So be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid and do not panic before them. For the LORD your God will personally go ahead of you. He will neither fail you nor abandon you.
~Deuteronomy 31:6 NLT
I PRIED my eyes open and everything appeared blurry. My muddled mind attempted to fire as I tried to get my bearings. Where am I? Noises beeped in my ears. My eyes fluttered, adjusting to the light, as reality surfaced like a submarine emerging from the darkest depths of the ocean. Everything that had happened flashed before me in an instant. I was injured on the football field, taken by helicopter to Minnesota, and rushed into emergency surgery.
I lay flat on my back in a hospital bed. A TV hung in the corner of the room, a chair sat to the side of the bed, and a bunch of medical boxes and IV stands perched on each side of the bed feeding liquids through the assortment of tubes and wires attached to my body. The curtain in front of the bed was closed. I was alone in the room except for a nurse looking at the monitors, checking my heart rate, and noting the stats the noisy machines recorded.
A giant tube down my throat helped me breathe. I could feel it in my throat where physical sense remained. I didn’t like it. I moved my head around, trying to spit it up; I put my tongue on the tube and tried to move it. But I moved my head too much, and a painful shockwave reverberated throughout my body from my surgery site.
The nurse came up to my face. “No, no, no. You have to keep that in. Don’t move the tube around.”
I knew I could bring air into my lungs on my own and push it back out without the tube in my mouth, so I ignored her and kept moving it around with my tongue.
“No, don’t touch it,” the nurse said. “It’s helping you. Don’t do that.”
I dozed off and woke up maybe thirty minutes later, and my mom and dad were there with me. They looked tired, upset, and very concerned. They asked if I was feeling okay, but I couldn’t answer because of the tube down my throat.
I still felt confused. I had no idea what the surgery accomplished and what to expect next. I didn’t ask for answers or demand to know what was going on because of the breathing tube, and I figured they’d eventually tell us.
The surgeon came in for a consultation with my family. I didn’t doubt their support or their commitment to my health and recovery, so whatever happened, whatever lay ahead, I knew I wouldn’t face it alone. But that also meant everything I faced moving forward would also affect them. The surgeon, directing his attention to both me and my parents, explained that the operation went well. He started off with some encouraging facts: he thought it would take between five and six hours to complete the surgery, but it only took three; they thought they’d have to operate from the back and the front of my neck, but they only had to go in from the back; and they removed a piece of my hip bone and put it in my neck to replace a bone, and to help fuse my C2, C3, and C4 vertebrae. Screws and the bone piece now fused my C2-4 vertebrae.
“It is hard to put into words what I felt walking into the room and seeing Chris for the first time. He was lying on the bed with a breathing tube in his mouth not looking like my brother at all.”
~ Katie Norton, Chris’s sister
As loopy as I felt, the specifics amounted to information overload. The only part that registered was “removing a piece of my hipbone.” Why had they taken a piece of my hipbone and put it in my neck? The children’s song about bones echoed in my brain. The thighbone connected to the hipbone. The hipbone connected to the backbone. The backbone connected to the neck bone…
The surgeon continued giving me the lowdown on how I’d suffered a grade four dislocation. I had a fractured break of my C3 and C4 vertebrae indicating an American Spinal Cord Injury Association (ASIA) classification of A, which meant a complete injury, or no feeling or movement below the injury site.
After the surgeon explained all the technical aspects of the procedure, he looked me straight in the eye and explained in his serious, measured tone that the X-rays showed extensive damage to my C3 and C4 vertebrae. Due to the lack of sensation and movement below the site of the injury, he initially ruled my injury complete. Some of my responses elevated my injury to incomplete, or ASIA B, but considering my current lack of motion and feeling, he’d still give me an approximate 3 percent chance of recovery below the injury site.
I must have heard him wrong. He couldn’t have said three, as in one-two-three. But the look on my family’s faces told me there wasn’t anything wrong with my hearing. My vision went white, my ears began to ring, and if I’d had any feeling in my stomach, it would have felt like a sucker punch. A 3 percent chance? I squeezed my eyes shut as the room began to spin. When I opened them, I was still there, still flat on my back in a room I didn’t recognize, unable to move my body.
No. Just no.
The thunderbolt I felt when I moved my head, that’s the same kind of shock I felt when I heard the doctor’s prediction. As soon as I heard his prognosis, as soon as I realized he wasn’t kidding, I knew right away I couldn’t accept that as my fate. The news went in one ear, jolted my system, and went right back out the other. As long as I had breath in my body and blood pumping through my veins, I wasn’t going to let that happen. I would beat the odds.
All the questions they’d asked before surgery started up again: How do you feel overall? Can you squeeze your hand? Make a fist? Wiggle your toes? Not much registered beyond the doctor’s horrific prediction. My brain was too foggy and full of disbelief, and I didn’t want to hear anything that couldn’t help me get better. I tried to feel what I could feel, and move what I could move. I was both excited and mad when all I could manage was a little shoulder shrug.
“That’s awesome,” the doctor said. “That’s huge.” He seemed really impressed by the movement.
By shrugging my shoulder, I immediately defied the 3 percent odds. That was great and all, but that little sliver of good was overridden by the surreal nature of the experience. I was still struggling to believe I was really in the hospital, unable to move my body, and not simply stuck in a nightmare that wouldn’t end. I had to keep repeating to myself this is my life, this is really happening, this is my life, because my mind kept screaming No! No! No!
What would my future look like? What would recovery entail? I had so many questions. There weren’t enough answers, and no one seemed to know anything. The doctors and nurses weren’t keeping anything from me—they were up front and honest about everything, and they answered every question my parents or I asked to the best of their abilities—but unfortunately they just didn’t know. My first reaction was anger. How could they not know? They were doctors—professionals—and they should’ve known when or if I’d ever be able to move again.
I quickly learned that recovering from a spinal cord injury was basically a waiting game. I naïvely assumed that doctors had all the answers, but the moment they admitted they didn’t, it threw me. The outcome for my kind of spinal cord injury was very inconsistent. Doctors couldn’t predict how my body would react once the swelling went down and the healing began. No one knew, and the vague answers were difficult to stomach; the more nebulous the answers, the more I became distraught. How was this happening? Why me? Why did this happen to me? And how could I possibly spend the next four weeks in the hospital? I had school, and a life…
It soon became crystal clear the best thing I could do, the only thing I could do, was turn to God. I reverted back to my faith. Just like when I prayed and asked God for help when I was first injured, after receiving the devastating news from the doctor, rejecting it, and then nearly suffocating from worry, there was nothing left to do but pray.
“[Chris] is a man of great faith, trusting in a greater plan for us all and making the most of the new journey he has begun.”
~ Brian Solberg M.A. L.A.T., Assoc. Professor of Health and Physical Education, Program Director of Athletic Training
I prayed for God to give everyone—my family, the doctors, and the medical staff—the confidence, strength, and focus they needed to help me. I had to put my trust in everyone who worked on me, because at that time, I had no control over my future. I didn’t have a clear understanding of what the doctors and nurses were doing, so I just had to pray they did the right thing.
No matter what people told me, or how they tried to comfort me, the only thing that brought comfort was asking God for help, strength, and direction.
“It’s all going to be okay,” my parents and family told me. “We’re here for you.”
“We’re going to do the best we can,” the doctor said.
None of those statements gave me comfort. Putting my faith in God and knowing that his strength and will would see me through was the only thing that helped keep me together. The injury happened for a reason; I believed that. It was planned. I didn’t know the reason or the plan, but I knew I had to trust God.
Both before and after the surgery, I wondered about the purpose of the accident. I wanted to know why it had happened, because I couldn’t simply accept that it had. I trusted God, and I did have faith, but I wanted to know the reason immediately in order to ease the pain and the sadness of being so disappointed. I asked God to please fill me in on what he had in mind for my life going forward, and for the answer to why this was happening. I didn’t doubt my faith, but I wanted to fast forward to the point where the meaning behind my situation was clear. Somehow, I thought knowing the purpose behind the accident would make swallowing my fate easier, because at that moment, I felt like every choice I had for the rest of my life was gone.