CHAPTER 5

Paralyzed

The emergency medical workers arrived and checked my vitals, then prepared to hustle me into the ambulance.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You likely have a broken neck,” one said.

I thought, Holy crap, I just broke my neck and lived. Then I said, “Whoa, I’m a badass.”

Despite my joking, I was concerned my condition was most likely permanent. I looked at one of the EMS workers and asked, “How many people in your experience have walked away from something like this?”

She didn’t answer right away. They both just kept working. I said, “Don’t beat around the bush. Tell me.”

The EMS worker said, “In my thirty years on the job, only one person has walked away.”

I looked at her and said, “Well, I’ll be the second.” Maybe it was false hope I was grasping on to, but hey, it got me through those next few hours.

They placed me in the back of the ambulance; the trip from the pool to the vehicle was a blur. Lauren ran alongside as they moved me and jumped into the front seat of the ambulance to make the trip to the hospital. She told me later that the driver was a guy she went to church with as a child and hadn’t seen since then. In all the hustle, they didn’t notice until they were driving away toward the hospital.

Before I knew it I was on my back on a metal table in the hospital in Virginia Beach with my neck being stabilized. The room was small and bright. Saying it was like a dream sounds cliché, but it felt unreal, like it couldn’t possibly be happening to me. I felt like I was witnessing someone else’s horror, not experiencing my own. It took all of my energy to remain calm.

I asked anyone who came in, “What’s happening?” and “What are you not telling me?” I couldn’t really get any answers. Every nurse and doctor who came in said, “Let’s wait for your neurologist.” Until he arrived, no one was telling me anything.

The girls were in the waiting room, and my parents had been called. They got to the hospital before I did and were with me the entire time. My grandparents and Chris’s mom, Susan, all arrived at some point, but Chris wasn’t there. He was out of town on his camping trip and couldn’t be reached right away. He was camping with his dad at Eno River State Park in Durham, about three hours away. He told me later that the park rangers found them and said only that there was a big family emergency. They both thought Chris’s ninety-year-old grandmother, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s, had passed away. They finally found a point with cell reception, and his dad called home. Chris heard him say, “I understand.” Then he hung up the phone.

He said to Chris, “Are you settled and okay?”

Chris said, “Yes.”

His dad said, “Well, you’re not about to be.”

His dad drove him back to our house in Knightdale, and he raced in to grab clothes and dump the camping gear. His father told him only that there had been an accident and that I had been hurt. They both knew it was bad, but not exactly how bad. He said later that he took a very quick shower because they had been roughing it, and he cried so hard in the shower that he could hardly see.

My parents never left my side in the examining room, trying to be comforting, stroking my hair as we waited. I think it was tough on the people working there, because I was young and otherwise vibrant. Someone told me later that my makeup was basically still on, that it looked almost perfect, and that my hair had dried in pretty blond waves. I think that image of a young girl made it even harder on them. I learned later that one of the EMS volunteers who had taken me to the hospital made mine her last call because it was just too upsetting for her to process, and she didn’t want to encounter anything so tragic again.

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.