Gratitude in Motion

by Colleen Kelly Alexander

  The Madison police chief had registered to ride with me, and so had a few other officers. A friend’s young son had offered to help “train” people by riding five miles with them as a school project. How awesome is that?

  Prior to the tour day, Fox News invited me to appear live in their studio to talk about it. I’d never done a live show before and felt a little Mary Katherine Gallagher–ish about it all (“When I get nervous, I go like this…”). But it went well, and they agreed to come out to tape another segment on the morning of the ride.

  Several longtime friends slept over at our house that weekend, which filled my heart with joy. It was amazing to have so many of us together under one roof for a cause I cared so deeply about. We had sixty participants on the day of the tour, and it was a big success: We raised just over $10,000 for the adaptive sports program. At an average cost of $2,000 per bike, that would mean five new bikes. There were three basic varieties: hand-pedaled bikes for people with spinal cord injuries; recumbent bikes for trauma survivors, amputees, and people who’d had strokes or balance impairments; and tandem bikes for people with visual impairments.

  I wore my “Hope Rides Again,” my favorite T-shirt post–brain surgery and now my favorite again. At the end of the day, I was exhausted and covered in bike chain grease, and so, so happy.

  Having to say goodbye to all those friends at the end of it was the hardest part. But two weeks after it was over, I had already set the date for the next one: October 19, 2013, would be the second annual Gaylord Adaptive Sports Cycling Tour, and instead of raising money for more bikes, we’d branch out to fill the needs of their other programs: the Wounded Warrior Project, wheelchair rugby, adaptive downhill skiing, water skiing, archery, and more. The adaptive sports staff were such creative people, always finding new ways to make the impossible possible for people with physical limitations. They were a team I wanted on my side for a long time to come. Like me, they were determined to create light in the world.

  Chapter 16

  Racing On

  THERE WERE SO MANY cycling and running events that one could sign up for, and I admit I may have gone a little crazy, but what better way to get my body moving and my endorphins kicking while also raising awareness and funding for good causes?

  Another cause dear to my heart cropped up that November: Just before Thanksgiving, a Vermont friend’s five-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a Wilms tumor, a form of kidney cancer. I decided to sign up for a half marathon that February in hopes of raising money toward her family’s expenses as she began chemotherapy. I had two months to train, and I was finally able to start running without a walker. My first race without a walker was the Faxon Law New Haven Road Race, which I slowly ran wearing a sign pinned to my shirt that said THANK YOU, YALE MEDICAL STAFF, FOR SAVING MY LIFE!

  When I finished, I ran straight over to the Yale Orthopedic Medicine tent and hugged the doctor. “I had my pelvis screwed back together! Just one year ago!” I said. “I still have a huge hole in my butt! I still have a giant eighteen-inch wound on my leg, and a hole in my abdomen, but I JUST RAN! HOW COOL IS RUNNING?”

  And just like that, I loved running, after spending my whole life thinking of it as a chore. I still loved cycling, but it scared me. I didn’t have the same bad memories attached to running. Now, when I ran, I felt the shadows of other people running alongside me…people I loved who couldn’t be with me out on the trails. I thought about my grandparents, mostly. My grandfather, who worked tirelessly in his vegetable garden. My loving grandmother, who died on my birthday when I was in my early twenties. I didn’t only think about people who had passed away, though. I also thought of my brother Erin, who had wanted to run with me but had ruptured his Achilles tendon and was stuck in bed. I thought about all the people who supported me and wanted to see me continue to heal and follow the path I had chosen. They were the shadows beside me the whole time, and they gave me strength to go on even when the pain verged on unmanageable.

  My little puppy grew at an alarming rate, and I wondered if she was ready to become a training partner. She was soon able to hike with us, and also attempted to jog with me, but got overexcited about it and jumped up on me as if to say, “Mom, this is so awesome!” I wondered if there was such a thing as athlete/dog training classes to get us in better lockstep. In the meantime, I figured I’d better stick to Sean and my girlfriends.

  I wasn’t ready to ride a bike on roads, except during group rides where I felt safer in a pack. Even then, there was a point in every ride when panic overwhelmed me and I broke down. The memories were still too fresh; every car on the road was now my potential enemy. Just the sound of engines nearby made my heart race and my throat tighten. For the most part, I stuck to riding stationary bikes indoors and trail riding. It was a loss, but I had to honor what felt safe to me.

  I was even jumpy when I was out running. One night, while I was training for the half marathon, I ran through a park. In the last mile, a car came toward me, headlights beaming. I ran into the grass in terror, and the car stopped. The driver yelled something at me, and I went straight into fight-or-flight mode. I chose flight! I ran full speed with the power of panic fueling me, worrying that I was about to get thrown into the back of some crazed murderer’s truck. The driver pulled up behind me and I was terrified that he was following me.

  It turned out to be a park ranger.

  “Park’s closed, ma’am.”

  I couldn’t even breathe.

  “Is that…what you yelled back there?”

  “Yes, it is. Didn’t think you heard me. You were all lit up like a Christmas tree. Sorry if I scared ya. I just got to do my job and keep people out of the park at night.”

  I was awfully glad that no one had videotaped my reaction to the park ranger, because I’m pretty sure it would have given people a good laugh to see me scream like a B-movie horror film actress over absolutely nothing.

  Panic attacks do that to you. They make you hypervigilant, ready to pounce at the slightest provocation. Your brain is conditioned to believe that there are threats all around you and that you need to be ready to fight them or flee quickly. Even things you logically know are safe can cause physical reactions that you can’t control—racing heart, tight chest, sweaty palms, feelings of depersonalization (like everything is a movie), nausea, dizziness, shaking, numbness, or tingling…in short, anything that reminded me of my trauma in even the smallest way could set my body off to react just the same as if I were freshly experiencing an actual trauma. Lots of people wind up in the emergency room thinking they’re having a heart attack, only to be told it’s “just” a panic attack. It’s hard to believe because the symptoms are real, no matter how they’re triggered.

  It was unfair to have to deal with this kind of psychological torment, but then again, a lot of things were unfair in life. I thought a lot about how unfair it was for a five-year-old to have to deal with cancer, and I hoped I could raise enough money to make a difference for her family. Maybe it would give her parents the ability to take time off from work the way Sean had in the early days when I was at my worst. I thought of the ways friends had pulled together to help me, and now that I was improving, I wanted to find a way to pay that forward and help others.

  Just as I was planning this, though, tragedy ripped through our community in an almost unspeakable way.

  On December 14, 2012, a twenty-year-old man killed his mother and then opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing twenty children and six staff members. All of the children were six or seven years old. Nothing could explain it; it was one of the cruelest, most senseless acts I’d ever heard of, and it was far too close to home.

  My community reeled from the news. At a Red Cross blood drive a week later, I encountered a man in his midtwenties with heavy eyes. Most of us in Connecticut were pretty lost that week, but he just looked broken in a way beyond the rest of us. I introduced myself, thanked him for donating blood, and asked him how he was doing.

  “I just
buried my dad two weeks ago because of brain cancer, and now I just buried my best friend who was shot at Sandy Hook while protecting her students. I think I’m numb, and all I know how to do right now is be here.”

  He pulled out his phone and showed me photos of his father smiling just weeks before his death, and a photo of himself with his dear friend Victoria Soto just a week and a half prior, smiling together. All I could do was wrap my arms around him. I thought it was beautiful that in this time of distress, his way of coping was to donate blood to help others.

  He knew who I was, and told me, “Your story inspires me; it gives us all hope.”

  All I could respond with was what I was actually grappling with: “Sometimes it doesn’t feel fair that I lived and so many die.”

  I wanted to believe that saving me was part of God’s plan, but I also couldn’t accept that God didn’t have a good plan for those twenty-six children and women. It was something so cruelly unfathomable, and brought me right back to the reason I had started working with PeaceJam, to combat violence and bring about more humanity and understanding.

  Although I was no longer working for the organization in any official capacity, I still greatly supported the work PeaceJam did. It had been such a huge part of my life, and its mission still resonated with me. I wanted to continue doing good work like I had with PeaceJam, but for now, the best way I could figure was to keep my name in the news so that I could keep promoting causes I cared about.

  Because it was difficult to train in the winter, when the roads and bike paths turned to ice or slush, my surgeon finally gave me (tepid) permission to start swimming in pools again, so Sean and I headed to the YMCA after dinner one night. As I was getting my towel in the locker room, a little girl about six years old came around the corner and looked at me.

  “Were you hurt?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I told her. “I was hit by a car.”

  She peppered me with questions as her younger sister, about four years old, walked right over to me and ran her little fingers down the scars on my legs. With sweet innocence, the two of them continued asking me questions—“Did you cry when that happened? Does it still hurt? What does that feel like?”—and touching my scars. Their mother heard me explaining and walked over, apologizing for her daughters’ forwardness.

  Then she paused a second. “Are you Colleen?” she asked.

  When I responded, “Yes,” she began crying through her smile.

  “Girls, this is Colleen…the cyclist who almost died who we prayed for every night before bed.”

  The girls smiled and the older one said, “So God listened.”

  The mother had seen my story in the newspaper and the family had been praying for me for months. The girls’ sweet little hands and wonderfully innocent eyes were so healing. They both hugged me and I thanked them.

  “You’re a miracle,” the little girl said. “Mommy said you died two times and needed a whole lot of blood. Where did they put the blood into you?”

  I showed them all of my port scars.

  “Colleen, do you still cry from all the pain?” the little one asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Colleen, why do people hurt each other?”

  That’s when my tears fell. I wondered how much they knew about Sandy Hook, or of all of life’s injustices and tragedies.

  “Because some people are very sad and hopeless and they don’t know how to love, and that is why it is so important that girls like you exist in this world, to share love and prayers and be a light.”

  We hugged again and they left. I took my towel down and walked with my head held high to the pool area, feeling so healed by these little souls who had prayed for me before they’d ever met me.

  In January, we took a whirlwind trip to Florida to celebrate Sean’s fortieth birthday. My rock, my best friend, had done so little for himself in the last year. He’d been on a surfboard once all year. So we took a mini-vacation to the Florida Keys, where we went cycling across almost 120 miles of bike trails. He had freshly short hair after growing it out all year to donate to Locks of Love, and I couldn’t get over how handsome he looked.

  When we got back home, we ran into a teacher we knew at the local Stop & Shop. Her school did an outstanding job with student blood drives, and Sean and I had come to thank the students for leading the state of Connecticut.

  “It’s so good to see you guys!” she said as we greeted each other in the produce aisle.

  We started with small talk about the school, and she thanked us for showing up to talk to the kids. “We love you guys. The kids admire you so much for the way you’re fun and honest with them. It’s amazing that both of you needed blood donations.”

  Somehow that led to a question about Sean’s accident. He promptly lifted up his shirt to show her his scars.

  “I was impaled from back to front, and I needed a colostomy, too,” he added. “So we have matching colostomy scars!”

  He started to lift my shirt to show her.

  Under my breath, I muttered, “Please don’t lift my shirt up.”

  “Well, her scar goes up and down while mine goes across, so if you squish our bellies together, it makes a plus sign!” he helpfully explained.

  We were so accustomed to talking openly by then that he just let it all hang out—the open abdominal wounds, the way colostomies work—and she suddenly turned pale. Though Sean is color-blind, even he could see that her lips were turning blue.

  “I think I’m passing out,” she said, and sure enough, she did. Sean hurried behind her and hooked underneath her arms to guide her to the floor as her legs gave out from under her. I took her vitals and helped to prop her up. She was out for only a few seconds, and when she came to again, she was very embarrassed.

  “I just get so queasy. I know this happens to me. I shouldn’t have had this conversation,” she said.

  We drove her home because it was clear she wasn’t going to do any more grocery shopping that day, and we learned two things: One, Sean and I make a damn good emergency team, and two, not everyone can handle details, even if they ask.

  I was reminded of that again a few weeks later when I was invited to speak at Salisbury School, an all-boys private high school. There were 375 boys in the audience; they were future surgeons, engineers, CEOs, musicians, and pilots, and they were listening. I described in detail what had happened to me, and when I began listing my injuries—the pelvic break, the skin ripped off my abdomen and leg and “feminine region,” the crooked ankle—I saw a boy with his head in his hands looking like he was very woozy.

  “You okay?” I called out. “Deep breaths.”

  From the nervous mumbling around the room, I realized several of them needed a break. So we all took some deep breaths and put our arms up in the air before I went on.

  “I’m not going to tell you any more gross stuff,” I promised.

  But I did tell them about what happened when I ran out of blood and died on the table: “It’s kind of like when you’re changing a fish tank and you take all the water out, but you forget to unplug the filter. So the filter just runs and starts getting louder and louder because it’s trying to suck the water but it can’t. Before you know it, the motor burns out. That’s what happened to my heart.”

  Then I told them about my depression, because it’s important for people young and old to talk about that. It’s great to hear about success stories and people who’ve had amazing outlooks on difficult circumstances, but not everyone comes through trauma feeling ready to skip down the road and sing. I told them how down I was, and that I needed to “get out of my head.” And then I told them about how I found gratitude again by focusing on my heroes.

  How fortuitous was it that the head surgeons from every major department just happened to all be working that Saturday? And that there was enough type O blood available for me, considering there was no time to test to find out what my blood type was? I explained in detail how important blood donations were and how any on
e of them could be a hero, too.

  Those boys were engaged. They were attentive and full of emotion, and when it was all over, I knew that they were now not only future surgeons and CEOs…they were also future blood donors.

  Sean and I continued to run together to train for the half marathon, and in the hopes of working our way back up to doing full marathons and triathlons together again. I had good and bad days; one day I was in so much pain that I had to stop and walk the rest of the way, and I was momentarily very upset about it. Then I put it in perspective for myself; no one had been sure I was ever even going to walk again. Every step I took was a miracle. The fact that I was training for a half marathon was almost unbelievable.

  My brother Erin had coined the phrase “Kelly Strong” to describe our family—he had overcome sarcoidosis (the same disease that killed Bernie Mac), a torn Achilles tendon, and a myriad of other issues while working full-time, raising three awesome boys, and being a husband and best friend to his wife. I leaned on his descriptor some days. I was strong. Slow and strong. In pain and strong. Sometimes terrified and strong. Whatever else I was, I was also Kelly Strong.

  I took that strength with me to New York City that February, where we loaded up on the best carbs around (pizza and bagels) before we ran the Central Park Half Marathon to fundraise for Rowan. Throughout the hilly course, a guide from Achilles International named Adam Meyer accompanied and encouraged me. We ended up with more than $2,000 to donate to the family, and a new finisher medal to present to Rowan, for fighting her battle with cancer.

  The next race was a very big deal to me, too: The Central Park Half Marathon, where I ran with Sean and Gail as my guides, and for the last three miles, Matt Long (author of the book that inspired me) joined me. What a thrill! I decided I was through being apologetic about my slow times, and that I could deal with whatever pain came afterward. After all, like C. Hunter Boyd said, “Last is just the slowest winner.” I felt more alive than I had since the trauma; I felt like me again. This medal went to my SICU nurses at Yale.