The Promise Read online

  I was calm, I really was. Maybe calmer than everyone else who was there. But I guess I knew things were dire by their demeanors and worried looks, and I just wanted the facts, not the pity. Everyone’s fears were evident. My one panic was Chris. I desperately wanted to talk to him, to tell him I was going to be okay. I was certain he was beside himself without details. All I knew, after a few hours, was that they’d finally located him and his father.

  I had to have CAT scans and MRIs and no one was allowed to accompany me, but since my mom’s brother Steve worked at the hospital, he was able to be with me and actually perform the scans. It was nice to have him there while everyone waited.

  Eventually, after the tests were completed and my parents had rejoined me, the neurologist came in. It was his first time in the ER.

  “Why does he look so scared?” I asked. The nurse made up a reason about something else happening in the hospital. He was touching me all over.

  “Can you feel that?” he asked.

  “Can you feel that?” Again.

  “That?”

  I couldn’t feel any of it. And he was just asking, not giving me any information. It was excruciating for us all as he did the test.

  After a few minutes he stopped the test and said plainly, “You will never walk again.”

  My parents were the only other people in the room at the time, and they broke down crying and held each other.

  “What are the chances that she might?” my dad asked.

  “Maybe five percent?” the doctor replied.

  My parents sobbed. It was heartbreaking to hear them in tears and in such pain. I felt worse for them, actually, than I did for me. I was in shock, I guess, but the implications of what it meant for me just felt far less than what it meant for everyone else I loved. I watched them cry, and my heart sank. I kept thinking over and over in my head, You will get through this. Stay strong. It’s going to be okay. One at a time, they went out to make phone calls to tell relatives. My mother was working desperately to get Chris on the phone, I was told. I needed so badly to hear his voice, to calm him down. I felt calm and he needed to hear that from me.

  The wait felt like forever. After about five hours someone walked into the room with the phone, my mother maybe, and held it to my ear. It was Chris. He had just begun the three-hour drive to the hospital.

  I wasn’t crying when I spoke to him.

  “I’m okay.” I wanted him to know I was dealing with it. “I’m handling this, but do you know exactly what’s going on? What have you been told?” I asked.

  “I don’t know much. Explain it to me,” he said. He sounded in shock. I knew he knew what had happened, but he wanted it in my words, as though maybe my answer would be different than what he had been told, like I held the truth and it wasn’t as bad as he thought.

  “I’m not going to walk again. I broke my neck.” I just wanted him to have the information. I didn’t want to sugarcoat it for him.

  He said “Okay” a couple of times but not much else. He wasn’t crying either, but I could hear the shock in his voice. He didn’t know how to react and suddenly became a man of few words, which was completely out of character for him. I knew he was rattled, so I just wanted to put him at ease and let him know I wasn’t a mess, that I was coping. I wanted so badly for him to hear that message from me because I knew he was upset. We said good-bye and I started counting the minutes until he arrived.

  It became clearer that I needed to have surgery, but we had to wait about eleven hours for some special machine to arrive. My C6 vertebra was completely shattered and the fragments had to be removed. My C5 and C7 had to be stabilized with a rod. The wait for the tools was excruciating for all of us, more so for me because I hoped Chris would get there before I went into surgery.

  Oddly, my parents had gotten bad news about me once before, ironically about me walking. When I was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on October 2, 1985, the doctors weren’t sure whether I would ever walk. Isn’t that crazy? It was like some kind of bizarre foreshadowing. They thought I might have had spina bifida. That wasn’t my only issue; I also was born with a vision impairment called nystagmus. The doctors thought even if I learned to walk, I wouldn’t be able to play sports like tennis, because I wouldn’t be able to see a tiny ball. I showed them on both fronts. I started playing when I was two, and I never stopped.

  My parents and the doctor went out of the room at some point and told everyone in the waiting room about the surgery. A crowd of twenty-seven had gathered, apparently just for me; no other big groups were waiting for news on a loved one. All the girls from the party were still wet from the pool. The nurses brought them some blankets, and they huddled together, waiting. Some of their parents had arrived, too. The update included the information that I’d never walk again, that the damage was permanent. That was jarring news for them, as in the chaos of the accident, they had held strong to the notion that it was just a quick nerve issue that would resolve itself. This was the kind of thing that happened only to other people. That’s what everyone had thought, which was why there was so much disbelief about the severity of it all. I was told everyone lost it out there—all of my girls were crying. One girl ran out, and my mom had to chase her down and hug her.

  Eventually Chris arrived. He said the waiting room was absolutely quiet; he could hear people crying, but no one was talking. I had already gone into surgery, so Chris took a seat like everyone else and waited for more information. Everyone told me later that the surgery took forever. When I came out of it and people gradually came in to see me, there were tubes protruding from all over me and monitors everywhere. Most people were tall enough to sort of bend over the tubes, but my mom wasn’t. They put a stool down for my mom eventually. We called it the kissing stool, because she would stand on it and could then reach in and kiss me.

  I’ve tried to recall the first time I finally saw Chris after my surgery. There were so many drugs in my system by that point that a lot of my memories are foggy. But I do vividly remember wanting to hold his hand when I first saw him walk into my room. I was desperate for that. I couldn’t ask him at the time; I couldn’t speak because of the respirator down my throat. But instinctively, he did it. He reached out and grabbed my hand. I thought I’d willed him to do it. I couldn’t feel him, but that didn’t matter. I could feel the warmth of his hand and the pressure of it when he placed it on mine. It didn’t feel the same since I couldn’t hold it back, but it was comforting. I’d been craving the comfort he provides me the entire time and was so happy to have finally received it.

  My bridal shower was supposed to be the next day. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

  CHAPTER 6

  Barely Breathing

  Three days after the accident my heart stopped, and for a brief moment I was dead.

  It happened, of course, in the only fifteen-minute span during which my mother left my side. From the second she arrived at the hospital, my mother, Carol, had remained awake and with me—the entire three days. She was so worried about me that she didn’t want me to spend one minute alone. My blood pressure had been falling; throughout those first few days it would drop and someone would have to rush out to get the nurses.

  Of course, the one time she did leave to take a small break, all hell broke loose. I was going in for what the doctors said would be a routine surgery, so she decided to take a few minutes to run home. She waited until they were wheeling me out of my room, and then she zipped out.

  I don’t remember anything because I’d been drugged, but basically, my heart stopped. I had to be given CPR. It was apparently extremely scary and caused major panic among the healthcare team, and it took some quick thinking to revive me. My mother was called immediately after it happened, so soon after she’d left that she hadn’t even made it home. She turned right around and came back to the hospital.

  My mom has always been my best friend. When I w
as little we had girls’ nights out that my dad didn’t know about. We didn’t actually go out. Most nights, she’d tuck me into bed, read me a book, and rub my back while she counted to one hundred. But on some nights she would whisper “Girls’ Night Out,” then go to bed herself, and when my dad fell asleep, she’d sneak back into my room and grab me, and we’d put pillows and blankets down in the living room and watch Disney movies and eat popcorn late into the night. It was a really special time for me, for us both, I think. We also did so much together as I grew up. We camped and shopped and rafted and tubed. She was always a kid herself to an extent. We were a team growing up, and I knew that the aftermath of my accident was as tough on her as it was on me, maybe even more so. I was unaware then of what an enormous sacrifice she’d eventually be making for me.

  I knew when I woke up in my room that my ribs seemed to really hurt and that they were bruised. I don’t know how exactly, but I could feel inside of myself, like somehow my insides and my stomach could still register pressure. A day or two later, I began to wonder why my chest was still hurting. It was an odd feeling, and I noticed then that there was sort of a line between where sensation ended and where it gradually picked up again. The discomfort intensified and the pressure had increased. It began to feel like I’d been punched in the chest.

  I still had a tube in my throat when a doctor came in one afternoon while I was alone, which was only because my parents and other visitors had to leave the room during a shift change for the nurses. Within that gap this doctor flat out told me my heart had stopped. I had no memory of going into cardiac arrest. There was no explanation, no comforting; he was very short and to the point about it, and then he left. I couldn’t communicate or ask questions because of the tube. I was terrified. I didn’t know what that meant exactly for my health or my future or anything. It was a truly awful moment. My mom and dad came in and asked me what was wrong, as my eyes were as wide as they could get. If the blow had been delivered by my family or a little more softly, perhaps I could have processed it better or easier and then moved on. Instead, that weird moment stuck with me for a while. But from then on my parents refused to leave me alone in the room even for a minute. My mom scolded the doctor later for telling me something like that without my being able to communicate.

  They were supposed to put an umbrella stint into my leg to prevent blood clots. When I was in the elevator heading down for that procedure, my heart stopped.

  This, of course, made me more upset. I was frustrated, mostly, that no one had told me. I didn’t want to be protected like that. I wanted all of the information I could get my hands on. Information was helping me cope and process the situation. I had been strong up until then, so I didn’t want anyone to think I was too fragile to know or hear about what was happening to me and what exactly I was dealing with. Information, as hard as it was to hear, was reassuring. Being informed was comforting.

  After that some days went well and some days were really terrifying. Everyone would describe it as a roller coaster. There were random things happening all the time to my body while I was in the hospital. My lung collapsed while I was in the ICU, for example. I didn’t have the ability to cough and I wasn’t moving around, so mucous and congestion entered into my system and had the potential to cause pneumonia. The stickiness of the mucous essentially made the two sides of my lung walls stick together, and when that occurs no air can go in. I couldn’t breathe. I remember one day that suddenly I couldn’t get enough air, and I felt panicked.

  The resolution to that problem, which happened often, was pretty horrific, too. The nurses would suck the mucous out with a tube that had suction. On days when it became really bad, they’d put the tube up my nose and down my nasal passage, into my throat, while I was completely awake, and it would suck all the mucous out from my lungs while I was sitting up. It was the most horrible feeling ever, but at the end of it I knew I would be able to breathe. They had a screen that showed what was going on in my lungs, and they could see exactly how much congestion had built up. If there was more and they needed to go in, I’d say, “Just do it again, just go for it and get it over with.” The mucous made me feel like I was going to puke and gag, so the procedure became the easy part. The doctors told me no one had ever asked for them to go back in. I realized then I was pretty brave.

  One of the most traumatizing experiences of my entire injury was in the ICU. When the tube that cleared my lungs wasn’t doing it well enough, the doctors had to perform an even more intricate procedure. Once, before the procedure began, I was lying on my side and they were missing a part to this machine that they were assembling. I was sitting there with one lung, barely able to breathe, and I didn’t want to freak out, because it would only make me breathe harder. But it was so hard to be calm, watching these people put together the machine. Then, as soon as they figured it out, there was no warning, just, “Let’s do this.” It happened so fast. I went from nothing—from sitting and watching them for what felt like forever—to being drugged (but not drugged correctly) to undergoing a traumatic procedure. I was trying not to overanalyze anything because I was trying not to scare myself. I was scared, but I was literally talking to myself in my head, saying, Chill out. This is a procedure that I want to have, and everything will feel so much better when it is over.

  Ideally, if the procedure goes according to plan, the doctors put you half asleep, not in full anesthesia, but they give you just enough drugs to knock you out. Then they take a big scope, which is much bigger than you’d think, and put it down your throat to suck the mucous out. This time when they started the procedure, they didn’t give me enough drugs, maybe because of the rush to get started after the delay in assembling the machine. But I was too awake. I began to freak out, so they gave me more drugs, and it knocked me into this weird semisleep; I was kind of awake and not awake at the same time. All the drugs were making me hallucinate, so I remember that—this was scary and ­traumatizing—I had a dream in which there was a barbaric war and people were putting a sword down my throat. I vividly remember the pain. This was the worst thing I ever felt, because it was not only physically but also mentally scary. It was the weirdest thing, being drugged up but awake enough to know that what was happening to me was bad. When I fully woke up, I don’t think anyone was aware of what I had just endured.

  After the surgery they threw me on a hard metal plate in order to take an X-ray of my chest to see what they had accomplished, and because my body had experienced a lot of physical trauma just days before, lying on a hard surface was extremely painful. So I awoke from this horrible dream only to be thrown onto a metal table, and I felt like no one was listening to me, but I could barely speak. It was a bad experience. I was trying to tell them how much pain I was in, but it was just a lot of chaos and noise; there were too many people, and I couldn’t explain what had happened. The nostril suction was almost a daily occurrence initially. The sword procedure happened twice, and only the second time was it a horror show. But I never cried.

  CHAPTER 7

  One Day at a Time

  Someone made a board for me on a giant orange piece of poster paper, writing the entire alphabet on it so I could spell out what I wanted to say, letter by letter. Visitors would touch a letter with their finger and I would nod when they got it correct. It took a little time getting used to communicating like this, which was rough, but once we had a system in place for pointing to letters, I could at least be understood. The first name I spelled out was that of the friend I knew would be having the hardest time with the accident. I wanted to know if she was okay. I would point out one name at a time, but almost daily, I returned to asking about her. No one had really asked me about who pushed me, even though the families all knew. No one outside of the core group was told. It was one topic that was left alone, maybe out of respect for us both. Everyone just knew not to talk about it.

  I was able to communicate through this board that I wasn’t angry. And I wasn’t.
Not at my friend or any of the girls there that night, not at myself, and not at what had happened. I didn’t cry and I wasn’t angry. We had a lot of laughs along the way as I tried to communicate all of this, but I was able to at least acknowledge how I was feeling, try to console everyone who was upset, and thank them for being there for me. I told them I was there for them, too. I wanted them to be okay. Even later when I could talk, I informed them over and over again, “I am totally fine.” I think they suspected I was more hurt than I was portraying, which is half true, half not true, but they were just trying to protect me. I was processing information pretty darn well in spite of everything.

  After the whirlwind at the very beginning, where there was an urgency to my treatment, after everyone caught their breath and the initial shock began to subside, deeper conversations with the girls really began. Step one was obviously getting myself stabilized and knowing the physical challenges that were ahead of me. That was the most important element of recovery. Next, of course, was the mental aspect of it. Everyone by the pool had had some time to really process, at least to a certain extent, exactly what had happened.

  We had a couple of group discussions. The girls wanted to be certain there was no anger. Once I could speak, I was clearer about this: I wasn’t holding back. I wasn’t angry at all. I think because I hadn’t really shown a lot of emotion, they thought I was repressing my feelings. Even at this point, when I was getting stronger, they were still crying. I’d heard they cried together in the ICU. They were extremely upset and traumatized. I had to help them, and this was the first time I realized it was up to me to be the spine for the group. Even though they were still quite emotional, they were there for me, really there. They visited a lot, they talked, they helped, and they were committed. It was a nice feeling to experience that kind of love from friends.