Chapter 2 THE ACCIDENT
June 29, 1979, is a day that will be etched in our memories until we die. Around 5:30 p.m. my mom, my brother Jay, and a hired guy were working on a tractor that had broken down out by the barn. My little sisters were in the house playing, and my brother Matt was watching TV. Dad was in the shower getting ready to go to work at the Tribune. It seemed like just another lazy summer afternoon.
All day I had been playing pretend with my dolls on the wraparound porch that I’d turned into my playhouse. This part of the porch was off the side of my parents’ bedroom, and I spent hours alone there, playing house with my dolls all lined up or tucked into little beds. I played wife and mom doing wife-and-mom duties like instructing my babies in how to behave, cooking Sunday dinner, or hanging their little dresses on a makeshift clothesline. I often sang along to an Emmylou Harris record and would race inside to the record player when the album ended. I’d climb up a stool and move the needle back to start the record over again. I’d watch the slight roll of the vinyl as it turned, listen to the scratchy sound of the needle as it began its journey back to the center. Then I’d race back to my babies as Emmylou’s voice filled the house again.
Just a few days earlier, I had decided that part of my pretend mommy duties included getting the mail. Our mailbox was at the end of our long gravel driveway and on the other side of the country highway. I knew I’d get in trouble for going down there alone if I got caught, but once I got something in my mind there was no stopping me.
I was just as much a tomboy as I was a girlie girl, being that I was the first daughter, with two older brothers. I played sports, and I also took ballet lessons. I played with Barbie dolls, and I rode a motorcycle. I rode horses, and I had slumber parties with my girlfriends. That’s the kind of girl I was, but one thing I loved most was my motorcycle. It wasn’t a small bike—it took all of my eight-year-old strength to roll it out to the driveway and kick-start it. Then I’d hop on and rev up the engine. We all had motorcycles—well, at least my brothers, my dad, and I all did. Jay and Matt both had Hodaka bikes. Jay had a Dirt Squirt and Matt had a Road Toad, and Dad had a Yamaha Virago. Mine was a Yamaha 80 that I was so proud of and loved to my core, because what eight-year-old girl has her own motorcycle to ride?
My mom said if I wasn’t with my brothers, the farthest I could go was up and down the driveway near the house and down to the pond. I wasn’t supposed to cross the highway or even get near it, not ever. I figured I could do it without anyone seeing me.
My first trip to the mailbox was uneventful, and no one saw me do it. I remember the wind in my face and feeling invincible while heading down the driveway to get the mail. I felt grown-up and proud of myself, and I didn’t tell anyone—especially not my brothers, who would’ve told on me.
On this day, I remember putting together an outfit of my own design. When you’re poor and don’t have a lot of clothes, you have to be creative. For Easter, Granny had given me a cute little pink-and-white shorts outfit. I decided the top would be even cuter with some cutoff denim shorts that my mom had made for me. And then I put on my new white Nike tennis shoes that I had also gotten for Easter. These were all such valuable items, as I knew it would be months before I got something else new. Much later, that outfit would come home from the hospital in a bag, covered in blood.
Once I reached the end of the driveway, I got off my motorcycle, stood by the highway, and waited. I looked to the left, looked to the right, and saw no cars. I did hear a car in the distance, but I thought I could make it across the road before it got to me. The last thing I remember was seeing a flash of blue to my left.
I woke up in a cold sterile room and then came the pain, just pain.
I was terrified and had no idea where I was or what had happened to me. Both of my legs were in casts, and my arms were bound. Outside the window, it was dark. I immediately started screaming and crying.
A nurse ran in to try to comfort me and calm me down. She asked, “Sara, do you remember what happened to you?”
“No,” I said.
“You were hit by a car.”
It didn’t make sense, and I just kept asking for my mommy. “Where’s my mom, I want my mommy!!!”
The nurse told me that my mom had just left to go shower and get some rest at Granny’s house. I never wanted anything so much in all my life as I wanted my mother at that moment. The most shocking part of this story is that they wouldn’t call her. I suppose the nurse thought I’d fall back to sleep or that my mother needed some rest, but that was a horrible decision on her part. For the next several hours, I stared out the window in agony, waiting for the sun to come up, because that’s when they said she’d come back. My mom’s younger brother, Uncle Dale, was in the cafeteria when I woke up. They called him in, so at least I had someone I knew, but all I wanted was my mom.
The next time I woke up, my mom was there. She looked like she’d been through hell and back. She began to tell me what had happened.
Highway 89 is the road that runs in front of our farm. It’s hilly and treacherous. There have been many accidents on that highway, some fatal. Years later, at almost the same spot where I got hit, we witnessed a horrible wreck and the death of someone we knew well. Our driveway was at the bottom of two big hills. The woman who hit me was going seventy-five miles an hour. When she came over the hill, I was standing in the road and she couldn’t stop. The only thing I can guess is that once I reached the middle of the highway and saw the car, I froze in panic and it was too late for her to do anything other than hit me.
When the car struck me, I was thrown onto the hood. There was a huge dent where my head hit the hood of her car. When she slammed on her brakes, I was thrown off the car and into the air before I landed eighty feet off the road in a ditch with tall grass.
The woman lived in the area, and her son who was in the car was in the same grade as my brother. They immediately turned around and drove back to our driveway. The son got out and ran beside the car yelling, “We hit Sara! We hit Sara!”
When my mom heard them shouting, she kicked off her flip-flops and ran barefoot down our gravel driveway to get to me. Have you ever run barefoot on gravel? It hurts like hell. I didn’t get that part fully until I became a mother, and now it’s one of my favorite parts of the story. Like her, I would run barefoot across broken glass if my child needed me.
At first, no one could find me. The grass was high along the roadside, and no one expected that I’d be eighty feet off the road. When they found me, I was curled up in a ball with my left leg mangled and twisted and almost severed in two. They all thought I was dead.
Mom sent the hired hand back to the house to tell my dad. He called the ambulance, then he and Matt ran down to the road. Then Mom sent Jay and Matt to the neighbors’ house for help. Out in the country, a “neighbor” is up the road on a huge farm of their own. They aren’t right next door. If you turned right out of our driveway, our neighbors were up a long hill, and their house was also at the end of a long driveway. The boys ran as fast as they could to the neighbors’ front door and collapsed to the floor, shouting, “Sara’s been hit by a car!” I cannot even imagine how scared my brothers were while running all that way to get help and thinking their little sister was most likely dead. As soon as our neighbors, who were also close family friends, understood what the boys were saying, they started rallying everyone they could think of to call. Word traveled quickly, and before long there were cars and farm trucks lined up for miles down the road. People came to help.
Forty-five minutes later, the ambulance came screeching up the road, weaving around cars till it came to a stop. I was still unconscious, but at least by then, they knew I was alive.
The EMTs put rubber casts around my legs and took me to the hospital in Boonville. My injuries were too severe for them to handle, so they sent me to the hospital at the University of Missouri in Columbia, about thirty miles away.
I had a severe concussion and had been unconscious for almost two days before I finally woke up in pain. Mom finished telling me what had happened, but I couldn’t quite take it all in. It was about to get even worse.
A young, handsome man named Dr. Breedlove, probably just out of medical school, came in and told my mom that my left leg needed pins put in immediately. The problem was that since my concussion was so serious, they were afraid to put me under anesthesia. The room went silent as the reality of what he was saying set in.
He went on to explain that the procedure would go like this: They’d give me local anesthesia to try numbing my leg as much as possible, and then he would use a hand drill to get the pin into my left knee. It was a difficult decision, because he felt sure that if we didn’t put the pin in, I would have a deformed leg for the rest of my life. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen my legs, but repairing them was the right decision! I have great gams!
My dad was at work, so my mom’s father, Papa Floyd, said he would stay in the surgery room with my mom. I remember the nurses on either side of me, holding me down as Dr. Breedlove picked up the drill. Every time he brought the drill close to my leg, I cried out, saying, “Wait, wait, wait!” I just couldn’t let him do it. I was absolutely terrified. I mean, imagine someone wanting to drill a pin in your leg while you’re lying there wide awake. But after my several attempts to stop the inevitable, Dr. Breedlove finally just told the nurses to hold me down so he could get it over with.
As soon as the drill hit my leg, the pain sent me into shock, and I mercifully passed out. I didn’t wake up for ten hours. My mom told me later that Dr. Breedlove was so upset and probably traumatized that he said, “I will never, ever do that again.”
When I woke this time, my mom was there. I looked down, and my body looked like Wile E. Coyote’s after a run-in with the Road Runner, but no one was laughing. My left leg was in traction, with pulleys, weights, and cables hanging at my feet. The cables had to be adjusted several times a day, and pain would shoot through my ankle all the way to my head. My right side was in a full cast from my hip to my toes. Both of my arms were sprained and bound.
For six agonizing weeks, I remained in that hospital bed.
As an eight-year-old who loved to run free and wild, it was pure torture being strapped down, hardly able to move, and in pain nearly all of the time. Also knowing that my whole summer was passing me by… I couldn’t swim or do anything fun—well, talk about feeling sorry for myself. I got through each day with the help of the sweet nurses and staff at the hospital and all the amazing people in my life. As soon as the news of the accident spread, and it was covered in all our local media, I was inundated with gifts, money, and stuffed animals from family, friends, and people in the community.
My family and friends also coordinated shifts to spend time with me. With my dad working most nights, and a farm to run, my mom couldn’t always be with me. My mother was only thirty-two years old at this time, and she had five kids. I just can’t imagine the stress that she was under. Every evening, Granny and Papa Floyd came to visit me, and Granny brought me fried chicken. Granny’s love language was acts of service, with a strong emphasis on cooking, and I loved fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. I’d ask for it all the time, and I was so spoiled and clearly her favorite (my siblings may disagree) that Granny brought it every single night.
“Brought your favorite!” she’d say as she walked into my hospital room with a smile. Granny and Papa Floyd would stay with me during that cozy evening time until visiting hours were over. To me, from around 5:00 p.m. till bedtime is the BEST time of any day. It could very well be because that’s when Granny and Papa would come to the hospital and I would eat dinner and they would sit with me and watch TV or just talk to me. It made me feel so safe and loved.
But being in the hospital really was unbelievably boring. And there were like two channels on the crappy TV they had. I remember it seemed like M*A*S*H was the ONLY thing on at all times. Every time the theme song would come on I would get so sad. I’ve always been very affected by music. Later I learned that the name of the song is “Suicide Is Painless,” and I’m like, “Well, of course it depressed the crap out of me!” I didn’t particularly like the show anyway. I was too young to understand it and I didn’t get why people seemed happy to be in Korea.
My brother Jay seemed particularly traumatized by my accident. It truly was a horrific accident, and we were all aware of the miracle it was that I survived. And I was his little sister and he adored me, so he volunteered to stay many of the nights at the hospital, sleeping on a little couch bed on the side of the room. In the night when I needed help with something, I’d call out for him, but he was a very sound sleeper.
“Jay! Wake up, Jay!” The end of my bed was absolutely covered with the stuffed animals that people had brought, and I would throw them one at a time at him until he woke up and helped me. He and I spent hours doing crossword puzzles, reading, and watching M*A*S*H. I was so touched and moved by his concern for me that I didn’t want to say anything about it for fear of embarrassing him. So I just tried to play it cool. But I will never forget how upset he was over the whole thing.
Smiling through the pain
A few times over those six weeks, I’d have a sudden, overwhelming feeling of pain and panic consuming me. “I want out of this!” I’d scream, thrashing around till someone held me down and calmed me. I felt like I was being buried alive and couldn’t move to get out. It made me so claustrophobic, and I still am very much so today. I can’t stand to feel trapped or confined. I’m terrified of elevators—not elevators themselves but being trapped in one. Honestly, if I were to ever get trapped in an elevator, I don’t know how I would cope. Or if I would cope. Just talking about the idea of being trapped inside that confined space makes me start sweating and makes my heart race. If someone even pretends to hold me down and not let me move, I will scream bloody murder. I’m no psychologist, but I would guess that being in traction in a hospital bed for six weeks without getting up one time, and then being in two full casts on both legs for another year, would make anyone claustrophobic. And contribute to several other issues in the anxiety category.
My parents promised me little surprises and special things to help me look forward to getting released. “We’ll go get pizza. You can spend the night with Granny and Papa when you get out, we’ll have a big fish fry and all the relatives will come over, you can have a slumber party…”—things like that. My mom also promised that I’d get a cute new outfit to wear home. This sparked a search back through the JCPenney catalog. I finally settled on this green-and-white striped velour shorts outfit that looked like something Chrissy Snow would wear on the TV show Three’s Company. I loved it! I would be styling in that wheelchair with casts on my legs!
Granny and Papa also told me I could pick out a gift from the catalog, so I chose a baby doll. It arrived about two weeks into my stay in the hospital. She was so cute. I kept her beside me in my bed at all times. When it came time for my last surgery to get the pins out of my left leg before sending me home—my right leg was still in a full cast—the doctor put casts on my baby’s legs, too. I woke from the surgery to see her beside me, and I was so excited. My doll and I both went home with casts on our legs. Such a sweet thing for that doctor to do.
Pain changes people. It can shape a life for the good, or twist and turn it in a bad way. For me, pain came with the side effect of awakening. Somewhere in the pain, the glaring boredom of an active child confined not just to a room but her own body, and the culmination of trauma of those weeks in that hospital—this awakening developed my eight-year-old mind.
My parents had always taken us to church and Sunday school. I knew the Bible stories and believed that God was real. But I didn’t think about God outside of church. We were a good, honest, hardworking family who went to church on Sundays, but that was about it when it came to God. Yet nearly every day I had visitors at the hospital, and someone invariably brought Him up. Family, friends, and church members would come in to visit me, and their words touched that something growing inside my heart.
“The Lord was really looking after you, Sara.”
“Oh, honey, you are so lucky to be alive. God must have a very important purpose for you.”
“God did a miracle in you. Don’t you forget that, not ever.”
And suddenly, I believed it.
I developed an understanding that God did have a purpose for me. It settled in as something I just knew to be true. I had this sense that I’d never be down for long or alone, no matter what I faced, because God was with me. He saved my life for a reason.
This felt like a special light in my heart or a fire for the Lord and for other people. I had a purpose in life, and I knew that God allowed me to survive that horrible accident, and I wanted to make him proud of me. So I needed to find out what that purpose was and never take it for granted.
My body healed slowly, but my spirit was soaring.
Since then, I’ve had a compelling desire to be a good person, to be the best I can be for everyone I encounter, to improve my situation, to improve the lives of others with kindness and generosity, and to be the living example of Christ so that others will want to seek a relationship with Him.
When I was released from the hospital after six weeks, in some ways, the work was just beginning. I spent the next two years in casts, having surgeries, going to doctor’s appointments, having physical therapy. I started third grade in a wheelchair. I can’t imagine the strain that put on my family, especially with my two sisters being just two and four years old.
I struggled a ton with anxiety from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I developed unreasonable fears about dying in my sleep. I was afraid I would go blind. I was in physical pain most of the time. And I wasn’t the only one in pain. My parents were struggling, too. They were extremely worried about me and trying to balance hospital visits, work, the farm, and my older and younger siblings. Then the hospital bills started coming in the mail. It was almost too much to ask of anybody. I think that’s when my parents started to grow apart from stress.
But even with the pain and fears and struggles, I knew without a doubt that God was real and He’d never leave me. For you reading this, I hope you’ll experience something like this as well. Not a near life-ending accident, of course, but a complete understanding of the fact that God wants to be in your life and that He has a calling for you. He’s always providing and protecting. And HE LOVES US.
As my body began to heal, my heart and soul were calling me back to music. Before long, we put the band back together and started doing shows. I even performed in a wheelchair, and believe me, that tip jar was full at the end of the night.
And at the age of eight years old, I knew that music was my calling. The accident taught me so much about patience and perseverance. When you endure hard things, you get stronger. There were many more challenges ahead, but my purpose on this earth has been clear ever since. I knew that I had a purpose, and that I would not ever let anything stop me from fulfilling it.