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January 17, 2010
There Are Miracles....
As many of you know my son was in a terrible car accident in early December. It was a freakishly cold night and he hit black ice on a very rural road , his car struck a tree at about 60+ miles per hour, then traveled up the oak tree snapping it off and then ,according to the CHP, corkscrewed through the air for 30 feet before landing on it's top and sliding to a stop in a pasture. He was discovered by a passing driver but he was not breathing, hanging upside down in the seat belt harness and bleeding badly. When the rescue crews arrived he had been without oxygen for between 8 to ten minutes as far as any of them could tell. They had trouble prying him out of what was left of his car but once they did he was life flighted to the nearest trauma center where they gave him the lowest survival score possible. His body temperature was only 90 degrees.....
We got the call that every parent dreads at about 2 in the morning, and at that time his brother ,who called us, didn't know if his brother was alive or not. The hospital had simply called him and asked him to come in and "identify his brother". Since he was brought in without any ID.....there was such a large "debris field" at the accident scene they didn't find his wallet till later that night..... he came in to the hospital as a John Doe.
We called a friend to take care of the animals and jumped in our truck and started driving. I can't even really explain how surreal the drive was as we live five and a half hours away and there is no cell service for most of the way, so we drove, mostly in silence, thinking our middle son was dead. It had begun to snow and it would have normally been a beautiful sight....but that night it just seemed ominous.
When we were about an hour out we had enough bars for cell service and both of us were afraid to make the call, but we did, and our youngest son told us that his brother had survived and was on a ventilator in the trauma intensive care unit, but that he was not expected to live through the night.
All I kept thinking over and over in my head was that he was ALIVE and that's all that mattered.
Most mothers will tell you that they can "feel" their kids and know if there is something wrong or not, and I am no exception. And what had really frightened me the whole drive down was that I couldn't get any sense of my son....he just, all of a sudden, seemed not to be there. And when I went into his room in the TICU I still couldn't feel him at all...even though he was laying right there in front of me.
The neurosurgeon was blunt and to the point, she said that he would not live till morning and that we should prepare ourselves for that fact. She opened his right eye [the other eye was down in his sinus cavity] and used a flashlight to check his pupil reaction....there was none. When I saw his eye I realized why I couldn't 'feel' him...he simply wasn't there.
I cannot tell you what it feels like to be looking at your son's body and know that there was nothing there except a body that machines were keeping alive. All the life and laughter that you are used to seeing ,and taking for granted, were gone. Simply gone. In a moment, one second, one patch of ice and the oh-so-fragile life is simply gone.
The neurosurgeon was extremely kind and explained all of his injuries to us...the crushing chest injury, the compressed skull fracture the size of the palm of my hand to the left temple area, the massive bleed that was going on in his brain combined with the lack of oxygen for an extended period of time she said did not warrant any chance for recovery. Plus the fact that he was 'posturing'...a term referring to autonomic body movements.
We sat and held his hands all night and talked to him telling him to hang on.
And he did.
Miracle number one.
There was an English nurse there that was, to put it mildly, a saint. She bent all the rules so that we could stay with him but she also was very blunt in telling us that in 32 years of working in TICU she had never seen anyone 'come back' from these injuries. She would come in every half hour and do a sternum rub on him and yell at him to wake up. There was no reaction.
But we kept talking to him, his brother kept talking to him and all of his friends [posing as his brothers] rotated in and out and talked to him.
I cannot explain how strange it is to sit in a room with your son with machines keeping him alive, clicking and whirring, at 3 in the morning. To look at him swollen and mangled beyond recognition in the blue glow of the monitors. Or what it is like to have the alarms go off and to watch people run in and start working on him and you sit there frozen, helpless. Or what it is like to step out of the room, silently crying, and look down the hallway at all the other parents doing the same thing.
It makes everything else seem so trivial, so pointless.
The second day the day shift doctor told us that we needed to have "a talk"....then he went on to say that someone else could use the bed. I pointed out that "someone" already was using the bed and he shrugged and left the room. We knew that time was running out. We kept talking to our son, telling him what was happening and that he needed to hang on and to wake up. The third day I noticed his nose wrinkle up, something he had not done before and I squeezed his hand gently and kept calling his name and telling him that if he were in pain that he needed to squeeze my hand.
The second miracle....he did. It was faint but it was there. My husband got the nurse and told her what had happened...and she of course thought it was just wishful thinking on our part. She stood on the other side of the bed from me, did a sternum rub and yelled at him to squeeze her hand...and he did. Weakly, but he did.
Her face lit up like a Christmas tree and she gave me a thumbs up sign. She then ran out of the room and got on the phone to the neurosurgeon and we could hear her laughing and saying "you won't believe this but...."
Up until this point they had not dealt with any of the many fractures to his face and skull because he wasn't stable enough, and they told us, frankly, that there was no point.
Now that he was showing "signs of life" they called in a reconstructive surgeon who worked with the neurosurgeon to repair our son's face and head. Because his brain was still swelling and bleeding they didn't want to touch the massive skull fracture...yet. It was just too risky, they didn't want to open up his skull if they didn't have to. We were told that his skull would be deformed, but we also were told that they could deal with that much later when he was more stable.
And he was ALIVE.
The surgery went well although at some point he had a stroke. I sat by his bed holding his hands and watching the monitors measuring every bit of his life. He began to bleed out of his nose and eyes and that scared the life out of me, but the doctors assured us it wasn't that unexpected. But he still wasn't waking up.
The next morning the doctors told us that they wanted to try taking him off the meds that were keeping him in a coma to see if he would 'over breathe' the machines. At first he didn't but they kept trying every hour or so and by the early afternoon he was trying so they made us leave the room and wait in the waiting room with all the other half-dead-with-fear people.
I have never been so afraid in my life.
When the nurse opened the door an hour later she motioned us in and then smiled and said "he couldn't wait for us..... he ripped the vent right out before we had a chance to deflate it."
Miracle three.
And then the really hard part began.........he was transferred to the traumatic brain injury unit where he began initial therapy.
He was released from there two days before Christmas and we all spent a very quiet but happy time together at his house. He has a group of therapists that come in every day; cognitive, physical, neuro-psychologists [they can tell by testing how his brain is healing..it's pretty amazing] and occupational...they help him re-learn things like eating three times a day. Because of the location of his brain injuries he doesn't have any sense of hunger and most likely never will. Long term and short term memory are also affected as is his left side from the stroke.
And biggest miracle of all? He keeps beating their predictions for best case scenario every time....he is getting better.
Thank you to all of you that sent emails and prayed for him. It worked.
And for those of you that doubt that there is anything past this life ,think about this; the first thing he asked us when he could talk was why hadn't mike and grandpa been able to "come through with him?" He was very insistent and upset that they weren't with him "anymore". He had been in a gray a place and a green place with them, they talked to him and were there with him.
Mike has been dead since 2000 and grandpa has been dead for over forty years....he didn't know mike well at all and he never met his grandpa.
And then there is this: he wanted to know what happened to the person that was in the car with him at the time of the accident. There was no one in the car with him.
Even the jaded nurses were fascinated by this.....so were the doctors.
But I know someone was looking out for him or he wouldn't be alive. If it hadn't been so cold and he hadn't been hanging upside down his brain would have died from the lack of oxygen, if someone hadn't of come along that lonely road...the road that the CHP pointed out usually had no traffic on it at that time of night, and called the accident in he would have died. One small change and he wouldn't be alive today.
I thank God for my son every day...
And we all owe a huge debt to his younger brother, they are and have always been the best of friends...and youngest son really showed everyone what he is made of; honest steel and a great heart.
And he looks like Vince Vaughn......
Posted by ChristmasGhost at January 17, 2010 10:36 PM
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Comments
God that's wonderful news, Ghost! Words can not express how happy I am that he's doing so well.
As always, if there is ANYTHING I can do on my end for you guys, do not hesitate to ask.
Posted by: TFMo at January 18, 2010 12:51 AM