Trauma Center | Seven Days after the Accident

The gray, gauzy haze finally lifted, along with my eyelids. I was awake.

Mid-morning light streamed through the open blind slats of a window to my right.

Two vinyl chairs sat at the foot of my bed, one brick red, the other drab orange. On the wall behind them, a square whiteboard announced the names of my assigned doctor and nurse in neat, loopy handwriting. Above it, a wall-mounted TV, and to the left, a computer on wheels half-hidden by the thin blue curtain dividing the room. A tray table beside me, another computer on wheels behind my shoulder. To my right, an IV machine.

From my forty-five-degree hospital bed angle, I could see I was neatly tucked into my environment, my body a letter enveloped in the white hospital sheet, a blanket turned down at my waist. My left arm was in a thin blue sling at my side, the other comfortably resting with an IV. An oxygen tube was up my nose, while what seemed like a hundred other tubes were either going into or coming out of my body at various angles.

I felt stiff, statue-like and confined, and when a nurse arrived to check my vitals, I asked if she could remove the covers from my legs. As she peeled the covers down to my ankles, I saw a cast encasing my left leg from the knee down. I slid it out from under the covers to try to lift it, but it was so heavy.

“Could you please pick my leg up and put it on top of the covers?”

“Of course. Your pedicure is gorgeous—very summery,” she said as she gently picked up my heel and set it down.

“Oh, thank you.”

My toenails, a glossy, sparkling fuchsia, peeked out above the edge of the cast. I had polished them the day before dance camp started. Their perfection looked ridiculous now in this sterile, bluish environment, but seeing them somehow made me feel better.

I watched highway traffic edge toward what I recognized as the Cleveland skyline while I lay there, taking in my surroundings.

“Hi, Aimee?” a man in a white coat said as he came from behind the curtain, pushing it aside to make room. He introduced himself as the trauma doctor on rounds that morning.

“I’m here to explain the extent of your injuries, let you know what’s happened to your body.”

I could tell from the sling and cast and scratches that I was pretty beaten up, but I didn’t know how badly.

“Do you remember what happened?” he asked gently.

“Yes, sorta.”

“Your car was T-boned,” he said. He gestured with his hands, placing the fingertips of his right into the palm of his left. “You took the brunt force of the collision, because impact was at the driver’s-side front wheel.

“Both your left ankle and foot are broken. The bones of your midfoot actually punctured your skin when they were displaced.”

So those were the bones I had seen.

He continued, pointing to the top of the cast, “There are three screws here and two wires here holding your foot together now.”

“Your pelvis and tailbone were also fractured. We had to put a screw into your pelvic bone to hold it in place as it heals,” he explained. He lifted my hospital gown a bit and gently turned me to show a small, stitched hole on the back of my left hip where a screw was now holding me together.

Whoa. My pelvis was fractured? Broken? I couldn’t believe it. And at the same time, I wondered what it really meant. How can a person even move with a broken pelvis? Would I be confined to bed?

“You also had another compound fracture in your upper left arm,” the doctor went on. “You can see here”—he pointed to a spot on my upper arm—“where the bone broke the skin.”

But wait. It was only in a sling. Don’t all fractured bones need casts?

“A metal plate was put into your arm to hold the bone together as it heals, and since you’re stuck in bed for a while, you don’t really need a cast,” he said.

I wondered if the plate and those screws would remain in my body, or if they would eventually need to be removed. But I was too shocked to ask.

“Nine of your ribs are fractured and your sternum is cracked,” the doctor continued.

That explained the pain I felt in my chest when I breathed.

“Those just have to heal over time.”

So many fractured bones, so much breakage. I felt light-headed, almost dizzy. It was all so overwhelming.

“Your lungs were punctured, probably when your ribs broke,” he said. “We had to insert chest tubes to inflate your lungs, but they’ll come out when you’re getting adequate oxygen on your own.”

The tubes, also draining fluid from my lungs, tugged at the skin around them with even the slightest movement.

“You also had a lot of internal trauma to your abdomen, Aimee,” the doctor said.

He paused, almost hesitated. Something serious was coming next. I could feel it.

“The airbag and seatbelt saved your life, but because of the force, there was still damage. You sustained lacerations to your liver, kidneys, and lower intestine—there was a lot of bleeding. We had to remove your spleen.”

Internal trauma.

Internal bleeding.

No more spleen.

“Is that bad?”

Now was the time to know.

“Well, it is an organ of the body, which of course we never want to lose. Your spleen filters blood and helps fight bacteria in your body, but you can live without it,” the doctor explained.

I looked down where a drainage tube snaked out from under my hospital gown into a container at the end of my bed. A watery red liquid was collecting, coming from somewhere inside my abdomen. Later, when the nurse checked my wounds, I saw that the tube was attached to the middle of a black sponge in my still-open body. From my vantage point, the sponge stretched lengthwise from just under my breasts to my pubic bone and across my entire abdomen, a width of about eight inches. A clear plastic film had been stretched over it and around a tube that was attached to a pump to remove excess fluid while increasing the blood flow needed to heal my body. The entire apparatus was called a wound vac.

There it was again. That familiar hollow feeling. My body, crushed in a single life-changing moment, seemed to have shattered into countless irretrievable pieces.

It was broken. I was broken.

From the inside out.

How could all of this have happened?

The doctor studied my chart for a few more minutes before he looked up, cocked his head to the side, and frowned slightly, pursing his lips.

“We think you’re going to make it,” he said.

And with that, he was gone, on to his next patient visit.

Make it?

They think I’m going to ... make it? Could I still die?

It had been almost a week since the accident, and I was out of the ICU. I was awake. I was connected to all kinds of machines.

How could I not “make it”?

I sat there alone in stunned silence, tears falling down my cheeks.