“We’ve gotta move,” I screamed at the driver as I shook the back of the seat. “Get off the track, Jack. A train is coming!”
I saw the monster bearing down on us through the left-side windows of a borrowed VW van. The whistle’s crescendo was deafening. We’re going to die. I’m only twenty-nine. I’m not ready to die. In seconds, the men had clambered out of the front passenger-side door. I clawed at the metal sliding-door handle next to me and yanked it back. Nothing happened.
Dave, his brother, and their dad had been riding in the front seat. His mother, sister-in-law, and I were in the middle seat behind them. The sound of my pounding heart blocked all noise except the voice in my head. Dave is out there somewhere.
I grabbed the handle again and jerked hard. Nothing.
The front door. All I had to do was jump forward, slide out, stand up, and run. I can make it!
I catapulted over the front seat, landed awkwardly, and, before I could catch myself, tumbled out the open passenger door onto the tracks. The only thing standing between me and the train was the van, with my mother- and sister-in-law still inside. I scrambled frantically to right myself.
Suddenly, my chest felt tight and I was lifted off the tracks. I opened my eyes. Dave’s face was inches from mine; his strong arms were wrapped around me. He’s going to save me! I could hear again. Dave was gasping for breath. His arms tightened around me, and then he was gone.
In one earth-shaking, deafening instant, the locomotive smashed into the van, pushing me down onto my back across the track. The blue sky above me disappeared as the van folded over me, blocking the color and light as the train hit it. Time morphed. Seconds jumbled and tumbled. Time ran away and disappeared.
I took a deep breath and held it. If I let it out, I might never breathe again. I must hold it . . . hold it . . . hold it. Till death do us part . . .
The train pushed me down the tracks. I felt nothing.
When it stopped, I heard new sounds. Human voices. Indecipherable words. I didn’t care what they were saying. If I could hear them, I was still alive.
The hands of time began to move again. Something was happening. I heard the scraping of metal on metal. The train was backing up. Someone shouted. People grunted and strained to lift the van. The terrible weight pressing down on me lessened. I found myself squinting against the late-afternoon sun.
I took a deep breath and felt a sharp pain in my chest. Pain is good! Breathing is good. What are they saying?
Then I remembered. I was in Germany. German! They’re speaking German! That’s why I can’t understand them. Maybe I don’t have brain damage. They pulled the van off me. I’m alive!
I smiled at the panicked-looking faces hovering over me. They did not reciprocate. Heads turned away. Hands held me down. My mind raced. Am I paralyzed? I was afraid to move. I didn’t want to know. But I smiled. It’s what I always did, and the only thing I could do for these horror-struck strangers. I’m okay, I tried to convey. Don’t worry; I’ll be okay.
No one was speaking English, so I had to work it out on my own: I was conscious, my glasses were still on my face, and I could see clearly. People swirled around me, some with purpose, others plodding mindlessly, as if through movement they could somehow make sense of the scene before them. I didn’t feel part of it either; it was as if I were watching a movie.
The scream of a siren got closer and closer. I looked around, wondering if there were other people on the ground. Who is the ambulance coming for? There were six of us in the van. Where is everyone?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shoe, then, farther away, another. One was Dave’s. Where is Dave? The other was light tan with a rubber sole. It looked an awful lot like the new ones I’d bought for the trip.
An ambulance stopped abruptly very near where I lay against the hot tracks. Its doors flew open, and medical personnel rushed over. They tied tourniquets around my right shoulder and high up on my legs. I heard the whooshing air of a blood pressure cuff as it tightened around my left arm.
I stared at each face. They looked at each other and shook their heads. “My blood pressure is always low,” I said. Why do they look so worried?
I knew from my medical training that if blood pressure got too low, the team responsible for saving my life might start to lose hope and motivation. I smiled and repeated, more slowly and more loudly, “My . . . blood . . . pressure . . . is . . . always . . . low! It’s okay!”
Big men gingerly slipped their arms under me and transferred me to a stretcher. An attendant picked up my still neatly tied shoe and walked toward me. He placed it at the end of my gurney. Conveniently, my foot was still inside it. Someone else put part of a leg next to it. The knot in my stomach twisted tighter.
I tried to sit up but couldn’t. I pushed again. Nothing happened. Why can’t I raise my arm? The right sleeve of my dark green velour shirt looked fine, not so much as a tear. My right hand, attached to my arm, lay motionless beside me on the gurney. My arm looked perfect as it protruded from the sleeve cuff. It was, however, hanging loose inside, unattached to my body.
I closed my eyes.
The ambulance swayed as it sped around mountain curves. The paramedics rocked back and forth in time with the motion of the vehicle, silent as they steadied my gurney. Time seemed to fly away again until we slowed and stopped. The ambulance doors were yanked open, and the low-hanging sun temporarily blinded me. A man in a US military uniform poked his head in toward me. “I’m Dr. . . .” His eyes quickly scanned the scene in front of him. “Let’s get her out!”
He’s speaking English! He leaned over, pulled the sheet off me, and pressed his fingers against my neck, feeling for a carotid pulse while he looked at the bloody tourniquets tied on three of my extremities.
“How are you?” he asked curtly.
Not wanting to state the obvious, I flashed a smile and said, “Fine.”
The doctor in me assessed my situation: foot in shoe, leg on gurney, loose arm in sleeve. I’m going to die. I’m going to bleed to death. In some ways, I was fine—fine with dying. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live like that.
There was a brief silence as the doctor stepped away from the door, then an exchange of words that floated over my head. He pulled the sheet back over me as he said, “We can’t keep you here. You need to get to surgery as fast as possible. We’re calling ahead to the trauma hospital in Salzburg and alerting them to prepare for your arrival.” He looked deep into my eyes and squeezed my remaining hand tightly. “Hurry and good luck! We’ll be praying for you.”
I watched the doors slam shut. I did want to live. Maybe they’ll get me to Salzburg in time. Surely they wouldn’t have sent us off if there wasn’t any hope. I looked at the faces of the men in the ambulance. If they have hope, I have hope. I’ll fool them as long as I can.
“I’ll be okay. My blood pressure is fine. It’s always low,” I reminded them. Don’t give up on me, guys. Please don’t give up on me.
It was a twenty-minute race to the trauma hospital across the passport-controlled border between Germany and Austria. The rapid, deep, up-down, two-note sound of the siren provided the soundtrack for the scene as the ambulance sped me toward my date with a room full of surgeons. I’m going to die; I’m going to live. I’m going to die; I’m going to live. I’m going to die; I’m going to live.
We stopped abruptly, and the doors clanged open. Out and down I went on the gurney, gripping it with the only extremity I had left. I fought to open my eyes, but they were too heavy. Everything was spinning. The sharp smell of alcohol and clipped, ordered speech of people told me I must be in an emergency room. Time was running out.
I was fading as I felt the sting of a needle in the skin under my clavicle, and the ER doctor put a catheter into my subclavian vein. As a physician, I knew this meant serious trouble. Then there was nothing.
Slowly, I became aware of the soft beeping of a cardiac monitor, speaking the universal language of medicine. I pulled against the weight of my eyelids, willing them to move. When they finally opened a crack, the glare hurt. I winced, closed them again, and listened. Subdued voices floated over me while squeaks from rubber-soled shoes moved quickly around the room. The beeping had a steady, reassuring beat. The voices, on the other hand, were unintelligible, so I made a bigger effort to open my eyes. Across the room, a clock on the wall said it was four. Probably in the morning. It was pitch black outside the window.
Concentrating with all my might, I heard and saw everything that had happened. Was that yesterday: the van stopping, a train, Dave picking me up, the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, an ambulance, my foot, part of a leg, and an arm disconnected from my body?
I took several deep breaths, opened my eyes, and forced myself to look down. A tent-like apparatus covered the lower half of me. I allowed my eyes to scan the contours of my body. My left arm lay at my side on top of the sheet. Under the sheet covering me, I could make out the familiar curve of my waist and flat stomach, but just below my hips, the fabric made an abrupt plunge to meet the mattress. It was true. Both my legs were gone. My right arm was gone. Life as I knew it was gone.
Images of Dave’s face floated all around me. I clenched my fist and tried to make them go away but drifted back to the beginning.
I’d noticed him the first day of medical school, the blond, handsome guy with the cute mustache and sideburns who sat below me in the anatomy amphitheater. He was in the front row of every class, taking extensive notes, staring intently at the slides or blackboard, and watching the professor. He was so focused that he didn’t notice my considerable efforts at flirting.
He grew up relying on sports to serve as an emotional outlet and to help him to maintain an even keel in life. But medical school was so time-consuming that he needed exercise he could do at odd hours and that didn’t require money or other people’s participation.
So, running became his thing. Starting at 5:00 a.m., before the Inland Empire heat and smog settled in, he ran in the dark on silent, isolated roads through orange grove after orange grove. If you’d passed him on the road, you would have seen him talking to himself, his arms pumping and hands gesticulating, his mind racing ahead of his feet.
If you’d asked him why he was running, he would have said that it calmed him and helped temper his impulsivity for the rest of the day. This was the 1970s. Researchers were just discovering the opioid neuropeptides (now known as endorphins) that eventually inspired the term “runner’s high.” Dave is living proof that it is an effective process. When he doesn’t run, he is hard to live with. When he runs, he is easy to love.
By the end of med school, he averaged thirty-five miles per week. I rode my mint-green Bianchi racing bike alongside him whenever I could. We didn’t talk. The effort the terrain required didn’t allow it. Footfall by footfall, pedal stroke by pedal stroke, breath by breath, we were together yet separate. We’d become a team.
Daylight streamed in through the window. It was Tuesday, August 28—in medical jargon, post-op day one. In my mind, it was the first day of a different life. I’d been mentally preparing for it over the past few hours. I knew where I was. I knew what had happened. What I didn’t know was how Dave was doing. I hadn’t seen him since the accident, but I’d been told that he’d broken his ankle and been knocked out but would be okay.
Will he really? Will he be okay with having a severely disabled wife? He married a cute, slim doctor with whom he hiked, biked, and traveled. What if I can’t do things with him anymore? What if I can’t work? Why would he want to stick around?
In good times, Dave struggles with anger issues. I wondered what he would do when he saw the mangled, tiny version of Linda, the visible remains being only the face he’d loved to kiss and one arm—half of what I used to hug him with, half of what I used to play the organ and piano for him with, half the person he used to cook Julia Child recipes with. Will he take out his anger on himself, or someone else . . . or me?
I knew I was in stable condition because a nurse was carefully sponging my face with a warm, wet cloth, avoiding the scabs and scrapes, while another gently worked a comb through the tangles of my hair. How would my husband of only two years react to seeing me wrapped in bandages and missing my legs and right arm? I was grateful that the nurses were doing their best to make me presentable. I pulled my shoulders down, trying to make them look as level as possible, and sat up as straight as my bed and back brace would allow. At least I look sort of normal from the shoulders up.
The double doors swung open. I held my breath as Dave, gripping his crutches, hobbled in with his left leg in a walking cast. His blond hair was unruly. A brown hospital robe was cinched around his waist. Eyes fixed on me, he limped past the nurses’ station and headed straight toward my cot, the only one occupying the long, seven-patient, old-school intensive care unit. He looked frail. The heat rose in my face. My chest tightened. I clenched my jaw and twisted the sheet in my fist, trying not to cry as I looked at his pale, haggard, unshaven face. What is he thinking?
I needed to be strong for him. I grinned as he crutched to my bedside while I silently rehearsed the two sentences I’d carefully crafted and memorized.
When he reached me, he slipped one of his hands under mine and with his other stroked the back of my hand. The gentleness of his touch on my wrist, across my knuckles, and down to my fingertips sent a familiar, warm sensation up my arm and across my chest. He gingerly bent over me, kissed my forehead, and pressed his cheek against mine. I could feel and hear his heartbeat and breath. As he straightened, I avoided his gaze, focusing instead on the empty space beyond the stumps of my thighs.
“I’ve been thinking about things,” I began. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to stick around.”
He shifted and let the crutches fall away from his body. I dared to look up and into his green eyes. Tears ran down his cheeks as he squeezed my hand. “Olsie, Olsie, Olsie, I didn’t marry your arms and your legs. . . .” His voice cracked. “If you can do it, I can do it.”
We were awash in a flood of emotions for several minutes. When the tide ebbed, Dave asked, “Do you know what happened to you?”
“I never lost consciousness,” I replied. “I remember everything. I know I’ve lost both my legs and my arm.”
I faltered and then forced myself to continue. “Wh. . . what happened to everyone else?”
His grip on my hand tightened. “You aren’t going to believe this. . . you and I are the only ones that got hurt. When the train hit us, my mom and Carol were thrown into the back of the van and nothing happened to them. Mark and I and my dad got out safely before the impact.”
He drew in a long breath, and I watched as the emotion cleared, making way for Dave the medical professional.
“Linda, is it okay if I do a neuro exam to see whether you have a spinal cord injury?”
“Yes, Dr. Dave,” I said, winking away a remaining tear.
He slipped his hands under the protective bridge and stopped briefly to admire the precision with which the staff had wrapped and taped the surgical dressings that covered the ends of my thighs. “They did a wonderful job,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Okay, Linda, can you feel this?” he asked as he gently touched the tops, sides, and bottoms of my left thigh.
“Yes, I can feel it,” I said, happy to be feeling anything that a normal spinal cord would allow me to feel.
“What do you feel?”
“It feels like your finger is just barely touching my skin.”
“I’m going to test for pain and lightly pinch you.”
I felt a gentle pinch and nodded my head, relieved to have the information.
“Can you move your thighs comfortably?”
“Just a little,” I said as I moved each one up and down and side to side.
“Do you feel any tingling or burning up here?” Dave asked as he softly drummed his fingers on my thighs.
“No, but I can still feel my lower legs and feet, and that’s a tingling feeling,” I said.
“I think you’re good. No deficit that I can detect.”
Satisfied that there wasn’t any neurological damage, Dave stepped back into husband mode, pulling the sheet up over me and once again taking my hand in his.
We talked. We didn’t talk about piano playing, the pipe organ, bicycling, hiking, skiing, or climbing the steps of the bell tower of the Ulm Cathedral, which we’d done the day before. We didn’t talk about how I had often climbed barefoot up onto Dave’s shoes to reach up and give him a kiss. We talked about getting through the next few days and weeks. We focused on the new and the now: this afternoon, tomorrow.
“Fünf Minuten,” announced a nurse from the station across the room. Technically, I was stable but still in critical condition. It had been less than twenty-four hours since the accident. The nurses wanted me to rest.
“If you can do it, I can do it,” Dave said as he picked up his crutches and limped reluctantly to the double doors. He turned awkwardly to look at me one more time before stepping out into the bright hallway beyond the comfort of me and my bedside. I was pretty sure he was crying. I was.
“I love you,” I murmured. And then I was alone, a tiny figure swaddled in white.
White sheets covered me. White pillows propped me up. Rolls and rolls of white gauze covered by white tape protected the ends of my severed arm and legs. Even my feelings were vanilla, kept at bay by powerful painkillers that let me float above all the whiteness. Nurses glided around me, whispering terse observations and orders in German. A central venous line, an IV, and a urinary catheter took care of most of my bodily functions.
All I had to do was rest. All I could do was think.
For the rest of the day, in a haze, I alternated between two personae: Dr. Olson and Linda. Looking around, I assessed my situation.
Legs:
• gone but somehow still here
• absence of legs from midthigh down—not okay
That was going to be a big problem. That would require a wheelchair. I was not okay with that. People in wheelchairs are nobodies. There’s no way I can spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair.
Arm:
• have one left; nondominant
• doesn’t hurt
• has full range of motion
• no scrapes or bruises
• all five fingers intact
It would take some practice and creativity, but I was sure I’d have a perfectly usable arm.
Back:
• hurts
Actually, it hurt like hell!
I’d asked to see the X-rays of my spine. The findings were obvious when I held them up to the light and looked at the lateral view. Instead of the normal, rectangular appearance, two of my vertebrae were crunched into wedge-shaped structures. Diagnosis: two vertebral compression fractures. Broken back.
Mental evaluation:
• oriented to person, place, and time
• dull, bland
The effects of the medication brought into sharp focus another fear: getting hooked on pain meds. I dreaded the pain ahead but couldn’t bear the idea of not being fully aware and engaged with the decisions that were coming.
My less confident Linda persona knew that there wasn’t much left of her body, and what was left had some pretty ugly scars. How could Dave find that attractive and sexy? My dreams of hiking the John Muir Trail, scuba diving, biking, swimming around the pier, and wearing my bikini to the beach were all gone. Will I ever drive, make love, or work as a radiologist again?
I was afraid of falling into a huge black hole and never crawling out again. Even worse, what would I do if Dave decided to walk out those double doors and never come back? I couldn’t imagine life without him.
It was useless to open my eyes. When I did, white lights, white walls, and white bandages blurred into nothingness. Without anything to hang on to, my mind spun, jumped, and fell. I needed something to touch or hold, or at least something I could think about. From my hospital room in Austria, I escaped to Mexico.
It started as a relaxing beach camping trip in Punta Estrella, Baja, Mexico, and what should have been a short walk to meet friends for lunch in San Felipe. Skimpily clad in bathing suits, tennis shoes, and windbreakers, Dave and I strolled north up the hard-packed sand, holding hands. We were young, carefree, and in love. Crashing waves sparkled in the morning sun.
The atmosphere was intoxicating. I drew in a lungful of salty morning air as I shaded my eyes to see beyond the expanse of sand. “It’s like the entire world is out in front of us—like I own the whole world,” I said.
Dave took a deep breath, then let it out. His shoulders relaxed, and the corners of that sexy mustache slowly curved upward. With his thumb, he gently stroked the back of my hand and winked. God, it’s great to be alive!
Lost in contemplation and conversation, we walked for miles. San Felipe, which we’d expected to simply run into, never came into sight.
Our pace slowed as the midday sun burned down, parching our lips and subduing our spirits. We had an ocean full of water but nothing to drink. Finally, a dune buggier came upon us. Before speeding off, he gave us one bottle of beer, which we nursed between us for the next hour. What was supposed to be a two-hour, five-mile stroll stretched into a ten-hour, twenty-mile death march through desert sands. Our fears escalated when we stumbled upon a set of human skeletal remains. A cold chill went up my spine, and the telltale tingling of a spike in adrenaline radiated through the tips of my fingers and toes. We are lost. I looked around and listened—sand and more sand. Is this how they’ll find us?
After night fell, shivering in the dark, with no food or water, the heat of the day replaced by a cold wind, we knew we weren’t going to make it to our friends. We had no choice but to turn around and face the long slog back to camp. The first tears fell silently; then I started shaking. I stopped walking and burst out crying.
Dave stopped and put his arms around me. “We can do this. I’ll carry you if I need to.”
With my head down, I concentrated on setting a steady pace as I struggled to see the ground through the darkness. One foot in front of the other while we talked about whatever came to mind. When we ran out of things to say, I started to sing and was surprised when Dave joined in. At first, we sang silly kid songs like “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” “Three Blind Mice,” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Then on to our national anthem and “America the Beautiful.” Whatever we could remember the words to. We plodded on through the desert blackness and started to realize and appreciate each other’s strengths: Dave the protector, Linda the entertainer.
It was the coldest, most miserable night of my life. As we trudged on, I relived each hour of the day and knew something had changed. The man I’d started walking with that morning had become someone I could trust with my life. We were strong. We were a team. He was my partner. I knew we could do anything if we did it together. I knew by the end of that weekend that we’d stay together.
I held on to that memory, mulling over it for hours—how Dave had put his arms around me in the darkness and said, “I’ll take care of you. We’re together.” Maybe he will stick around. Maybe this story is my beacon. Rather than doubt him, I decided to be positive and try as hard as I could to make him happy.