The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt, and I didn’t want to feel that way. I searched my heart for all the grace I could find. I wanted so badly to forgive this man, but I had nothing to base it on.
I channeled some of that energy into activism, speaking out in the media about the need for safer roads and stronger laws. I began paying more attention to the news reports of other bike traumas, which came in with alarming frequency. An organizer with the group Ghost Bikes also reached out to me; they attached white spray-painted bikes to street signs near where fatalities or serious bike crashes had happened, along with plaques to memorialize cyclists who’d lost their lives. It was heartbreaking to fully realize what a large problem this was. What had once been something that happens to “other people” now felt deeply personal to me; cyclists were out there getting paralyzed and killed on the roads every day, and our legislators seemed to be ignoring it.
Of course, it wasn’t all the motorists’ fault. I wasn’t blind to the fact that many cyclists pay little attention to bike safety laws. Some ignore stop signs, some weave too far into traffic, some don’t wear helmets. The job of respect is a two-way street.
Sean got angry when he saw a cyclist riding against traffic one day. “If people are going to be on the roads, they should have to take a safety course.”
“You mean like passing a road test to drive a car?”
“Yes! When you buy a bike, you should have to take a class before you can ride on public streets.”
I figured it would never work from a legal perspective, but the thought was solid. There’s a reason cyclists get a bad reputation for being entitled and irresponsible. Because of my dad and his bike shop, bike safety was drilled into my head from the time I was a toddler on my first three-wheeler. Not everyone has learned even the basics of bike safety, though, or realized that the same laws that apply to cars also apply to them—no biking the wrong way down a one-way street, for instance.
But the people who drove me the craziest were the ones who should definitely have known better. I was completely distressed when one of my own surgeons revealed that, while he cycled to and from work every day, he didn’t wear a helmet! Even after what had happened to me. I realized what I had to do: I brought him my helmet. The one that had saved me from having my skull cracked open on the pavement. I’d thought it would be with me for a long time, but now it needed a new home. Though he couldn’t wear it, I trusted that my doctor would appreciate the symbolism.
I didn’t want to let legislators off the hook so easily, either, so Sean and I did whatever we could to support the efforts of bike safety groups in our area, by being both volunteers and mouthpieces in the media.
My doctors kept telling me to relax and let my body heal, and I kept responding, “Are you kidding? Have you met me?” Relaxing was not a skill I was good at. My whole life, I was someone who was constantly in motion, physically and mentally. I didn’t do downtime. And for the first months of my recovery, it was something I fought against and frankly hated—I wanted to be back at work, back at training, back at my normal fast-paced life. But something wonderful happened to me that spring: I learned the art of stillness.
Not all the time, mind you. I still had things to do. But for the first time I can remember, I found myself sitting there in my garden with my new chickens, my cat, and my blind old dog, sipping my coffee, and just being. Not doing. Without struggle. I read a letter from my pen pal—my grandfather’s sister, who exchanged handwritten letters through the mail with me each week from Pennsylvania—and I wrote back in my neatest script.
I transplanted some peppers, and then the mood struck me to just lie down in the grass and listen to the sounds of nature: the birds, the wind in the trees. I felt the sunshine on my face and I felt…happy.
It was so weird!
Soon after that, it was my nurse’s time to say a professional goodbye. She had been telling me for months, “Someday you won’t need me anymore, and I can see us just being friends,” but that day sneaked up on me. After five and a half months, her last visit for wound care arrived in June, and I was discharged from home health care. It was bittersweet.
“You’re strong enough. You and Sean are an excellent team and you can manage your wounds on your own now,” she told me.
We both teared up a bit. I smiled and said, “Well, I guess we can just be friends now.”
I had grown so accustomed to our sessions together; we talked about everything there is to say. I believe that sometimes, God does put people in your path who are meant to be with you, and Ali was one of those people.
I would soon get the great pleasure of seeing three more of those special people: my EMTs, Patti, Amanda, and Lindsay. First I got to speak with Patti, the paramedic, on the phone. Then I went to the ambulance service to meet with her and Amanda in person.
That’s when I learned that I had been Amanda’s very first call. She was a part-time EMT on nights and weekends, while Patti was a full-time paramedic and part-time transporter.
“You were one of the worst calls I’ve ever seen since I’ve been on the Madison squad,” Patti said. “And the worst one that lived. We could see your hip bones, your pelvis, your intestines, tire marks across your abdomen…but you just kept praying and fighting the whole ride.”
Patti had tried to come visit me at Yale, but wasn’t allowed to due to privacy rules. Seeing them now, hugging them, made me giddy. I wanted them to see how far I’d come. I had just recently transitioned to using a cane most of the time—going back to a walker only for long or challenging walks. And as long as I was fully clothed, you couldn’t tell that anything was wrong with me. What was underneath, of course, was another story, but people really had no idea unless I wore shorts or showed my abdomen.
After that day, I went to visit my EMTs every few weeks and often brought them Starbucks or food.
My friend Gail told me that was a funny thing.
“You’re saying thank you a lot.”
“They saved my life. How could I not?”
“It’s just that we’re the behind-the-scenes people, usually. It’s really unusual to have somebody come back to say thank you.”
“Well, that’s just sad.”
I was connected to those three women in ways that felt permanent. It was Amanda’s eyes I was looking into when I thought I was experiencing my last moments on Earth. It was her compassion I felt in that terrifying time. I could not have been in better hands, and I just wanted to thank her every day.
I know what it feels like to be appreciated and I know what it feels like to not be appreciated. I made a conscious effort to verbalize my gratitude to people because I know how much it can positively affect the recipient.
On one of my first visits, I told the EMTs, “I’m doing the Branford Road Race next week.” They stared at me in astonishment. “Well, I mean, I’m not running. But I’m going to wog.”
“Wog?”
“Walk-jog.”
I had made it my mission to get the blood banks filled up by the time I finished the race. There were two local blood drives that day, and I made a big social media push to get people to sign up to commit to donate blood in the days leading up to the race. Since I had needed seventy-eight units of blood and twenty-five bags of platelets and plasma, my goal was to get enough people to donate to at least cover that amount.
NBC came out to film me for a series of commercials for the Red Cross, encouraging people to donate blood. They wanted people to see my face—to humanize the idea of blood donations so that it wasn’t just a clinical experience. They sent a film crew to my backyard to interview me, and the chickens and Sedona made special guest appearances.
“Without those more than one hundred people who gave of their time and their blood, I wouldn’t be here,” I said in one of the commercials. “When you sign up to donate blood, you’ll know that I’m someone who benefited directly.”
I was booked on five local radio shows to talk about it, and there were sev
eral new articles about me that week to mark the historic occasion of our return to the Branford race. On June 17, once again I had to use a walker, and Sean wrapped my wounds with extra gauze and taped me up tight to avoid leakage.
My trusty iPod and headphones always came along with me, too. Hearing the sound of my heart beating fast set off panic attacks—it reminded me too much of the fact that I’d gone into cardiac arrest, and it made me paranoid that my heart was going to give out on me. I didn’t like hearing or feeling my heart thump…or noticing that it was too still, either. I’d lain in bed for so long watching and listening to my heart monitors, knowing that changes in either direction would send nurses dashing in. In short, my heart freaked me out. So I drowned out the sounds as much as possible with alternative rock—in particular, “Dare You to Move” by Switchfoot, which had a special meaning to me…we had played it at our wedding, but now it took on a different gravity.
I wore a Team Red Cross T-shirt and my race number, 708, and headed out to the starting line early that morning. Sean ran the race, too, but he actually ran it. Finishing in just over forty-five minutes, he headed back to find me along the race course and didn’t see me anywhere. For a few minutes, he panicked, thinking I might have had a problem and had to leave the course. He started asking people, “I’m looking for my wife. Have you seen a woman with a walker?”
People laughed. They thought he was playing a joke.
Really, though, I was just farther along the course than he expected I could have been. Despite that I was definitely not supposed to be jogging, I was pushing my wogging to the max. It just felt so good! I finished that race and I got the best news afterward: There had been record-breaking numbers at both blood donation sites. We’d done it; we’d replenished that blood supply, at least for that day.
I had just learned that June and July were the months blood donations were most needed. People who usually donate blood go on vacation in the summertime; schools don’t host their usual drives; in short, it’s a time when few people are thinking about donating blood, so banks often have a shortage. It felt good to help fix that problem.
The natural high of all that exercise kept me going for another couple of hours, but then it caught up with me: I got home and just crashed. That was going to become an ongoing theme for me: I loved taking part in races despite how improbable it looked, and it always took a lot out of me because my body was still deep in healing.
“Can I swim now?” I asked my doctor one day.
“Yeah, sure, as soon as you find a sterile pool!” he said.
“How about a saltwater pool?”
“No way.”
“Well, that’s no fun. How am I supposed to be a triathlete again if I can’t swim?”
I’m not sure which of us was more exasperated. He explained that my skin was still in a very compromised state and would be for quite some time, if not forever—I was always going to be more prone to infection than other people, and considering what my body was already going through, a simple infection could turn into something much worse. No pools for a few more months at minimum.
But at least I had my three-wheeler bike to use, and I was positive that one day I was going to get on a regular bike again. In fact, when I wrote to the bike company Jamis to ask them about potentially sponsoring the cycling tour I was organizing for the adaptive sports program at Gaylord, I also told them about my trauma and my beloved bike—and along with agreeing to become sponsors, they sent me a commuter bike. With my new cycling shoes and my new bike, well, now I was practically obligated to ride again. That would convince my doctor, wouldn’t it?
Chapter 15
Light Peeks In
SUMMER WAS A TIME of healing and renewal. We grew an amazing bounty of vegetables from seed in our greenhouse and garden: carrots, tomatoes, squash, peas, broccoli, kale, chard, edamame, spinach—all kinds of good, healing food courtesy of the earth. We ate greens two or three times a day. And we found good people to share them with, too, like our local dentist.
He had read about my trauma in the newspapers and also noted that I had lost my job. So he called Sean to offer a free cleaning and exam. When it turned out that Sean had cavities, he did the fillings for free, too.
Good people are everywhere.
I looked for ways to channel my interests and abilities into some kind of “hobbyist income,” even though I knew I wasn’t ready for a regular job yet. I learned how to create body scrubs and natural lip balms tinted with minerals. I began making prints of my nature photos, and a friend of mine who owned a gift shop offered to carry them for me. She even had me display my “artist photo” and bio on the sale table, and I would work there occasionally selling my wares.
I started volunteering at blood drives, too. One day, just after someone had introduced me as a “spokesperson for the Red Cross,” a woman who was waiting to give blood lifted her eyes and looked straight into mine.
“You’re Colleen,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I saw you in the commercial. That’s how I knew you were still with us.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears as she explained that she was also a cyclist who had been riding her bike on October 8, until she hit a portion of the road that was closed off and she couldn’t go any farther. She didn’t know what to do, and got into conversation with people nearby. Rumors swirled about a bad accident and possible fatality.
When, finally, she was allowed to ride through, fire trucks and police cars were still on the scene, and the freight truck was still parked with my mangled bike underneath.
“I saw the pool of blood where your body lay, and I just stopped, cried, and prayed. It was all I could do,” she said.
We held hands and cried together.
“The memory of all that blood has haunted me and I never knew that my prayers were answered until I saw the commercial on NBC. That’s when I picked up my phone and made an appointment to donate blood.”
It was so gratifying to know that I had made a difference like that. So many people don’t donate blood just because it doesn’t occur to them; it hasn’t hit them in a personal way. Maybe they don’t know anyone who’s ever needed blood, maybe they figure enough other people do it so they don’t have to. I wanted to be someone who could help wave the flag high to say that blood banks are almost always in need, and that people really do live or die based on whether or not there’s enough blood available. Imagine if there had been a shortage before I arrived at the trauma bay.
“Maybe we can be blood sisters,” she told me. “My blood type is a universal donor, so I can donate to anyone. Maybe you’ll use my blood in one of your next surgeries.”
The idea of “blood sisters” was beautiful to me. So many times lately, I wondered about the traits of the people who’d donated blood to me. When I accidentally left Jay-Z playing for an hour during a workout, I thought, I don’t like this music. Why didn’t I change it? and then my second thought was I wonder if one of my blood donors likes this music. Maybe there was just a little bit of hip-hop running through my veins now.
I did have two more surgeries that summer, which came with new scars, new rainbow-colored bruising, new pain, and new nausea. Each surgery, even the fairly minor ones, set me back again in my recovery, at least temporarily. The aftereffects of so much anesthesia were tough, and I just kept throwing my body new curveballs in what it would have to heal next—while it was already doing the hard work of healing the preexisting stuff: growing new skin, closing wounds, reawakening nerves and muscles. Every surgery was a source of anxiety, but I was also so glad to get them ticked off my to-do list—we were making improvements now.
One surgery was to retrieve my vena cava filter that had been placed there to help capture embolisms: blood clots that have broken away. I stayed awake with just mild pain management for this surgery.
The medical team put a blue cape around my neck and lifted it toward my head so I wouldn’t see what was going on below me, like when a woman has a C-se
ction—though the surgeon admitted that I was going to be the first patient of his to stay conscious during the procedure. It didn’t scare me too much. I figured, when else would I ever have the opportunity to witness something like this? Plus, it made me feel pretty bad-ass to be able to say that I stayed awake during surgery. It would make for a great story.
Once they’d numbed the area as much as possible with an injection, the surgeon ran a long catheter through an incision in my neck. Then he inserted a long hooked wire into the catheter to retrieve the filter. I had asked for the remnants of previous surgeries—bones and things that they’d had to remove—but never got a yes before. This time they presented me with the inferior vena cava filter in a surgical cup. It looked like the metal structure of a teepee, with little chunks of tissue still clinging to it. (I still have it!)
When I finally removed the bandage from my neck, I realized I might have a better story to tell: There were two puncture holes that looked decidedly like a vampire bite worthy of a Hollywood movie.
While I was healing better than the doctors expected, that still didn’t mean it was a smooth road. My skin was growing in, but it was paper thin and with no layer of fat underneath it, so it tore very easily. Just the elastic waistband of my underwear could open up the skin on my abdomen easily. And my leg was so stiff it was like a wooden leg…I had no range of motion because the skin was so taut and thin that if I moved freely, it just tore right open again. So despite gaining strength, I still needed to use canes and walkers because my gait was so thrown off and my leg motions were limited, making it easy for me to lose balance and hurt myself again.
Gratitude in Motion Page 16