To prove it, I had a parting gift for him. Sean and I did the craziest thing we’d done thus far: We signed up for the Timberman half Ironman event in New Hampshire: a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike ride, and 13.1-mile run. It was unprecedented. Even before my trauma, I’d never done a half Ironman, so why did I think I could do one now? I just knew that I was on a roll, breaking down all kinds of personal barriers, and I had to give it a try. I was completely ecstatic and terrified to push myself to such an extreme. My goal was simply to finish the race and give my medal to Dr. Kaplan.
Two weeks before the race, Sean and I journeyed up to New Hampshire to scope out the setting and practice some of the route. While we were there, I scattered some of Sedona’s ashes at the start and finish of the swim and at the finish chute area so she could be part of the day with me. She had been my swimming buddy prior to the trauma, and I was still grieving her immensely.
At every Ironman event, there is a company that makes display pieces for the medals. They show off the medal and the route, and include a plaque with custom engraving of your name, your finish time, and anything else you want to write. It was a leap of faith to hand out our credit card information before the race to reserve one of these display pieces, and I was a little nervous that I was jinxing myself by doing it—but I did it anyway.
We woke up at 3:45 on the morning of the race, and I knelt and prayed. I thanked God that I was there, that this was happening, and that I had this honor. I prayed I would stay safe and hoped that my choice was wise.
I met with my guide, Chris, one of countless volunteers from Achilles International who trains and races beside people with disabilities to keep us safe and help us maintain our quality of life as athletes. Not all disabled athletes need guides, but because I was still fragile and unsteady on my feet, I did. I had to denote that I needed a guide when I signed up, and he had to register, too. He wore a bright yellow Achilles Guide top, and he would do the entire race alongside me to keep me protected.
There are good people all around, I remembered. I added Chris to my list of heroes. What a wonderful thing to do for someone—to use a skill of yours to lift up another person and help them achieve something they couldn’t safely do alone.
Just as I was getting psyched up in the starting area for the swim, the announcer’s voice came across the intercom:
“We have a special first-timer amongst us today named Colleen Kelly Alexander. Just two years ago, she was run over by a multi-ton freight truck and ripped apart. She required over seventy-eight blood transfusions, was in a coma over a month, and is here today to give thanks for her life and show the strength that blood donors give when they roll up their sleeves.”
I started shaking. Ironman seeks motivational moments to share with athletes before the gun goes off, but no one had asked me if they could make that announcement. I was trying to blend in with the masses as much as possible with my guide, Chris, and now all eyes were on me as I walked up to the disabled athlete swim start. My heart raced and tears of anxiety welled up. Luckily, there wasn’t much time to feel self-conscious before the starting gun went off.
As we swam over the lake bed and looked down on the sand glistening in the sunlight, I imagined Sedona swimming beside me with her big goofy face, barking and splashing in the water, maneuvering around with her giant, otter-like Lab tail. I knew that some of the glistening I was seeing came from her bone fragments, and as much as that made it hard, I found comfort in my soul having her present and swimming with her again.
Chris maintained my pace the entire swim and guarded me beautifully from being hit, punched, or kicked. At the end of the swim, I was disoriented and struggled getting my “land legs,” so Chris picked me up under my arms and helped me into the transition area, where my next helper, John Young, was standing by my bike with an immense smile.
John has dwarfism. He’s four foot four. I’d had no idea who would be there to help me with balance and to get my wetsuit off, stand guard as I did wound changes, and help me into my bike clothes. John’s arms were outstretched and he cheered me on with this resoundingly powerful voice, “Colleen! Let’s go! I’m John and I’m here to help! You tell me what to do!”
I had never been face-to-face with a little person before. He was larger in life than anyone I had met.
“Please hold my waist firmly so I don’t fall over,” I said, and I began pulling my wetsuit down.
“Well, this is an awkward way to meet!” he said, and we both burst out laughing. Once I got my wetsuit down around my feet, he held on to my waist tighter and I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and pulled my legs up so the wetsuit snapped off from around my ankles.
Then he helped me into my dry bike shorts and handed me my clean wound bandaging as he continued smiling and encouraging me. My transition time was close to ten minutes that day, which is an exceedingly long amount. However, when he unracked my bike and handed it to me and said, “Go get ’em!” I felt so peaceful and thankful. We didn’t know it then, but in 2016, John would be the first athlete with dwarfism to complete a full Ironman, at the age of fifty.
At the bike mount, Chris held on to both of our bikes and stabilized me while helping to lift my leg up and over the handlebars so I didn’t fall over. I still couldn’t mount or dismount the bike solo because of my lack of range of motion and balance issues.
The fifty-six-mile bike ride was challenging, but powerfully epic: beautiful views, beautiful climbs, and wildly scary descents. Chris rode directly behind me in case my legs weakened and I lost the ability to go into full rotations. If that were to occur, he could grab the back of my seat and help me up the hills as he rode beside me so I wouldn’t crash and fall over (something I had done only once before this day post-trauma, and needed to make sure I didn’t do again—orthopedic surgeons aren’t fans of having their handiwork messed with).
When we crossed the bike dismount line I was in tears. All I had left was a half marathon. I needed to change my wound dressings, which had soaked with body fluids again, change my bike shorts, which were soaked with some blood and bodily fluids, and put on clean compression shorts. I couldn’t run well unless I had tight enough compression shorts on, as my glutes had been literally ripped out from the inside and pulled apart. Although the hole was closing up, the muscles and everything inside still felt like giant bags of heavy, wet sand sloshing around on my bones. The only way I could engage my butt muscles well enough to run was to have those babies strapped tight up onto my skeletal frame.
Right away on the run, I was hurting. My legs didn’t seem to want to engage, my body overheated, I felt nauseated, and the thought of trying to run 13.1 miles after all that swimming and biking was terrifying.
One step at a time, I reminded myself.
I remembered the young man at Gaylord with the severe spinal cord injury who would probably never walk again. I thought about all the people who were important to me, all the people who gave me CPR and donated blood, my husband’s huge smile through tears as he said, “You and me, love, you got this.” I knew that when I crossed, he would have finished hours earlier and would be standing there so full of pride (and probably a bit relieved to see me upright).
The run became a walk/jog. I had to stop every ten to fifteen steps to have Chris stretch my legs and put pressure on my back and different areas of my body to relieve the pain. When we came into the finish chute, most of the race had begun closing down, but we crossed that finish line with a time of eight hours, forty-eight minutes.
I hugged Chris, standing up as strong as I could, and cried. Sean stood there screaming, “YES! YES!” We took photos and I thanked God. Within a few minutes, though, I began crashing hard. Something was wrong.
I looked at Sean and said, “I feel like I’m in a dream. Everything is distant-feeling and I’m shaky.”
He walked me to the med tent, where my legs and arms started convulsing intensely. I was so scared. Sean explained my trauma history. They removed my bandages and rebandaged m
e, warmed my body, and encouraged me to try to drink as much fluid as possible. A woman walked in and asked if she could lay hands on me and perform qigong, a type of energy work. She massaged my body and prayed, saying, “I feel God’s presence with us. I know you are meant to do great things.” I knew God sent her to be with me at that very moment.
I stayed in the med tent for more than an hour getting fluids and body work while speaking to this angel, who I would later learn was the head of post-race care for Timberman. She also taught energy work and massage. I knew I had to go back and race again, and she would get my next medal.
Going to bed that night was such a satisfying feeling; it was my biggest athletic accomplishment, and I’d done it less than two years after the trauma. I was starting to believe that I was meant for great things after all.
I believed it even more when I saw my sixty-one-year-old neighbor running down the road two days later. I pulled my truck over.
“You’re running!” I screamed.
“I haven’t run in thirty years, but I figured if you can do an Ironman, then I can start running.”
I threw my arms around her in gratitude. She had started running right after hearing about my finish. It was the best topper to that day I could have gotten.
Over the next year, I would get to celebrate many times as several family members also took up running and joined me for races—notably, my nephew Zachary was my partner for the Disney half marathon, the slowest half marathon I’ve ever run but also the most fun. We kept stopping for hugs and pictures, and he said, “Aunt Colleen, thanks for getting me into running. Thank you for letting me do this race with you. You and I are awesome.”
We completely were. The medal I earned from that half marathon went to his little brother, Anthony. My nephews were always some of my biggest cheerleaders and made me feel so special. I knew they had been praying daily for me, and I wanted Anthony to know what a hero he was to me for believing in the power of prayer. Little did I know that Zachary would become a serious athlete, running a 5:30 mile on the high school track team just three years later.
I scheduled three more triathlons before the September surgery date, along with another half marathon, a 20K, and a 10K, figuring I wanted to get my body into the best shape possible for this next round of anesthesia. My next medal went to two more of my heroes: my parents. Then I promised my next medal to Pem McNerney, the reporter who had first covered my story as I lay comatose at Yale, and who had long since become a true friend. She had taken such care to learn about my background and my aspirations when she was writing about me, and had spent many hours just listening over tea when I talked about my challenges, far beyond what she needed to do her job. She was such a dedicated reporter, but beyond that, she was someone who cared deeply about our community and the individuals in it. She showed up to that race to cheer me on, too.
Unfortunately, it was the first race I tried to quit. Three times. The air was heavy that day, and that made it difficult to breathe. I kept having panic attacks, almost from the start of the race, and I would break down in tears, sit down, and decide I couldn’t finish. But Sean kept grabbing my hand and coaxing me onward.
“This is just a beautiful day, and we’re enjoying the streets of New Haven, full of people,” he said.
After setting a post-trauma personal record in a 10K the week before, this was my slowest time ever. But I decided to give myself twenty-four hours to rest and then get back to training again. As one cycling brother said to me, “It’s not about coming in first; it’s about persevering to the finish.”
I was becoming an expert on perseverance.
Before the trauma, I had hoped to do a full marathon and an Ironman by 2013; now it had been pushed back, but completing both remained a goal. I didn’t know when my body would be ready, but my mind was already there. When you can imagine something, you can achieve it. It’s amazing how much you can influence your own destiny by visualizing yourself succeeding.
By the time my kidney surgery came around, I had named them. My “good” kidney was Bonnie and my “bad” one was Clyde. Clyde had come around somewhat—he was now hovering at about 20 percent functionality, so there was more of a shot at keeping him, but it was still a big question mark. If the surgeon didn’t feel he could improve the damage, then it would be more of a liability keeping him in there and waiting for more infections.
“They’re a team, you know,” I explained to my surgeon the week before surgery. “They really want to stick together. Inside my body.”
“And we’re going to do our best to make that happen. But we won’t know for sure until we get in there.”
Sean and I sneaked in one more half marathon right before the surgery date, and we both set personal records. I was glad to have filled up my joy tank, because the medical stuff was never any fun. I had four needle sticks before the phlebotomist gave up and went through my wrist instead. Then there was lots of pre-op testing and paperwork, culminating in my twenty-second surgery in less than two years—and instead of watching the number of surgeries left tick down, somehow I was seeing it go up. I still had at least seven more to come.
“I’m scared,” I whispered to Sean through my oxygen mask as I lay on the operating table.
They had allowed him to come into the OR with me until I fell asleep. He stood before me in blue scrubs, a hat, and a surgical mask, and held my hands with his latex-free gloves. “We’re going to get through this,” he promised.
“Just breathe deep,” the anesthesiologist said.
“Please, dear God, let me wake up,” I prayed. “Regardless if I keep this kidney or not…let me wake up again. Let me recover. Let me continue to be a wife, a daughter, a friend, and hopefully a mommy someday.”
“Okay, Colleen, within two minutes you will be asleep.”
I reached up to feel the side of my husband’s face covered by the blue mask, and then everything went fuzzy.
Sean wouldn’t see me for almost seven more hours, the time I was in surgery. Just like when I was in a coma, I closed my eyes and hours of my life were taken away from me. It was hard not to feel upset by all the time I’d literally lost—gone, without any memories.
This surgery was a complicated procedure with the goal of removing as much scar tissue as possible from my ureter and kidney. I woke up in the recovery room, sick as always from the anesthesia, terrified, and in terrible pain.
As I began to focus, there stood Sean beside my bed.
“You’re here, my Colleen. So is Clyde. They took care of the blockages. The surgery was a bit more intensive than they planned, but everything worked out well. Rest, my love. I am here.”
Feeling his hand on my heart, I closed my eyes wordlessly and awoke again an hour later to a rhythmic beeping sound.
“How are you, sweetheart?” A nurse held on to my fingers and gazed at me with big brown eyes. “You sure are a strong woman, a light to all of us…”
My eyes closed involuntarily again.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
When I finally awoke for good an hour later, I learned more about the procedure. They’d made several small incisions into my belly to remove the scar tissue and blockages. I had a ten-inch stent placed back in, and this time it was joined by a catheter and tubing sticking out of my body from within my kidney.
God, go to my roots. Make me strong, I prayed.
I imagined my favorite childhood willow tree, with its swaying limbs brushing over my body and its tiny silvery leaves filtering the air, embracing the way my body contoured into its sprawling roots that climbed above and below the ground. I’d had a favorite willow tree as an adult, too, on a country road next to a farm stand en route to one of my favorite hikes. It was tall and graceful, beautiful in every season—but one day I returned to find that it had been cut down.
“The roots were so sprawling that they were just too invasive,” someone explained to me.
This is why a willow tree is tattooed on my back.
God, make my
roots that strong. Make me a willow tree.
Throughout the night I kept awakening with PTSD flashbacks and pain. Sean was sleeping by my side again, and a nurse who came in for pain management looked over at him and said, “You two have such strength between you.”
As much as I had suffered, so had Sean. He had been my rock through every bad day, and my inspiration on the good ones. I never took for granted how lucky I was to have someone like him, and I wished that everyone else who’d been through trauma could have someone just like him, too. He was the reason I fought so hard.
For some reason, I hadn’t expected the kidney surgery to be as painful as it was. I’d been through so much already that I was looking at this one more as a routine matter, but even through the narcotics, it was a rough time.
“What did you expect? You had major, major surgery,” my surgeon said with a little laugh in his voice. “I had to dissect your midsection even to get to your kidney and ureters. Your kidney was in the wrong place, by the way—it was stuck behind your pancreas, so I had to move it. You still have a lot of scar tissue left; I just took out what I needed to so I could get the job done. I also had to remove a section of your ureter that was too narrowed down to work effectively, and then I removed the lower section of your kidney, fixed it, and reattached it.”
So Clyde was a bit of a quilted rag doll now. And according to the surgeon, he would never work fully again…he would always hover around the 20 percent mark. But I guess they decided that 20 percent was better than zero, so he got to stay.
“You will feel better, I promise,” the surgeon said. “You just have to stay the course.”
Gratitude in Motion Page 20