Gratitude in Motion

by Colleen Kelly Alexander

  The plan was to wait another few months and then start the process of expanding my “good” skin, then remove the paper-thin skin, stretching out the good parts to cover the gaps. I knew it was necessary, but I didn’t want to do it anytime soon because it would mean going back to a wheelchair and starting new wound care all over again. I wanted to make some headway before that.

  In September, I finally got my surgeon to agree that I could run and bike on an upright bike again.

  “Can I sign up for a century ride?”

  As my surgeon knew, a century ride meant one hundred miles within twelve hours.

  “No century rides!”

  “How far can I run?”

  “I’ve learned to tell you to do a quarter of what you feel like you can do.”

  “So no marathons yet?”

  “No. Start with a mile. See how it goes.”

  Hmph. Spoilsport.

  It felt fitting, though, to take a ride with my sister-in-law Kaori. It had been a year since our six-hundred-mile cycling tour together, and although I wasn’t going to attempt that distance anytime soon, I did still want to celebrate with her that I could ride again. We rode on an abandoned rail trail that was away from any car traffic. At the halfway point, we stopped for lunch and were seated next to a sign that read:

  TODAY IS A GIFT FROM GOD. REMEMBER TO THANK HIM.

  I did.

  Thank you, God, for my family, for my soul mate, for all of my doctors and medical team, for everything that’s led to this moment. I am not okay yet, but I am getting there. I’m going to try to be that light that I know You want me to be. I will do it with Your help.

  The more I intentionally focused on my gratitude, the less I focused on what I’d lost. As we closed in on the one-year anniversary of my trauma, we decided to throw a backyard thank-you party for all the medical people who had kept me alive and helped me to heal. I had forty invitations professionally printed and mailed, and eagerly awaited RSVPs. The first one came in.

  “I’m just wondering…when the party is?” the nurse asked.

  “What do you mean? Didn’t you get the invitation?”

  “Yes, but…” I’m sure she was being as delicate as possible. “It doesn’t say.”

  I looked at the invitation again, and sure enough, no date or time was given. I imagined the recipients getting their invitations, shaking their heads, and saying, “Must be that girl who got run over by a freight truck, bless her heart.”

  It’s true that my memory and judgment were still pretty off. I would make plans with a friend and completely forget by the next day. I would have no idea at all until she showed up, and I’d think it was a nice surprise, despite the fact that she’d told me exactly when she was coming one day earlier. It was a little unnerving to have it keep happening, and eventually Sean bought me a date book and helped me write everything down. I had also been telling reporters that I was thirty-eight years old; he finally helped me do the math to realize that I was thirty-seven. I’m not sure why I had skipped a year in my head.

  The party was a great success. A local restaurant catered a soup bar, and we hired a bagpiper and drummer. Several of the medical staff were unable to be there because they had to be at work at the hospital, but my chief orthopedic surgeon delighted me by showing up on his bike, fully suited in cycling gear. I was so excited; it felt like a celebrity was rolling into my driveway. Unfortunately, his pager went off after a short time and he had to leave for the hospital.

  We played boccie ball, volleyball, and croquet, and had a painting station for kids (and adults!). All around, it felt like a great way to say thank you to the people who’d kept me alive and helped me to get to my next birthday—a whole year of my life that wouldn’t have happened without them. These were the people who’d made sure I still had a future to look forward to, and I’m glad I got to thank them.

  After two appeals, I finally got approved for disability benefits, thanks to a lawyer friend who took on my case pro bono. The rule was that I could have a part-time job as long as I didn’t earn more than $700 a month, so I applied for work at a shoe store for runners. They hired me and scheduled me for two to three shifts per week, during which I would help people get fitted for their shoes and ring up their purchases.

  It quickly became apparent, though, that I was unable to work a cash register. I was no longer able to do basic math without severe panic attacks and help—I would take too long to figure it out, then give out the wrong change, and I could almost never reconcile my drawer at the end of my shift. Although she kept me around for several months anyway, the owner eventually stopped scheduling shifts for me, and Sean took me to a neuropsychologist for testing. It was then that I officially learned about my brain injury. After a barrage of scans and neurocognitive tests meant to check my long- and short-term memory, facial recognition, spatial references, and thinking skills, I received a report explaining where my weaknesses were—mostly things I had already realized, like the fact that I was mixing up words, but I hadn’t thought deeply about the cause.

  Interestingly enough, my brain injury wasn’t from being run over; the doctors could tell from the area of the brain where the damage showed up that it was from the cardiac arrest afterward. Because I had been dead—twice—for a total of half an hour, my brain didn’t get oxygen and brain cells started dying off. That’s normal for cardiac arrest patients; lots of factors determine whether the prognosis will be good or bad, but it’s unusual to ever have complete brain healing. Many brain injuries leave permanent effects, and most of the recovery is made in the first month or two.

  Whether caused by football injuries, shaken baby syndrome, a car accident, drowning, or any number of other issues, brain injuries have the same wide-ranging symptoms: They can cause problems with thinking, memory, and reasoning; difficulty communicating appropriately; inappropriate social outbursts or aggression; personality changes; depression and anxiety; and problems with sensory processing—sight, sound, touch, hearing, and smell can all be “off.” There are varying levels from mild to severe, and because of my helmet, mine was nowhere near as bad as it could have been if I’d had the double whammy of also dealing with trauma to the brain.

  Just another thing I’m going to have to overcome, I thought. But this time, my athleticism wasn’t going to be any extra help. Going to the gym couldn’t bring back my math skills. I would have to just keep practicing and going to therapy, and hope my brain would continue doing its good work of putting itself back in order.

  On September 20, I decided to tackle a major milestone: I wanted to drive by myself for the first time in almost a year. I had been cleared to drive for a few weeks, but I had to build myself up to the idea. Finally, one morning, I had a mission: I needed a new lightbulb, and I wanted to buy a mum to put by the front door. In total, I drove less than two miles, on non-busy roads, and I panicked, but I accomplished my mission. I even rewarded myself with a pumpkin spice latte from the Dunkin’ Donuts up the block on my way home. Shazam.

  Old me would never have understood why new me was celebrating something as simple as taking a quick drive, but when you’re rebuilding your life from scratch, you have new standards for celebrating. This was a big deal. It meant I wouldn’t be limited by my fear my whole life.

  After another couple of quick trips, I decided that I would try to take a longer drive—appropriately enough, to therapy.

  “I want to come to your office like a regular client,” I told my therapist, who was still doing weekly home visits then.

  “I’m all for it, but I have stairs leading up to my office. No elevator.” She thought for a second. “Let me see if I can borrow an office on the ground floor for your visits.”

  That’s what she ended up doing. She called later to tell me that she’d found an open office downstairs, and I could meet her there. So I set out to make this unfamiliar trip. I was nervous and hoping I wouldn’t be too rusty—but I hadn’t prepared myself for the sight I was about to see. As I turned
left from my block onto Boston Post Road, there it was:

  The stupid freight truck.

  Not the same exact one, presumably, but the same company’s truck. It was the first time I’d seen one of their trucks since the trauma. Panic overtook me and my breath caught in my throat. The truck pulled into an assisted-living facility’s parking lot right in front of me, and something compelled me to follow it there. The driver was undoubtedly dropping off linens, but I was about to throw a bit of a wrench in his plans.

  I didn’t know exactly what my intention was at the time, but I had to see this truck up close. I parked my car next to it and walked right up to it, shaking and crying, as the driver headed around back to make his delivery. Then he spotted me and asked, “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  I descended into sobs and screamed, “I was run over by one of these trucks!”

  Then, by way of explanation, I lifted my shirt up over my abdomen.

  He let out an involuntary curse.

  “Do you see the tire marks?”

  He nodded.

  I rolled up the bottom of my pants to show him the bandaging on my leg.

  “That’s what the driver of one of these trucks did to me.”

  Quietly, he said, “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing. Just let me stand here.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  He turned the engine off. I walked up to the front and opened up my arms to extend them over the entire double set of front tires. I wanted to feel them without being in danger, and to understand how wide they were together since I had their marks across my body. Then I reached down to let my fingers touch the places on my body where the tires ran me over, up to my sternum.

  The driver asked, “When did this happen?”

  “Almost a year ago.”

  “Do whatever you need to do.”

  I went to the back of the truck and ran my hands along the underside of those wheels and sobbed. I wanted to smell the tires, to feel the heat of the rubber friction and the underside of the truck again. I wanted to experience it all again in safety, as if I could defeat it this time. It felt like facing my demon in a very literal way. Instead of avoiding it, this time I was allowing myself to be vulnerable and running straight into and through the terror. This was the big beast that had almost taken my life.

  This poor driver just stood there patiently, letting me cry. I don’t know how long I was there, but finally, I asked, “Can I give you a hug?”

  He didn’t really answer and I did it anyway. I think I got the crazy-lady pass.

  “Promise me that you will be really safe when you are driving this truck on the road, because one of your coworkers ran me over.”

  “I’m sorry. I absolutely will.”

  I got back into my car, still shaking, trying to pull myself together. I called Sean and he said, “Stay there. I’ll pick you up.”

  “No, I’m going to continue driving to my appointment,” I said.

  Obviously, I was late. But my therapist understood and stayed late with me to work through what had just happened.

  As difficult as it was to see that truck, it felt good afterward to have had that time to face it. There was nothing I could do to turn back time, but I would have to find ways to keep moving forward. Many days, I still felt like I was in a dark tunnel. The difference now was that I could not only envision a light at the end of it, but I could also see cracks all throughout the tunnel where light kept peeking through. People were my lights. The beautiful fall breeze on my face as I got back on my bike was a light. My ridiculous chickens were lights (even the one who turned out to be a rooster and began waking us at the crack of dawn).

  And then another light came into our lives: We adopted an English Lab puppy and named her Jamis Malone. Jamis after the bicycle company.

  Jamis was such a good little girl. She learned how to sit on command effortlessly, and spent all her sleep time snuggled up to big sister Sedona. I couldn’t stop taking pictures of them together—it was just unbelievably cute. And considering I had been apprehensive about how Sedona might take to a new puppy, it was a relief to see she didn’t mind too much.

  We got a big crate, which looked funny with such a little puppy inside, and lined it with my old bed pads from Gaylord. All was well, except that Jamis was terrified of the rooster’s crow and ran behind my legs, yelping. We knew we were going to have to find a new home for the rooster, and in the meantime, we put him in a crate in the shed each night to keep the crowing muted.

  But our hearts were broken one October morning to find that an animal had gotten into the shed, knocked over his cage, and devoured him in the middle of the night. For all the noise he made, he was still a love, and I felt terrible that we hadn’t been able to protect him.

  October 8, 2012, was the one-year anniversary of my trauma, and also my day of rebirth—literally. I had come back to life twice that day, so it felt fitting to declare it a celebration-of-life day rather than think of it as a sad anniversary. Sean and I took a road trip to Vermont with the dogs that weekend. We went for a slow hike, then out to dinner. It was a crisp fall day with beautifully changing leaves, just as it had been a year prior, and I wasn’t about to let bad memories steal my ability to make good new ones.

  The next day, I found out that a local article had been published on the anniversary of my trauma stating that our police wanted to make Madison a more bike-friendly community, and that they were going to host a bike safety ride later in the month. I cried tears of joy when I read the article, knowing it was happening in part because of me.

  Slowly but surely, I was also realizing that maybe Connecticut wasn’t awful.

  All these wonderful people who had saved my life lived in Connecticut. The neighbors who were now enthusiastically cleaning up the shoreline and helping us in any way they could, the facilities that had so capably cared for me, the adaptive sports program and bike safety clubs…they were all right here. Despite all my prejudices and anger about the place, I had come to the realization that this was home. I loved going back to visit Vermont, but I was no longer looking for an excuse to leave my new state.

  Gaylord representatives had asked me to come speak at a staff luncheon they were having, so Sean and I drove there and I shared my story, the kind of care I got at Gaylord, and the good progress I’d made since then. It was empowering to get to tell my story in front of a room full of people at rapt attention, and afterward, several people came over to tell me that they were inspired by my words.

  “You should become a motivational speaker,” one said.

  “You should write a book,” another said.

  Hmm! I always liked both speaking and writing, and had never shied away from giving talks for PeaceJam. Speaking about my own recovery was new, though. I thought about what was inspirational about it and ended up feeling even more appreciative of the care I’d received. If anyone had dropped the ball…I hated to think about the many, many ways I could have died.

  I had constant reminders of how close I’d come. When I rolled over in bed, my sternum still made crackling noises. I’m sure that’s from the CPR I received in the trauma unit. When CPR is done right, it can crack ribs or detach them from the sternum—it happens in about a third of all cases (more women than men), and a smaller percentage of people wind up with broken sternums. It’s one of the things I always got questioned about when I taught CPR classes—people were very tentative about how hard to push.

  “The person is already dead,” I would tell them. “Yes, you may crack ribs. That’s okay. They can live with cracked ribs. They can’t live without breathing.”

  Now I was a living example of my own advice.

  While I was at Gaylord, I got to visit my old room and its new inhabitant, a man just slightly older than I was. I saw the same desperate pain and fear in his eyes that once were in mine when I was in that same bed. I didn’t get to learn his story, only to see that he was going through something awful. As I looked at him, I tho
ught about what the audience members had said to me about using my story to inspire others. It made me want to reach out to him and everyone else in that place and tell them that there was hope beyond those walls. That as grim as the world looked right now, there was still beauty to be found. I wanted them to know that there were still sunrises and mountains and new puppies in the world, even if right now seemed to be a fog of never-ending pain.

  My heart was heavy as I asked my friends to pray for him, that he be wrapped in angels’ wings as he recovered from whatever it was that had happened to him. There were so many of us out there whose worlds had been ripped apart by one careless act, and I became more and more determined to serve as a positive force for all of us. I thought of how the woman in the running store had been so inspired by Matt Long’s book that she bought it for a stranger—and how I, that stranger, had seen him as that same kind of beacon. I wondered if my own story would do that for someone someday.

  I had no intention of being an Ironman like Matt, but I had every intention of pushing my limits to the max. That month, I ran my first relay marathon with the Red Cross team, which also included my physical therapist from Gaylord. In fact, she’s the one who passed the baton to me. I was able to do a 5.8-mile leg of the race and then cross the finish line (this was just one year post-trauma), which was exhilarating! I earned a medal for our team’s participation, and I made a decision then that I would never keep my medals: I would give them to my heroes instead. Shouldn’t all heroes get medals?

  I gave the first medal to my chief trauma surgeon, Dr. Kaplan. I loved seeing him smile as I put it around his neck and told him that he was my hero.

  Finally, October 20 rolled around, and it was time for the cycling tour I’d organized. Sean and his fellow postal workers had delivered six thousand flyers around town, and there were posters up at Gaylord and local businesses. They let people know that the event was open to riders of all abilities and needs, and they could sign up for ten, twenty-five, or fifty miles along the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail.