinary things that I missed so much, and it was hard to see beyond what was happening.
One day they took me back to Yale New Haven Hospital for a follow-up visit with my surgeon, Dr. Kaplan.
“It’s good to see you alive!” he said, and I tried to smile. “I wasn’t sure if I would get to see you again. You died on me a couple of times.”
“I did?”
“Yes. You went into cardiac arrest several times when you first came in. We had someone running back and forth to get you blood over and over.”
“How many units of blood did she need?” Sean asked.
He checked the charts.
“Seventy-eight.”
“Wow.” Sean looked at me. “I had eight after my accident.”
The human body holds, on average, ten units of blood at a time. So people had donated the equivalent of about eight entire bodies’ supplies to keep me alive. The very idea was humbling, but still, it didn’t fully sink in until later.
“You lost so much blood that there was nothing left for your heart to pump. We were doing CPR on you for twenty minutes at one point, but I wouldn’t call the time of death. You looked like a fighter to me.”
“I had no idea it was that close,” Sean said. “All I knew for a long time was that she came in for a broken leg.”
I guess it was supposed to make me feel better that I was such a miracle patient. That’s what people kept telling me—that it was amazing I had lived at all, much less that I was speaking and breathing on my own and, despite the traumatic brain injury, mostly coherent at this point. I was such a brave fighter.
But I lived with high anxiety and depression constantly. Though I didn’t have a name for it then, I now know that I also
had PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder, the same condition that affects many service members who’ve been to war, or people who’ve been raped or violently attacked. Some of the main symptoms are hypervigilance (being constantly “on the alert” for danger—thinking another bomb is about to drop or another truck is about to run you over), nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts about the trauma, insomnia or difficulty staying asleep, and having trouble connecting with loved ones. I had all the above. Thank God I didn’t know that the driver who ran me over was still making deliveries for the next three years, or I would have never wanted to set foot out of my house.
My family knew I was depressed, but I don’t think they knew how depressed. They would tell people publicly that I had “good days and bad days,” but the truth is that I never had good days psychologically. Every day was a fight with my brain and agony for my body. Lying in bed was so opposite of who I was that even that in itself was psychological torment for me. I was not supposed to be bedridden; I was supposed to be out there in the world training for marathons, pushing our baby in a jogging stroller, and riding my bike.
“When an athlete gets injured, it’s even more of a curse than for a non-athlete,” my dad said. “You’ve been so active that it’s even more of a loss to have it taken away.” My dad got it. He understood because he had gone through many health ailments of his own and was an incredible athlete.
People sent me beautiful cards and care packages; my dad had given my address out online and encouraged people to reach out to me. He figured it would lift my spirits. Gifts came in every day: a neck warmer, essential oils, lip balm, face lotion, flowers, teddy bears. I was grateful, though I was spiraling so far down that it was difficult to pull out of my funk for more than a few minutes at a time.
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