We were very willing to do whatever it took to help our daughter, but being in ministry didn’t give us much financial leeway. Cheryl and I no longer worked in the corporate world. We’d retrained as marriage counselors, and we earned some money from our counseling service. We also brought in a little income from speaking at seminars and churches, and we got a very tiny bit more from the sales of our book. Due to the accident, our main means of generating income had stopped until we could get a handle on what Lauren’s new situation would look like.
Then there were Lauren’s medical bills. Even after insurance I knew the bills would be huge. I started adding it all up: Paramedics. A helicopter. Teams of surgeons. Anesthesiologists. Intensive care. Therapists. A hospital stay with no end in sight. And even if Lauren recovered, what expenses were going to come next? Ongoing therapy? More surgeries? Prosthetics? Even changes to our house? All the unknowns put a huge strain on me. I envisioned bankruptcy for Lauren or a lifetime devoted to paying off her bills.
Our good friends Steve and Mary Farrar had visited regularly since the accident. Steve is a tall, barrel-chested, California-transplanted-Texan who writes books and speaks around the country at men’s retreats and seminars. He’s a few years older than I am and had been a real support during the last few days. On Wednesday morning, the fourth day after the accident, Steve called me early in the day, asked how I was doing, and told me not to lie.
“Not very good,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t know how we’re going to make it over the long haul.”
Steve didn’t say anything at first. I could hear him opening his Bible, flipping through the pages. Then he read part of Isaiah 30:15 out loud. “In quietness and trust is your strength” (NIV).
“Jeff, this is where you’re at right now,” Steve said. “Your world’s chaotic, but all you can do is follow the example set forth in God’s Word. Wait calmly, remain quiet, and maintain confidence that the Lord is at work in Lauren’s life—and in your and Cheryl’s lives, too.” Steve sat in solidarity with me for a few moments without saying anything. If he’d been with me in person, he would have given me a hug. We talked some more, and then we prayed together over the phone.
Steve’s words from Scripture became our rallying cry. Whenever I started looking beyond one day ahead, I got overwhelmed. But I consciously told myself that because God is in control, I could be calm. I decided not to try to see the future, only the next small stretch of time. Our new motto became “Twelve hours at a time.”
That was good because on Tuesday night we needed to place a no-visitor policy around Lauren. No one except immediate family was allowed to see her. The risk of infection was still too high, and she needed optimum quiet and rest. Doctors were particularly concerned about her facial nerve healing correctly. Lauren’s face had been slashed from the top of her head down to just above her mouth. If the facial nerve didn’t heal, Lauren wouldn’t be able to smile the same way or lift both eyebrows. We prayed specifically for the nerve to heal.
On Wednesday morning—Lauren had still spoken only a few words—hospital staff wanted to see if Lauren could sit up, and even more, if she could walk. Her vital signs were all good, and they wanted to get her up and moving around as quickly as possible. There’s no sense for a person to lie in bed when she could be moving, they explained. Muscles atrophy if a patient doesn’t move, and then recovery takes that much longer.
So they sat Lauren up in bed and swung her feet over the side. Lauren’s head looked wobbly even with her neck brace, and her eye looked far off into an unseen distance. But then her eye focused, and it looked like she caught her balance and her head cleared. They helped Lauren into a wheelchair and pushed her out into the hall where the corridor was straight and easier to follow. They set the brakes on the wheelchair and helped her up. Lauren stood like a soldier.
“Lauren,” said the therapist. “I want you to walk, and I want you to walk twenty steps. Do you think you can do that? I’ve got your arm. Here we go. Twenty steps.”
For a moment Lauren stood without moving.
“Come on,” I said under my breath. I could see Cheryl and Brittany were praying.
Shakily, Lauren took a step.
“C’mon,” I said again. “Twenty steps, Lauren. You can make it.”
Lauren took another step and still another. She kept walking. One step after another. We all grinned from ear to ear. Our expectations for her had been far too low.
Suddenly Lauren stopped walking. She didn’t move. It was almost like a switch in her mind had flipped and her body had turned itself off.
“What is it, honey?” I asked.
The therapist steadied Lauren.
“Lauren?” Cheryl said. I could hear the alarm rising in her voice.
“Lo, do you need to sit down?” Brittany asked. “Hey—I think she needs to sit down.”
“Thirty,” Lauren said quietly.
“What do you mean?” the therapist asked.
“Steps,” Lauren said.
Thirty steps. In all of our excitement over Lauren walking, we’d lost count. But Lauren hadn’t. The therapist had asked for twenty, and Lauren had given ten more. We were beyond ecstatic. It meant that not only was Lauren walking, but her brain was working so well that she could count silently to herself. Caroline wrote about the incident on CaringBridge that day, and it was reported on the news that night. I received texts from all over. One person wrote, “Thirty is my new favorite number.”
On Thursday Lauren walked again, this time a little farther. She rested throughout the afternoon, and when she woke up, she was stringing a few sentences together, even talking and laughing. Some words were slurred, and others just didn’t make sense. For reasons unknown, she kept calling everybody a “nugget.” She would request things in her line of sight, but the words she used wouldn’t match the objects she wanted.
Brittany asked her if she had any dreams, and her clear response surprised us all. “I had a dream about big, beautiful flowers,” Lauren said. “And in my dream I said, ‘Thank you, Lord, for letting me see such beautiful things.’”
The no-visitor policy continued all that day and the next.
On Friday morning Lauren was walking and talking more. She also, however, started talking about pain for the first time. “My fingers just ache,” she said. “Dad, you’ve got to uncurl my fingers.”
She was talking about the fingers on the hand she’d lost. I tried to explain that to her.
“No, Dad, no. You’ve got to do something about my fingers. I can feel them. Please—they hurt so much!” We called the nurse. More pain medication was administered, and Lauren slept.
When Lauren woke up she said that she was hungry. This was the first time she’d said anything like this, and we were all excited. We asked what she was hungry for.
“Sweet potatoes,” she murmured. “And maybe some Brussels sprouts.”
Her two favorite foods. It wasn’t exactly easy to find those two menu items in the hospital, but a while later someone located them, maybe from a store somewhere nearby, I don’t know. But when the food was brought to Lauren, she wasn’t able to eat. She just slept.
On Friday night Lauren’s fingers were hurting again. This time she spoke to Brittany. “Britt—you’ve got to fix my hand. My fingers are crossed over. Please, you’ve got to do something.”
Brittany kept her voice calm and steady. “Lo, you remember what we talked about. Your hand feels like it’s there, but it’s not.”
Lauren nodded like she remembered, but twenty minutes later she asked the same thing. She tried to touch her hand, the one that wasn’t there. You could tell her brain was hoping to make a connection. Brittany calmly explained to her again what had happened. Lauren nodded, but a few minutes later she asked the same question again. They were trying to lessen her pain medication just slightly by then, and this went on repeatedly for the next hour.
It killed me emotionally every time we needed to tell her, and I tried to think of anything I coul
d do to divert her attention. What she needed to do was sleep. Finally I asked, “Lauren, do you remember when you and Brittany were little girls? When I tucked you into bed at night, I’d always sing the same song. Remember the song, Lauren? I could sing it to you again right now. You need to sleep, honey. You want me to sing you the song?”
“No, Dad,” was all she said. Lauren looked so confused.
On Saturday, December 10, Lauren woke up and drank some juice. She walked up and down the hall three times with the help of a therapist. It had been exactly one week since the accident. The prayers for the facial nerve had been answered as we’d hoped. Doctors said a successful connection had been made, and Lauren was able to smile and lift both eyebrows on her own.
Lauren’s sweet spirit continued to shine through. She regularly talked to all the medical staff now, thanking them repeatedly for taking such good care of her. They loved her for it. One doctor administered the pain medications, and Lauren kept calling him “Dr. Feelgood.”
Still, there was a long way to go. We all knew it. Lauren’s eye wasn’t making any progress at all. We couldn’t understand why God didn’t seem to be answering that prayer. We so wanted the eye to be saved, but doctors said that if they didn’t see some more progress by Wednesday of this upcoming week, they’d need to remove it.
That night Lauren was in a lot of pain. Her shoulder ached. Her chest ached. She kept asking us to uncurl her fingers on the hand that wasn’t there. Brittany was our rock through this. Patiently, time and time again, Brittany soothed Lauren and calmed her down, explaining to her that the hand wasn’t there anymore. I was so proud of both my daughters.
At about 10:30 p.m., Brittany left to go home with Shaun. Cheryl was sitting on a chair at the foot of Lauren’s bed. I was dozing in my chair next to Cheryl.
“Daddy,” said Lauren. I could just faintly hear her voice. It was so soft from the bed where she lay.
“Yes, sweetie,” I said, rousing myself.
“Will you sing to me tonight?”
“Of course,” I said and sat on the edge of her bed. I tucked the blanket underneath her chin and smoothed the hair that still remained on the right side of her forehead.
“Edelweiss, edelweiss . . .” I began softly, the same song I’d sung to my daughters as little girls.
Lauren opened her eye. I kept singing. She shifted her right arm over and tried to feel where her left hand was. She gave me one final confused look for the night, then relaxed and closed her left eye.
I ended the song like I always did with the last line I’d made up, “Bless Brittany and Lauren forever,” and when I finished, my daughter was asleep.
CHAPTER 23
The End of Week Two
Cheryl
On Tuesday morning, December 13, Lauren writhed in pain. It just seemed impossible to regulate her pain medication so that she consistently felt okay. She had no appetite and refused to eat. Doctors said this type of stubbornness might happen. The only person Lauren would respond to, interestingly enough, was Shaun. For some reason, he could be a bit firmer with her, and she would be okay with it.
“Look, Lauren,” Shaun said, “you’ve either got to eat, or they’ll put the feeding tube back in. What’s it going to be?”
“All right, Bosser Cracker,” she said before eating a few bites.
The stubbornness was the only display of anything negative in Lauren’s personality. Most moments she was upbeat, positive, grateful, even-tempered, and encouraging. Later that morning she asked Caroline to put up her favorite verse on CaringBridge—Isaiah 40:31, about those who hope in the Lord having their strength renewed.
We’d been noticing that in spite of the heavy medications she was on, Lauren was speaking more clearly, and her sentences were becoming more coherent. Every once in a while she still rearranged words, or completely unrelated words would pop out of her mouth. One morning about ten days after the accident, she wanted to put on some deodorant. “Dad, would you put some sneakers under my arms, please,” she said. We don’t know where she got the word sneakers or why it was placed in that sentence. It made us laugh, but it also kept us praying that everything would get sorted out in her mind.
During her second week in the hospital, the no-visitor policy was lifted, and Lauren could see friends again. Chace Crawford was in town from New York to visit his family for Christmas, and he came to see Lauren. Presents started to pour in from around the country. Stuffed animals, CDs, books, homemade crafts. One seventy-five-year-old woman sent a little blanket she had made “to keep Lauren warm.” It was so sweet. A little six-year-old boy sent Lauren a stuffed toy owl, which Lauren loved. While lying in bed, she could never find a position for her arm that felt comfortable, and the owl made a perfect fit to prop up her arm.
Parkland is a hospital that shows its age. It’s been around for more than one hundred years. In 1963, after he was shot in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy was rushed to Parkland for emergency treatment. The people at Parkland are amazing, and the services they perform are among the best in the nation. But the building itself has sort of a stale atmosphere, which got to us after a while and made it hard for us to feel clean. Because she’d been in bed so long, Lauren’s hair had gotten kind of ratty. Caroline, Brittany, and I wanted to give it a good, deep cleaning. Medical staff agreed, as long as Lauren was lying down. Chris Wilson was visiting, and he went out and bought some good-smelling shampoo for Lauren. We ran back and forth from the sink to her bed with cupfuls of water. They gave us a suction hose to vacuum up all the water. Lauren was laughing as we washed her hair. When it was all over, her head smelled fresh and clean—not an antiseptic kind of clean, but just a regular Lauren kind of clean.
I was so happy to see Lauren enjoy that shampoo. We were finally beginning to experience a little sense of normalcy. She also began to mention the magazine, and I was grateful she remembered that LOLO Mag existed. Her normal personality shined through in bits and pieces, giving me a sense of relief that the Lo we knew was beginning to emerge again.
At the same time, I felt scared as I wondered how this was all going to turn out. At this point I was just in survival mode . . . putting one foot in front of the other and trying with all I had to be emotionally strong for her and everyone else. My sister eventually took me off to the side and told me to stop worrying about all the people who were visiting. For once, she said, I didn’t need to take care of them.
I was numb. Exhausted. Emotionally spent. I didn’t know how I was going to make it. Jeff and I hugged a lot but didn’t talk much. We communicated through eye contact, and that spoke volumes. We reassured each other of our love and thankfulness that God had restored our marriage and family. Without a doubt, a deep love existed between us.
For the past several days, Lauren had needed to do a lung-clearing breathing exercise with a device called an incentive spirometer, where she would suck air through a tube and, in doing so, raise a blue marker within the device. This procedure helped prevent pneumonia, a common post-surgery complication. Lauren never enjoyed doing it, but she learned to make it into a game to see how long she could hold up the marker by taking strong, deep breaths. One afternoon she took the tube and acted like it was a microphone. Each time she inhaled into it, she said, “Yes, and what is the next question for LOLO Mag?” Due to all the medication, we weren’t sure if she was consciously making a joke, or if she actually thought she was back conducting an interview for her magazine. We assumed the best. Her performance had me, my sisters, and Jeff’s sister laughing so hard we could hardly breathe!
I’m glad there were a few bright moments along the way. It helped us to get through the darker times.
Right after the accident, the cells in Lauren’s left eye had begun to knit together, but little progress had been made since then. Because I had held out so much hope for a miraculous healing for her eye, my biggest struggle came when I was told it could not be saved. Early on Wednesday, December 14, doctors removed her eye. No one knew exactly how to p
rocess that. It was a bad day for everyone, for sure.
But even then I didn’t question God. I consciously reminded myself that I trusted him and that he knew what he was doing. I asked God to increase my faith because, as a mom, I so wished I could take on the pain for Lauren. Why couldn’t it have been me? Why didn’t I go flying instead? I wanted more than anything to put myself in her place. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t change a thing. I’ve always been known as a strong person . . . the oldest of five, very responsible. Yet inside I felt helpless and desperate.
Not only that, but Jeff and I had gotten so little sleep that I was amazed we were able to converse and carry on normal activities. On the outside, I appeared to be in control. Whether because of exhaustion or grief, though, I often felt as if I were having an out-of-body experience or functioning like a zombie.
On the day Lauren’s eye was removed, I vacillated between feeling hugely disappointed that the eye wasn’t spared, yet hugely thankful that her life had been. Truly, I was so grateful my daughter was alive and making such rapid overall progress. Not only was she beginning to respond to us, she had not come down with a single infection. Considering how many contagions Lauren encountered when running into the dirty propeller blade and then falling onto the runway, that was truly miraculous. Her traumatized body might have been unable to fight an infection, and we might have lost her.
Then there was the eye surgery itself. The doctors had said it could be tricky, yet they reported that it had gone unbelievably well. They put what they call a “placer” into the empty socket and bandaged it up.
When Lauren woke from surgery, she was in a lot of pain. The pain ebbed and flowed the rest of the day around the medications administered. For a while after the surgery, Lauren was lucid and able to talk. She was so sweet, telling me how much she loved me and wanting to hold my hand. Then her pain returned, this time with excruciating force. Once she’d been given the maximum dosage of pain medication, there was nothing we could do except wait it out. I began to pray out loud, the only prayer I could think of just then, “Jesus . . . Jesus . . . Jesus.” Then we prayed together, “Jesus, take the pain away. Jesus, take the pain away.” We said it over and over again until we both would doze off to sleep. At last more medications were administered. When the pain subsided and she finally dropped off to sleep for the night, Lauren looked so peaceful, almost like an angel.
Still Lolo Page 17