by Hannah Luce
However, both Hannah and Austin suffered severe injuries and were life-flighted to hospitals in Kansas City and Wichita, respectively. Hannah was listed in serious but stable condition, suffering primarily from burns on 28% of her body. Austin’s burn injuries were far more severe, especially those sustained to his lungs. At about 5:30 a.m. Saturday, Austin went to be with the Lord.
We believe he helped Hannah out of the plane and to the roadside. Not only is he a hero for serving our nation, we probably owe our daughter’s life to his courage and strength.
Of course, the entire Teen Mania family is mourning the loss of these four young lives. They were so full of promise and love for God. All were friends of Teen Mania, and two of them, Austin and Stephen, were only recently hired to join our marketing team. Katie and I will share additional updates as we can. For now I would ask that you help us by lifting some very specific needs to the Father in prayer.
Right now our most intense concern is for the families of those who died. Please pray that God surrounds the families of Austin, Stephen, Luke, and Garrett with His supernatural love and peace in this tremendously difficult time.
Also, as the Lord leads, please pray for a quick and supernatural recovery for our Hannah. As of today, the update on her condition is one of improvement. She is recovering well at a hospital in Kansas City. This morning, the doctors took her off the ventilator and she is breathing on her own. They have removed the tube from her throat so that she will be able to speak. She is growing stronger, more coherent, and is asking questions. The burning and soot in her lungs has been suctioned out and is healing up. The doctors are reporting the damage will not be long-term.
It is truly a miracle that she is alive. Grief counselors will be seeing Hannah throughout the next few weeks, as her heart is heavy with the grief for the loss of her friends. She will be beginning skin graft surgeries right away for the third-degree burns she sustained on the back of her hands and her lower left leg.
Please hold us up in prayer. If you have friends or loved ones whom you know to be effective intercessors, please feel free to forward this message to them with an encouragement to lift us up.
Still Consumed, Ron and Katie
• • •
My hands were tied to the bed rails, and I felt as if red-hot coals were burning my bottom. It was Day Three of the new Hannah Nicole Luce, a girl who had once lived a pretty privileged life but was now deep in some hellish nightmare. The last thing I knew I was on a gurney in an electric blue operating room being prepped for skin graft surgery, the first of several I was scheduled to have. (The doctor had said he wanted to start grafting right away, before my skin began healing.) The anesthesiologist was saying something about counting backward from ten, and all I could think was my friends were dead and all of the anesthesia in the world wouldn’t blunt that pain.
When I got back to my hospital room, it didn’t look like my hospital room. The color of the furniture was wrong, green not tan, the sequence of pictures on the wall was different, and I didn’t have a white board with a nurse’s name written on it before. I blinked, thinking that maybe when I opened my eyes again I’d recognize the room, but nothing changed. Where was I?
My skin throbbed with a kind of pain I couldn’t have imagined before and can’t begin to describe. I couldn’t get my limbs to move, and my right leg was suspended in the air. The worst part was having my hands bound to the bed. I didn’t know why someone would do that to me. I was trapped in my own body, unable to talk or move, and I was terrified. At least before I could use my good hand to write a question or a thought, but now the only way I would be able to communicate was with my eyes, but first I had to get someone’s attention.
Mom was there somewhere close by. I could hear her talking with one of the nurses. I moved my eyes to the right and saw them standing there, on the side of my bed. How will Mom know I’m awake? I wondered. What if she leaves me here like this? Panic welled up inside me. I wiggled a finger on my left hand, the one that wasn’t wrapped up in a gauze mitt. It took all of my strength to do it again, then again. I heard a lull in the conversation. Thank You, God. The nurse walked closer to my bed and leaned over me.
I opened my eyes as wide as I could so she’d know I was in there. I tapped my left finger to reiterate my point: “I’m awake!” When I knew I had her attention, I moved my eyes dramatically from left to right. “Get these restraints off!” The nurse was maddeningly casual. “Oh, well, she’s just trying to get out of her restraints,” she said, coolly. I hated her at that moment. “Oh, well,” I thought. “When I do get out of these handcuffs I’m going to crack you in the nose.”
I tapped my finger wildly (as wildly as you can tap one finger), and Mom moved closer. My mother is the sweetest person in the world. She oozes kindness and compassion, and I could see the hurt and concern in her eyes. She explained that I’d been moved to a different room after surgery, a bigger, prettier room with a nice view! My eyes drilled into her eyes. I looked down at the restraints and back at her. “Get them off!”
She touched my head and gently explained that my hands were tied down because I’d been trying to pull out my breathing tube. I understood that would have been ugly because the tube went down my throat, past my vocal cords, and into the airways of my lungs. But I was gagging on that tube. I’m not sure which was worse, gagging or being tied down. I held Mom’s eyes, pleading now. “Please, Mom. Please help me.”
Mom turned to the nurse, “Please,” she said. “Take them off.”
When my hands were finally free I motioned that I wanted to write something. Mom brought me a piece of paper and a pen. “I love you,” I wrote. She decided to speak in my language by writing her response. “I ADORE THE GROUND YOU WALK ON!” she wrote back.
• • •
The next time I woke up, it was the following morning, and Mom wasn’t with me. I was lying on a steel table in the middle of a tile room with no windows and a ceiling so low I felt as if I could touch it—if I’d been able to raise my arm. The room was hot and steamy, like a sauna, and it smelled musty and stale. As I lay there, drugged and wondering if I was dreaming, a black hose dropped from the ceiling. A team of masked strangers descended on me, five of them, all dressed in green scrubs and wearing strange-looking purple gloves. “Is this a gas chamber?” I wondered.
No, but it was what I would come to think of as a torture chamber. I was in the hydrotherapy or “tank room,” the place where burn patients are taken every day to have their wounds cleansed. The skin is the first line of defense against infections, and burned skin isn’t effective in keeping dangerous infection-causing bacteria from entering the body, so the idea is to scrub away the dead skin and any germs that are festering there. It’s torture for patients. (Think about how it feels when you burn your finger on an iron and run water over it, then multiply that kind of pain by a million. I’ve heard about people who are in deep comas and still wince when they’re being cleaned.) And it’s torture for the nurses and burn techs who are inflicting the pain.
I looked into the smiling eyes of a masked face looking down at me. “It’s okay,” he said, reassuringly, but I wasn’t at all reassured. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew it couldn’t be good. It was as if he could read my thoughts, that kindly burn tech. He was a big, burly African American guy, with muscles so big they protruded from the short sleeves of his scrubs, and he held me protectively while they cut off my bandages. “I promise we’ll take good care of you,” he said.
Someone came at me with scissors and began cutting off all of my bandages. When the bandages were gone, I lay there naked and shivering (the skin also helps control body temperature, but the shivering may have been terror-driven), and they went to work on me. If I could have, I would have screamed bloody murder and begged for more medicine to numb the pain. They sprayed me with warm water and washed my burns with antibacterial soap and small gauze pads, but it felt as if they were raking my raw skin with steel wool. I wanted to get out of
there, but every time I tried to move I felt a big, muscled arm come over me to hold me down.
“How can this be helping anything?” I wondered. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it felt like hours. By the end, I was a bloody mess. They smothered my burns with rust-colored ointment and wrapped me back up. Good job, they said. See you tomorrow. Tomorrow? Tankings take place at least once every day.
I had trouble sleeping all night, dreading the next time in the torture chamber, but each time I woke up Papa was there in the chair next to my bed, holding my hand.
I felt so safe with Papa and confident that nothing bad would happen to me when he was there, which he was all the time. Even if I hadn’t been the most faithful Christian, he prayed for me and for the boys enough for both of us. And I loved him for it.
• • •
Papa had his work cut out for him those first days after the crash. Besides sleeping in my room every night (which he did for the next six weeks), he became my official bodyguard. More than once, a reporter snuck onto the floor to try to get a peek at the famous evangelist’s poor sick kid, and Papa had to shoo them off, but the real problem was well-meaning religious crackpots who came to pray over me. One day, when Papa had flown back to Dallas for a few hours to take care of some ministry business, a nurse peeked into my room and asked if I was expecting company. No, I said. She said that she’d stopped a man and a woman outside my door. The woman was rotund and unkempt, with greasy hair and missing teeth. She told the nurse she was a self-ascribed prophetess with prayer power and she was there to heal me. I shook my head. “I think I’ll pass,” I said. The nurse went back to the couple and pointed toward the exit. “Out!” she said. “And don’t come back.”
Papa always kept watch at my door after that.
• • •
During that month I spent in the Kansas City hospital, I was always asking for the doctor, and when he came I pitched as many questions as he was willing to answer. Some of my scribbles were clear-headed and almost legible. Others were confused and unreadable. Once, after I had complained about a lightning-hot pain radiating through my core, he changed my pain medication, causing me to write: “This is not the right med, it hurts more.” Another time I wrote, “My arm and head shouldn’t be burning.” And, “Where’s Pop?” I guess I meant Papa, as I’d never called him Pop before.
I insisted on making my own medical calls and stubbornly clung to the shred of independence I had left by calling the shots and leaving my parents out of my decisions. My parents were talking about flying in my brother and sister to see me that first week, and I wrote with ferocity, “NO! I don’t want them to see me like this!” My fear was that Charity and Cameron would be terrified of the way I looked and run away from my wretched-looking body.
Writing sapped me of what little energy I had, and Mom developed another way to help me communicate. She drew boxes on pieces of paper. One might say “Yes,” and the other “No.” One might say “Stay?” and another, “Go?” meaning did I want her to spend the night or to leave me alone with my thoughts? I usually didn’t have to answer that one because Papa slept in the chair by my bed every night, except for the days he had to fly back to Dallas on business or to Oklahoma to speak at the funerals for each of the boys. I was bitter about not being able to go with him, but I was too sick and still hooked up to the ventilator.
At the beginning of my recovery, my main goal was getting off the ventilator so I could speak. The doctors’ concern was my collapsed lung and whether my good lung could support my breathing. I was intent on proving that I was mentally aware and physically stable enough to have the breathing tube removed. After a couple of days, he agreed that we could give it a try.
Having the tube removed felt like a gigantic slug being pulled out of my gut. I gasped, my heart rate skyrocketed, and I started gagging. As soon as it was out, I tried talking, but the nurse who was attending to me told me to stay quiet. My throat was filled with phlegm and who knows what other kinds of crap. They called Mom into the room. I tried talking again, but the only thing that came out was this raspy rumble. “I’m here, Mom,” I said. It was frightening, hearing my voice, and I asked for my paper and pen. I wrote a note to the doctor. “Listen to me. I’m growling.”
The doctor said I would be able to talk soon enough. My voice box was irritated from the tube. It would take a few days to heal and then I’d have my voice back. But I couldn’t wait. There was something I needed to say.
26
Do You Want to Know What Happened?
When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
—HENRI J. M. NOUWEN, THE ROAD TO DAYBREAK: A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
I woke up in the middle of the night. I knew it was sometime between midnight and daybreak because the sights and sounds of the hospital were different then. The lights were dimmed to an eerie blue, and the hallway was quiet except for the occasional static voice coming over the public address system. The moment I opened my eyes, the crashing plane and frightened faces of the boys flooded my thoughts. I tried to beat back the flashbacks, but they overpowered me, and I felt terribly alone and afraid. Papa wasn’t there the way he always was. He’d traveled out of town that night to speak at Austin’s funeral the next day. He’d been asked to speak at services for all four of the boys. Of course he had to go. I wish I could have, and I was filled with regret that I would never have a chance to say a proper good-bye.
I listened intently for footsteps in the hall. Nurses and technicians were always coming into and going out of the room at night. Now I heard nothing, no signs of life at all. Tears streamed down the sides of my face. I still couldn’t speak except for an occasional word that sounded more like a rusty grunt. I was afraid to be alone with my thoughts, they were dark and forbidding, and I was whimpering like a frightened child. Of all nights for Papa to be gone, I thought. I needed to tell someone my story now and there was no one to tell.
The nurse’s bell was out of my reach, and panic stabbed at my gut. I was feeling anxious and desperate. I tried making myself sleep. Counting sheep? It was no use. Every time I closed my eyes fiery ghouls and bloody ghosts visited me. My heart rate spiked. Couldn’t anyone hear the racing rate of my heart on the monitor? A moment passed, an endless moment, and one of my favorite nurses walked into the room. She was clocking out for the night and wanted to check on me before she left, she said. “Is everything okay, Hannah?” she asked. She saw my tears and asked if I was in pain. I shook my head. No more than usual.
My heart had settled down a bit. She turned on the track lights in the room and stood over me, looking at me with the kindest eyes. I was alone in the room, because the patient who had been on the other side of the divider curtain, whose burns were less severe than mine, had caught an infection and died the day before. I think the nurse could see the desperation on my face.
I hadn’t been able to tell anyone about the crash, how it happened or what I experienced, and I needed to get it out. I had to talk about it, even if I couldn’t talk. I felt more coherent than I had since I’d been in the hospital, and I was afraid if I didn’t tell someone right then my story would be lost in a morphine haze again, and who knew for how long? The longer I held my story in, the more I succumbed to the debilitating sadness that followed me. I wanted to be with the boys, not recovering in the hospital. I didn’t want to live without them. I wanted to be dead with them. Sharing my burden with someone would be honoring them. Because then people would know that my friends died heroes. And they died with God in their hearts.
I motioned to the nurse to hand me my pad of paper and pencil. I did my best to scratch out my request. “I have to tell you what happened to me.” She looked at me quizzically, and I handed her my first note. She squinted as she looked at the paper, and I knew she was trying to decipher my words. Did she
understand? I wondered. She began sounding out my attempt at words. “Call? . . . No, tell . . . happy . . . happened? . . . You want to tell me what happened?” she asked, finally. I nodded vigorously.
The nurse pulled a chair up to my bed. I knew her shift was ending, but she didn’t seem to be in a rush to leave. I began jotting down more notes, sometimes only a couple of words per piece of paper. I knew some of the words were no more legible than scribbles, but I was determined to say what I had to say, whether she understood or not.
I wrote for what seemed like an hour or more, and it may have been even longer. Someone turned on the heater . . . Smoke flew out of the vents . . . Terrible smell . . . That’s what Hell smells like . . . My friend Luke made a valiant attempt at getting the plane on the ground . . . We’d nosedived, then tumbled across a Kansas plain and how those final moments seemed never to end . . . I was stuck inside the burning plane . . . Had it not been for my friend, Garrett, who cracked open the door of the plane just before we hit the ground, neither I nor our friend Austin could have gotten out of the burning wreckage.
I told the nurse that I was grateful for the fireman who taught me when I was a child to stop, drop, and roll if I was on fire, because if he hadn’t taught me that I would have run and fanned the flames and been burned even worse than I was. I told her about how I first saw Austin and how my life had been saved because of his persistence and presence. And I explained how Austin, my beloved friend, had given me hope until those sweet ladies in the minivan found us and got us help. Otherwise, I would surely have given up and died.
The nurse nodded, and I saw tears in her eyes. Then I cried again, too. The sun was rising when I put down my pen, too tired to write anymore. I wasn’t sure how much my wonderful nurse understood of what I wrote. But, if nothing else, she seemed to understand that we were crying over some very special boys. And that was enough for me.