Gratitude in Motion

by Colleen Kelly Alexander

  Despite the medication, I panicked the entire way. It was awful. The vibrations of the car, the smell of exhaust, the sounds of cars passing us—I was triggered up the wazoo and couldn’t wait for it to be over. Sean basically didn’t stop talking the whole time, trying to distract me.

  “Look at the Christmas lights! Wow, look at that house,” he said. “I bet that took a long time to put up.”

  “Mmm,” I managed.

  He played Christmas music on the radio, too, and tried to keep the mood joyful.

  Once we were home, our landlord and a friend helped to get me out of the car and into the house. No Sedona. My enthusiastic dog, who always greeted me at the door, would have to stay with our landlord for the next couple of months while I continued to heal. Our cat, Luna, too, would remain on an extended vacation at a friend’s house. It felt so strange and wrong not seeing them as soon as I walked through the door. Sean had hired a professional crew to come in to scrub the house, so when I arrived, everything was fur-free and clean. It felt oddly sterile.

  Our friends had cooked my first meal at home, which was there waiting when we arrived. I sat at the dining room table to eat, but then felt the full brunt of being out of a hospital environment: I hadn’t sat in a normal chair since the trauma. It was painful. I could sit for only five minutes, and then Sean had to carry me to my wheelchair and put me in bed.

  Still, I was home.

  Around the bed, presents and mail were piled up. The first thing I opened was a beautiful blue-and-brown hat that a woman named Diane had knit for me. She was a Facebook friend who had become an important resource to Sean because she had also had cryoglobulinemia and was able to answer his medical questions.

  Since my hair was so thin and damaged after the trauma and lack of nutrition, I loved having something pretty to put on. Sean and I took our first selfie at home with it on my head and posted it to Facebook.

  As relieved as I was to be back in my own environment, there was also a new reality to consider: If I spiked a fever, if my heart rate got erratic, or if anything else went seriously wrong in my recovery, I was no longer in a place with a team of people, equipment, and medication ready to deal with it. I would have home health aides every day for the first two weeks, then three to four days a week for wound care (as much as my insurance would allow), but anything beyond their scope meant calling 911 and getting into an ambulance again. I dreaded it. I wanted to believe it would never happen to me, but I knew I still had a long road ahead with several more planned surgeries.

  My home health care nurse was a kindhearted woman named Ali. She spent nearly two hours on my dressings every day while I continued to cry out in pain and exhaustion, just as I had in the hospital. Over and over, she told me, “You’re strong. God has big plans for you.”

  On Christmas Eve, my sister-in-law thought it would be good for me to get a little change of scenery. She aired me out a bit by driving us to Starbucks for a green tea latte. I waited in the car while she bought it, vomiting in pain into a barf bag both before and after the latte—which was such a frequent occurrence that it barely registered anymore. Especially after all he’d done for me, I wanted to go to a running store to buy a Christmas gift for Sean, but I wasn’t sure I could handle walking in.

  “I know how much this means to you. If I find a parking spot right in front of the door, you have to try to come in,” she said.

  I agreed, figuring the odds were pretty low I’d have to live up to my promise. It was downtown Madison and the street parking was usually very crowded. But sure enough, there was a perfect spot right in front of the door.

  We went in together and some of the employees recognized me from my Cycling for Peace tour. I sure didn’t look like a cyclist at the moment, though.

  “I got run over,” I explained.

  As I told them my story, a woman nearby said, “Me too! Well, not run over, but hit, and I read all about you! I was hit by a UPS truck a few years ago. I don’t think my injuries were as extensive as yours, but it still took a huge toll on me. I want to give you a Christmas gift…”

  I wondered what she was talking about, and then she walked down the aisle, picked up a book, and came back to pay for it. Then she handed it to me. It was The Long Run: A New York City Firefighter’s Triumphant Comeback from Crash Victim to Elite Athlete by Matt Long.

  “His courage to survive helped save my life,” she told me. “I hope it will do the same for you.”

  We both cried. I started reading it in the car. Matt was an athletic New York City firefighter who had been run over by a shuttle bus when he was on his bike one day. Like me, he’d had a very slim chance of survival and had needed significant blood transfusions. Like me, he had questioned why he survived. But he had gone on to train and become an Ironman triathlete once again, and was dedicating his life to inspiring others to overcome their great challenges.

  One of the central themes of his message was “No longer will I wish…no longer will I want…from now on…I will.”

  My new friend in the store was right; it was just the right message at just the right time, and she reminded me how easy it was to become an everyday hero with a kind gesture. Her sense of empathy led her to give a gift to a complete stranger just in the hopes of being helpful, and it worked. It was a shot of inspiration to read that someone had been through something so similar to what I’d gone through and had come out on the other side that strong, and that confident, despite his scars. I wondered if I could do the same.

  My family came in to Connecticut that day. Erin was not able to be there because of work, but on Christmas, we got him on Skype on the iPad so we could still take a full “family portrait.” It was an awesome day. I wasn’t as active as I would have liked to have been—I kept having to sleep on and off throughout the day—but it was just so good to be surrounded by people and my home and my things rather than beeping machines.

  It really wasn’t until after Christmas that the “new normal” set in. I was finally back in my home, but it didn’t make me magically me again. I was like an entirely different person in an entirely different environment. Navigating everyday tasks that I used to take for granted was a challenge; I longed to do even the normal chores like laundry and dishes, but I couldn’t stand up for long or lift things. It might have been nice to get out of housework for a while if not for the reason for it all—I hated that there were things I could not do, while knowing how lucky I was to have loved ones all around me ready to take over everything that needed to be done.

  Constant reminders of what I was missing popped up all around me; friends of mine would post their pictures of New Year’s Eve dance parties and I was stuck in a recliner on pain medication as I wondered if I could keep my eyes open to watch the ball drop on television. The next day, while they were enjoying days off from work and taking road trips, I was enduring four grueling hours of wound care. It seemed a pretty depressing start to a new year.

  “It’s okay. You know you have a few tough months to go, but you’re going to get through this,” Sean reminded me.

  “Promise?”

  “You’re the strongest person I know. Of course I promise.”

  Every now and then I’d regain a skill, though, or do something that had previously been impossible. On January 14, 2012, I walked up a beach ramp with my friend Erin Christiansen without using my walker, just holding on to the guardrails. That was so exciting that I did it twice more just for fun. Later that day I took my own shoes off for the first time post-trauma by using a reach-it stick. I learned to take nothing for granted. I was delighted to take my shoes off!

  It’s wondrous how many things you can find to be thankful for when you look for them. Just the act of noticing all the things you can do and how many gifts you have in your everyday life can ease stress and improve your outlook. My life seemed to overflow with both—sources of stress and things to be grateful for, often overlapping.

  Now that I was out of a job and medical bills were starting to gi
ve me heart palpitations, we took out high-interest loans through our lawyer’s contacts so that we could survive, but Sean felt a lot of pressure to bring in as much money as he could. He began working lots of double shifts and taking on side work as a personal trainer. But I was really never alone—either my family was there or my friends were. I had a team of everyday heroes: people who took time away from their own needs so they could attend to mine.

  My girlfriends set up a calendar so they could each sign up for shifts. Those who lived nearby might tag-team every few hours, while people from out of state would come in for a few days at a time to take care of me because there was still so little I could do for myself. One friend drove up from DC, several friends from Vermont, Kaori from Pennsylvania…they would overlap to make sure that I was nearly never in the house by myself. That was good for both my physical and mental well-being. I was still working through a lot of anxiety and depression. It helped to reflect on my grandmother’s words of wisdom: “If at the end of your life, you can count five friends who’ve been with you the better part of your life, you are lucky.” My life had almost ended—did that count?—and I had a lot more than five friends who were showing up for me in a big way. If getting squished by a truck was good for one thing, it was the ability it gave me to see dear friends whom I hadn’t seen in years.

  It also seemed I had some friends I’d never even spoken with before: the nurses who’d cared for me while I was in a coma.

  After I had an MRI at Yale one day in January, my mom asked if I wanted to visit the ICU.

  “Sure,” I said. I wondered how it would feel to see the place months later. A nurse led me to the room that had been mine. But when I walked through the doors, I felt…nothing. I had no memory of it at all. I had spent an entire month of my life there and yet I drew a blank when I tried to “see” myself there. Probably a good thing that I had blanked so much of it out, but I did wish I remembered the nurses, many of whom greeted me with tears in their eyes and big hugs.

  It was so good to be able to say thank you to them. These were people who had helped me in my most vulnerable times, and I hoped I could convey to them what they had given me.

  Thank you for keeping me alive. Thank you for the fact that I’m here to go out to lunch with my mom. Thank you for the fact that my husband will kiss me good night tonight.

  At the end of January, we went to visit my cat, Luna. It was a six- or seven-mile ride to Guilford, where she was staying. The ride there went pretty well. The ride back did not.

  We were on Boston Post Road approaching the same intersection where my crash took place when a woman driving a car blew the stop sign and started making a turn from Neck Road, looking in the opposite direction, and front-ended us. I went berserk.

  Police arrived within minutes and issued the driver a ticket. She would drive away with nothing more than a fine, and I would be stuck in a living nightmare. Frozen in fear, I didn’t want to get out of the car so it could be taken out of the crash scene and safely off the road. Although I was physically unharmed, I was deeply mired in a panic attack, convinced the world was out to get us. Maybe I was supposed to die in the first wreck, and this was a follow-up attempt.

  The same newspapers and network news programs that had covered my trauma now dashed out new stories: LOCAL WOMAN GETS HIT AGAIN AT SAME INTERSECTION! It almost sounded like a conspiracy theory.

  I didn’t want to get back in a car again after that, but on Valentine’s Day a couple weeks later, Sean wanted to take me out on our first “real date” since the trauma. How could I resist that? I wasn’t in good shape yet, but I thought it was important to try. We went to a small restaurant that was just at the top of our block, and we headed out early so it wouldn’t be crowded with the dinner rush and it wouldn’t be dark outside. I took ample pain medication ahead of time so I could handle sitting in a booth, which I managed to do for about an hour. It was great. I clung to those little bits of okayness—Look at us, here, doing what normal people do.

  When dinner was over, Sean said, “You’re doing so well. Why don’t we try to walk around T.J.Maxx and get you a pair of shoes?”

  It was nearby, and I had my walker with me. I was pumped about the idea because it meant I would get a lot of exercise. And a new pair of shoes.

  Sean drove us to the T.J.Maxx parking lot and helped me get out of the car and situated with my walker. Then he went back to the driver’s side to retrieve his wallet. I took my little-old-lady steps to the back of the car with my walker, my wound vac slung across my neck, and I had made it just to the trunk when the guy who was parked next to us in a brand-new Mercedes threw his car into reverse.

  He had been waiting for his wife to get out of the store, and as soon as he spotted her, he cut the car around to turn to get her. All I could see was this car coming right at me with its engine revved up, and I screamed.

  I tried to run with my walker, but my body wasn’t put together enough for it. I could barely take baby steps, yet my brain was telling me to move faster! I threw myself to the ground over my walker to get out of the way, and my wound vac burst open.

  SLAM! Sean pounded his fist on the back of the guy’s car to get him to stop. The driver rolled down his window and yelled, “Don’t touch my car!”

  “Are you kidding me? You almost just ran over my wife!” Sean yelled.

  “She should have been looking where she was going!”

  “She’s got a walker! She was just run over four months ago! You can’t see her?”

  “Not my problem if she’s not paying attention. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Sean called the police, but I was too worked up to answer any questions.

  “Just get her to the hospital ASAP,” he said to the police officer.

  An ambulance arrived, and I was so shaken up I could barely speak. I had to be lifted up off the ground and onto a board again, buckled onto a stretcher, whisked away by ambulance like on the day of my trauma, and examined in the emergency room. Luckily, it was just a matter of getting my wound vac reattached; I had no significant new injuries from the fall.

  But I didn’t want to leave the house after that. In my mind, the world had become a completely unsafe place. To make it worse, we tried to file a report so that the driver would be responsible for the cost of my ambulance ride and ER bill, but the police said the parking lot was “private property” and they wouldn’t get involved. The driver never so much as apologized.

  Was it the state that was cursed? Or just me? The thought of it broke my heart. I felt so defeated in my attempts at reentering the world. I wondered if it was time to just give up.

  Chapter 13

  We All Bleed Red

  THREE DAYS LATER, I got a mysterious call on the home phone.

  “Is this Colleen?” a woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been collecting all the newspaper articles about you. I have a stack of them in my living room, and I’ve always intended to call you. I live about an hour south of you in Milford, and I’m a cyclist, too. It’s been heavy on my heart to call you today, so I finally decided to do it. I want you to know that everything that’s happening to you is happening for a reason.”

  I had no idea who this woman was—maybe just a random crazy lady—but at that moment, this lady was the voice of reason I needed to hear. I felt like I was absolutely falling apart and the world had gone crazy; I was ready to latch on to any bit of encouragement I could find.

  “I’m guessing you want to leave the state,” she said.

  Tears streamed down my face. “Yes,” I said. “I hate it here. I hate everything about it. I’m terrified to leave my recliner in fear that something else is going to happen to me. I think there’s a very negative presence that’s literally out to get me.”

  Maybe it was because I’d gone through two divorces, or because I’d stopped attending church regularly. Maybe God was punishing me.

  Very matter-of-factly, she said, “Colleen, I’ve been reading a
bout you. You have quite a story even before your trauma. You moved here to do peace work and advocate for others. People who are doing strong work of peace and love will never have it easy. You are meant to be here. Every bit of negative energy in the world is trying to push you away and make you quit. Don’t let it.”

  We spoke for about five minutes. She told me that the area of town where I had been hit was also the site of witch trials, which very few people knew anymore. It seemed to be a haunted place.

  “This is not the time to fall victim to self-pity and judgment, but rather to rise up and know that you are being picked to go through this, to persevere and be a light. Swords aren’t forged in snow; they’re forged in fire.”

  I never heard from this woman again, but she changed my life. I don’t know how she knew that I needed her call that day, but her voice reminded me that there were so many people out there pulling for me…people I’d never met before. I took her call as a connection from God.

  What I thought about, more than anything, was all the people who had saved my life. I had become a product of heroes.

  My brother Erin had been my first hero when he rescued me from drowning. On the day of my trauma, there was David Smith, who witnessed the crash and came running to my rescue. I was covered in blood and he did not react in fear and leave me. Responders were present and they called 911; they called Sean; they stopped the driver; they kept me talking.

  Then there were the three EMTs who raced out and capably tended to me so I’d have a fighting chance when I got to the hospital. Then there were all the doctors, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other medical staffers who literally brought me back from death more than once.

  And there were the staff members at the rehab hospital who helped me walk again and relearn basic tasks, and cared about me enough to believe in my success.