CHAPTER 6

Barely Breathing

Three days after the accident my heart stopped, and for a brief moment I was dead.

It happened, of course, in the only fifteen-minute span during which my mother left my side. From the second she arrived at the hospital, my mother, Carol, had remained awake and with me—the entire three days. She was so worried about me that she didn’t want me to spend one minute alone. My blood pressure had been falling; throughout those first few days it would drop and someone would have to rush out to get the nurses.

Of course, the one time she did leave to take a small break, all hell broke loose. I was going in for what the doctors said would be a routine surgery, so she decided to take a few minutes to run home. She waited until they were wheeling me out of my room, and then she zipped out.

I don’t remember anything because I’d been drugged, but basically, my heart stopped. I had to be given CPR. It was apparently extremely scary and caused major panic among the healthcare team, and it took some quick thinking to revive me. My mother was called immediately after it happened, so soon after she’d left that she hadn’t even made it home. She turned right around and came back to the hospital.

My mom has always been my best friend. When I was little we had girls’ nights out that my dad didn’t know about. We didn’t actually go out. Most nights, she’d tuck me into bed, read me a book, and rub my back while she counted to one hundred. But on some nights she would whisper “Girls’ Night Out,” then go to bed herself, and when my dad fell asleep, she’d sneak back into my room and grab me, and we’d put pillows and blankets down in the living room and watch Disney movies and eat popcorn late into the night. It was a really special time for me, for us both, I think. We also did so much together as I grew up. We camped and shopped and rafted and tubed. She was always a kid herself to an extent. We were a team growing up, and I knew that the aftermath of my accident was as tough on her as it was on me, maybe even more so. I was unaware then of what an enormous sacrifice she’d eventually be making for me.

I knew when I woke up in my room that my ribs seemed to really hurt and that they were bruised. I don’t know how exactly, but I could feel inside of myself, like somehow my insides and my stomach could still register pressure. A day or two later, I began to wonder why my chest was still hurting. It was an odd feeling, and I noticed then that there was sort of a line between where sensation ended and where it gradually picked up again. The discomfort intensified and the pressure had increased. It began to feel like I’d been punched in the chest.

I still had a tube in my throat when a doctor came in one afternoon while I was alone, which was only because my parents and other visitors had to leave the room during a shift change for the nurses. Within that gap this doctor flat out told me my heart had stopped. I had no memory of going into cardiac arrest. There was no explanation, no comforting; he was very short and to the point about it, and then he left. I couldn’t communicate or ask questions because of the tube. I was terrified. I didn’t know what that meant exactly for my health or my future or anything. It was a truly awful moment. My mom and dad came in and asked me what was wrong, as my eyes were as wide as they could get. If the blow had been delivered by my family or a little more softly, perhaps I could have processed it better or easier and then moved on. Instead, that weird moment stuck with me for a while. But from then on my parents refused to leave me alone in the room even for a minute. My mom scolded the doctor later for telling me something like that without my being able to communicate.

They were supposed to put an umbrella stint into my leg to prevent blood clots. When I was in the elevator heading down for that procedure, my heart stopped.

This, of course, made me more upset. I was frustrated, mostly, that no one had told me. I didn’t want to be protected like that. I wanted all of the information I could get my hands on. Information was helping me cope and process the situation. I had been strong up until then, so I didn’t want anyone to think I was too fragile to know or hear about what was happening to me and what exactly I was dealing with. Information, as hard as it was to hear, was reassuring. Being informed was comforting.

After that some days went well and some days were really terrifying. Everyone would describe it as a roller coaster. There were random things happening all the time to my body while I was in the hospital. My lung collapsed while I was in the ICU, for example. I didn’t have the ability to cough and I wasn’t moving around, so mucous and congestion entered into my system and had the potential to cause pneumonia. The stickiness of the mucous essentially made the two sides of my lung walls stick together, and when that occurs no air can go in. I couldn’t breathe. I remember one day that suddenly I couldn’t get enough air, and I felt panicked.

The resolution to that problem, which happened often, was pretty horrific, too. The nurses would suck the mucous out with a tube that had suction. On days when it became really bad, they’d put the tube up my nose and down my nasal passage, into my throat, while I was completely awake, and it would suck all the mucous out from my lungs while I was sitting up. It was the most horrible feeling ever, but at the end of it I knew I would be able to breathe. They had a screen that showed what was going on in my lungs, and they could see exactly how much congestion had built up. If there was more and they needed to go in, I’d say, “Just do it again, just go for it and get it over with.” The mucous made me feel like I was going to puke and gag, so the procedure became the easy part. The doctors told me no one had ever asked for them to go back in. I realized then I was pretty brave.

One of the most traumatizing experiences of my entire injury was in the ICU. When the tube that cleared my lungs wasn’t doing it well enough, the doctors had to perform an even more intricate procedure. Once, before the procedure began, I was lying on my side and they were missing a part to this machine that they were assembling. I was sitting there with one lung, barely able to breathe, and I didn’t want to freak out, because it would only make me breathe harder. But it was so hard to be calm, watching these people put together the machine. Then, as soon as they figured it out, there was no warning, just, “Let’s do this.” It happened so fast. I went from nothing—from sitting and watching them for what felt like forever—to being drugged (but not drugged correctly) to undergoing a traumatic procedure. I was trying not to overanalyze anything because I was trying not to scare myself. I was scared, but I was literally talking to myself in my head, saying, Chill out. This is a procedure that I want to have, and everything will feel so much better when it is over.

Ideally, if the procedure goes according to plan, the doctors put you half asleep, not in full anesthesia, but they give you just enough drugs to knock you out. Then they take a big scope, which is much bigger than you’d think, and put it down your throat to suck the mucous out. This time when they started the procedure, they didn’t give me enough drugs, maybe because of the rush to get started after the delay in assembling the machine. But I was too awake. I began to freak out, so they gave me more drugs, and it knocked me into this weird semisleep; I was kind of awake and not awake at the same time. All the drugs were making me hallucinate, so I remember that—this was scary and ­traumatizing—I had a dream in which there was a barbaric war and people were putting a sword down my throat. I vividly remember the pain. This was the worst thing I ever felt, because it was not only physically but also mentally scary. It was the weirdest thing, being drugged up but awake enough to know that what was happening to me was bad. When I fully woke up, I don’t think anyone was aware of what I had just endured.

After the surgery they threw me on a hard metal plate in order to take an X-ray of my chest to see what they had accomplished, and because my body had experienced a lot of physical trauma just days before, lying on a hard surface was extremely painful. So I awoke from this horrible dream only to be thrown onto a metal table, and I felt like no one was listening to me, but I could barely speak. It was a bad experience. I was trying to tell them how much pain I was in, but it was just a lot of chaos and noise; there were too many people, and I couldn’t explain what had happened. The nostril suction was almost a daily occurrence initially. The sword procedure happened twice, and only the second time was it a horror show. But I never cried.