Colors of Goodbye

by September Vaudrey

  I am good, I sense Him say. This tragedy doesn’t change My character. It doesn’t change who I am. I am good.

  How ludicrous His words sound. Really? He’s good? How could a mother with any sort of emotional capacity affirm this sappy “God is good” message, given our situation?

  But something in His words rings true. I want them to be true. This tender encounter with God is undeniable, as real to me as the pavement beneath my feet in this ambulance bay. He is wrapping His strong arms around me in this world where pain has the brutal and current—but not final—say. I am good . . .

  Will I find His words to be true, no matter how this mess turns out?

  With steadier fingers, I dial Brooke’s cell number, and she picks up.

  “Brooke, it doesn’t look good. Please, please get the kids here as soon as you can. Are you guys still at the house?”

  “Deanna’s running her son home. I’m just leaving the house with Sam and Tember.”

  “How are they doing?”

  “Yes, they are both right here with me.” She’s not free to speak. I don’t ask to talk with them—I would only affirm their worst fears. And I don’t want to assure them Katie is still alive when she may be dead by the time they arrive. Let them live in fretful ignorance a few moments more.

  With a miracle seeming to be Katie’s only hope, we need people praying. A thought occurs to me: It is now after 5:00 on a Saturday night, and thousands of people are pouring into our church for the 5:30 service. They could pray!

  “Wait—Brooke? Is Davy still with you?” I ask. The kids’ friend Davy was at the house earlier when the phone call came. Davy’s father would be at church, and he could get word to our pastor, Bill Hybels, who could ask people to pray.

  “No, Davy already went home.”

  “Call him. Have him call Jimmy and tell Bill—and Willow—to pray!”

  “We’re on it,” Brooke says. “And we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  I make one more phone call before going back inside: I call my parents in Seattle. My mom answers. Through tears, I try to explain what has happened to Katie. She can barely make out my words. But she hears two phrases clear as day—phrases no doctor has yet spoken to me, and words I will later have no recollection of saying: “no hope for quality of life” and “brain-dead.” This is what I tell my mother.

  5

  5:15 P.M., SATURDAY, MAY 31

  I step back into the trauma room, where it’s clear that Katie is not doing well. Nurses and techs buzz around her, speaking only what is necessary, intently focused on their individual tasks. Scott and I stand out of the way, watching. The ER doc, however, just stands there, flipping through Katie’s chart. Nurses ask him for orders, but he simply rubs his forehead, silent. One nurse casts a knowing glance at another. It hits me—and with panic—that perhaps this doctor doesn’t see many traumas as severe as Katie’s.

  At about 5:20 p.m., a monitor alarm sounds. Katie’s pulse on the screen shows a flattened squiggle.

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  “V-fib,” Scott says. “The worst. Katie’s heart isn’t pumping blood.”

  An ER tech springs into action. She jumps up onto Katie’s gurney, her knees straddling my girl’s petite body. She begins forceful chest compressions to restart Katie’s heart. With each aggressive, two-armed compression, Katie’s chest sinks, her rib cage expands to each side, and her tan, naked belly bulges out. I envision her organs being shoved around inside like bumper cars.

  “She’s going to break Katie’s ribs!” I whisper to Scott.

  “Maybe,” he says. “But she’s doing good CPR.”

  The compressions continue, but the faint squiggle on the monitor is unchanged. The ER doc at last begins giving orders. A nurse fills a syringe with what I assume is epinephrine, a heart stimulant, and injects it into one of Katie’s IV lines. Nothing.

  “Shock her, 150 joules,” the doctor says.

  The ER tech hops down from the gurney and preps the paddles with lubricant.

  “Clear!” she shouts, pressing the cold paddles to Katie’s warm skin.

  A jolt of electricity surges through my daughter, causing her entire body to jump. Our eyes look to the monitor. No change. The tech shocks her twice more. Nothing. The nurse injects another bolus of epinephrine into Katie’s IV line. Nothing. Again and again, they repeat this pattern as we watch, helpless.

  Long minutes tick by, and Katie’s beautiful little body endures more CPR, more jolts of electricity, more physical abuse than I think anyone could possibly survive. Scott stands next to the doctor, riveted to the monitors, attuned to each order being given. I shrink in silence, flat against the back wall, my fists drawn to my mouth. Don’t freak out. Don’t pass out. Don’t distract. Stay out of the way. I should not be here, seeing this, and I’m afraid they will ask me to leave. But no one seems to notice me, and I cannot move. I don’t want to move. I cannot leave my girl.

  As the life support efforts fail to bring back Katie’s pulse, I watch Dr. Rogers. Whenever he issues an order, he glances toward Scott. Scott either nods his head or offers a quiet correction, which the doctor then repeats to his staff.

  When a young person codes (loses her pulse), an ER team will fight long and hard to get that pulse back. A healthy young body wants to live, fights to live, and the attending physician will be very slow to give up on resuscitation efforts—to “call the code.” Our presence—and the fact that Scott is a fellow physician—adds pressure to this doctor, no doubt.

  The minutes drag on as this team continues their lifesaving violence against my daughter. The tech doing CPR begins to look spent, her hair plastered against her forehead, dark rings of sweat appearing under each arm. Yet she continues. I fight the urge to shout, “Stop! Stop it! Just leave her alone!” I want to push the tech aside and scoop Katie into my arms. I want to stroke her hair, to rip out all those horrid monitor wires and tubes, to close her eyes, and to push the tip of her tongue gently back into her mouth. Instead I must, must, must allow the medical team to continue. It is her only hope.

  “More epinephrine?” a nurse asks the doctor. The doc looks at the clock.

  “No. She’s maxed.” The nurses exchange glances. The tech keeps pounding on Katie’s chest. The monitor’s alarm blares, undeterred. We need a miracle.

  I look at my watch. It is now 5:42. They have been working to restore Katie’s heartbeat for more than twenty minutes, but nothing is working.

  Dr. Rogers turns to us. I fear he wants to call the code. As if reading his mind, the tech stops her compressions. All movement in the room ceases. The piercing blare of the alarm drowns out the gentle whoosh of Katie’s ventilator. I stare at the monitor—and at my daughter’s lifeless body. It is over.

  Then suddenly, to our utter surprise, the alarm ceases and the sound of a heartbeat breaks the stillness. All heads turn back to the monitor, which shows the return of a normal rhythm! Katie’s heart is beating! The sound of a strong heartbeat sends the staff into full gear once again. Within moments, Katie is stabilized, and the immediate crisis averted.

  Friends who gather at the hospital later that night will describe to us how Davy’s dad got the word of Katie’s accident to our pastor during the worship songs that open the 5:30 service. Bill took the stage moments later and stopped the music.

  “This afternoon, Katie Vaudrey—the daughter of one of our staff members, Scott Vaudrey—was in a terrible car accident,” he said. “She is in a coma. Let’s pray right now for the Vaudreys and the healing of their daughter.” Our church family then poured out their prayers for Katie. The clock at the moment of Bill’s prayer read 5:42 p.m.—the same moment Katie’s heart inexplicably jumped back to life.

  Bill’s sermon that night—a message about living our lives fully surrendered to God—was titled “Have You Died Yet?”

  Now that Katie is stable, Scott tries to assess the full picture of her medical condition.

  “Can I see her chest X-ray?” he as
ks Dr. Rogers.

  “Uh, I didn’t order one,” he replies.

  A shadow crosses Scott’s face. I watch as hints of disbelief and restrained anger cloud his eyes. Dr. Rogers looks away, his cheeks reddening.

  “It’d probably be good to check for a pneumothorax or a widened mediastinum,” Scott says quietly. “Let’s order the chest film.”

  Dr. Rogers nods. “Good idea,” he says and finds a nurse to call for the portable X-ray machine.

  Scott and I wait in the hallway while they shoot and develop Katie’s film. “They took her to CT without first getting a chest film,” Scott says, incredulous.

  “Is that bad?” I ask.

  “Standard of care in blunt trauma would be to get a chest film as soon as possible after you pull a patient off the ambulance,” Scott explains. “An X-ray will show if there’s a collapsed lung or torn aorta. You get the film before sending patients to CT because, if they have a tear, there is a risk they could bleed out—and should go straight to surgery first. Plus the film might show other reasons for a patient’s decompensation. A pneumothorax could explain her heart arrhythmia, and a chest tube could resolve that. Katie has been here for almost two hours, and still no film.”

  The X-rays come back and Scott studies them in a light box on the wall. He looks relieved. “Normal.”

  The nurse takes Scott and me to a room down the hall, where the hospital has been sending friends who have arrived as news of Katie’s accident spreads. Scott updates them with as much information as we know. I go outside to wait in the ambulance bay for Brooke and the kids to arrive.

  At last, I see them coming up the sidewalk. Sam and Tember are red eyed and ashen faced—and I am no better. I wrap them in my arms and take them inside, where Scott meets us in the lobby and hugs the kids. The nurse shows Brooke to the crisis room. We head to the trauma room and to Katie.

  When your children are little, you reflexively shield their eyes from a graphic scene on TV and distract their attention when you drive past a dead cat on the side of the road. I realize Sam and Tember’s first sight of their sister will be burned into their memories for a lifetime. How I wish I could spare them. How grateful I am that Katie is not all bloody or banged up. It helps a little. But the vacant gaze in her eyes is shocking to behold. And the wires and tubes don’t help. Thankfully my kids are “medical kids.” They’ve been in the ER dozens of times to visit their dad at work, so at least the general setting is not foreign to them. But this is a scene like no other. Scott stops us and preps them before we go in.

  “Katie is in bad shape,” he says. “She has a broken neck and a skull fracture.” Large tears begin to pool in the kids’ eyes. He pauses to let this reality sink in before continuing.

  “The skull fracture has caused some bleeding in her brain, and that’s her biggest problem right now. She’s unconscious. She’s in a coma.” The kids listen intently.

  “Can she hear us?” Tember asks, her voice a tiny wisp of air.

  Scott looks tenderly at his youngest daughter. “No one fully knows how the brain works for people in a coma,” he says. “But we will take you in to see her, and you should go ahead and talk to her as if she can hear you.”

  We enter the trauma room, and Scott pushes back the curtain. Sam and Tember rush toward their sister. Sam, tall and lanky, reaches over the wires and drapes his arms around Katie in a cumbersome hug. Silent sobs wrack his lean body. Tember hangs near the end of the bed, her eyes large at the sight of all the wires. Reflexively, she picks up Katie’s foot and strokes it.

  “Her foot is warm,” she tells me. I feel it, and she is right. I think of all the times Katie playfully shoved one of her bare feet—always cold and clammy—under Tember’s shirt to torture her and make her laugh. The difference now is striking. Tears roll down Tember’s cheeks and drip from her chin onto the white sheet covering her sister. She whispers to Katie, “I love you! Don’t die! Don’t die.”

  A new physician enters the room. He exudes a quiet confidence, which gives me hope. Dr. Rogers trails behind.

  “Dr. and Mrs. Vaudrey, I’m Katherine’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Yun. I am so sorry about your daughter’s accident,” he says, shaking our hands firmly. “The bleed in Katherine’s brain is substantial, as you know. The break at C1 and the cranial fracture would cause some intracranial bleeding—though the pattern on the CT looks more like an aneurysm. Regardless, our first priority is to try to relieve the increased intracranial pressure that the bleed is causing. We need to measure that pressure, and to do so we need to drill a hole into her skull and insert an intracranial pressure monitor.”

  Dr. Rogers holds out a clipboard and a pen. “We need your permission for the procedure,” he says. “The incision will be made just above her right temple, and it will mean shaving some of Katherine’s hair.”

  Her hair? No mention of drilling a hole into my daughter’s skull—just a warning about her hair. “I assure you, we’re not concerned about her hair,” I say. Scott and I sign the consent forms, giving our permission for them to insert the pressure monitor—and, oh, shave off a bit of her hair.

  The nurse motions us from the room so they can begin the procedure. Tember and I move toward the door. Sam, however, doesn’t budge. He remains bent over his sister, arms extended, hands cupping her shoulders, his own shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. We all wait a moment for him to compose himself and let go. But he shows no sign of moving. Scott rests a hand on his shoulder.

  “Come on, buddy. Let’s go to the waiting room so they can get started.” Nothing.

  “Hey, Sam,” he quietly persists. “It’s time to go.” But Sam is lost in his own world of heartbreak, oblivious to Scott’s words. In this moment, he seems incapable of moving.

  “Sam, we need to go so the doctors can begin their work,” he says. “Come on, son.” Scott touches Sam’s arm, but he flinches like a wounded animal and draws himself closer to his sister. Scott puts his arms around Sam’s shoulders and tenderly but firmly pulls him away. Sam’s arms strain toward Katie’s motionless body. He tries to stand upright, but his knees give way, and Scott catches him. With a fatherly arm around Sam’s shoulders—half supporting, half carrying his son—Scott leads us from the room.

  6

  AUGUST 2006

  Katie would begin her senior year of high school—and Sam his freshman year—in less than a week. Sam was fourteen and all limbs, like a Great Dane puppy. I love this age of boy—where voices squeak, random facial hairs sprout from chins, and jeans are outgrown before they’re broken in. He had grown six inches in the past school year, and nothing in his closet fit.

  It’s a tradition in our house to make a big deal out of back-to-school shopping. In a family of seven, this is one time when each child can be guaranteed a one-on-one shopping date and dinner out with a parent. Scott and I savor this chance to dote on each individual child. But one night at dinner, Katie announced she’d be the one taking Sam back-to-school shopping this year, and I could see nothing but win in this plan. Let’s face it: What freshman boy wouldn’t rather be outfitted by his stylish senior sister than by his mom or dad?

  The appointed afternoon arrived, and as Sam waited in the kitchen for Katie to find her purse, his face tried to read “no big deal”—but I could tell by how fast he was talking that he was excited about spending these hours with his sister. It didn’t hurt that he was pretty much guaranteed to be dressed in way cooler clothes when he walked through the doors of Fremd High School on his first day as a freshman. Katie found her purse, and I handed her my debit card. Off they drove in her Taurus.

  Four hours, one fresh haircut, and a dinner at Panera Bread later, the Taurus pulled back into the driveway. Sam and Katie burst into the kitchen full of stories and laughter, with bags of Sam’s new clothes in hand.

  “Sam was a good sport, Mom,” Katie announced. “He’s gonna be the coolest thing on campus.” She made him model at least one outfit for us.

  The damage to my debit card was respecta
ble but not overboard. Sam had never cared much about clothes before, so a little splurge this year felt right. And the investment between sister and brother? Priceless.

  Fremd is a large high school—close to three thousand students—and Sam started the new year with confidence. Throughout fall semester, whenever Katie spotted him in the crowded hallway, she would holler out to him, “Sam! Hey, Sam! Sam Vaudrey! Everybody, that’s my brother Sam! He’s the coolest! I love you, Sam!” She embarrassed him, to be sure, but she knew down deep he was feeling loved, was proud of her attentions—and was probably gaining cool points from his freshman friends who all admired his sister, the hot senior.

  But one day Sam decided to flip the script. He spotted Katie down the hall.

  “Katie! Hey, Katie! Everybody, Katie Vaudrey is my sister! She’s so cool!” he shouted. “I love you, Katie!”

  Katie blinked, caught off guard. “I love you more, Sam!” she shouted back.

  “No, I love you more,” he countered. And back and forth they went until Katie finally cried uncle. This time she was the one with reddened cheeks. He caught up to her, picked her up with those lanky, strong arms, and swung her around in a huge bear hug. She’d been bested at her own game.

  For the rest of the year, the “love you more” game was on. Both looked for prime embarrassment opportunities to proclaim their brotherly or sisterly love. Their playfulness, affection, and mutual respect—both at school and at home—reflected the closeness they shared as sibs and as friends.

  7

  6:00 P.M., SATURDAY, MAY 31

  By the time the four of us leave Katie’s side in the trauma room and follow the nurse out, the crisis room is crowded with friends who have heard the news. Sam’s friends from church surround him. Katie’s girlfriends embrace Tember. Scott and I are shocked at how many people have gathered here for us, all with reddened eyes and praying lips. How grateful I am. For all the bad press Christians get (and, sadly, sometimes deserve), this scene is a beautiful picture of the church at its finest.