The Accident
My first semester of college. Little did I know how much my script was about to change.
It had been the perfect opening scene to the rest of my life — ocean views, friendships with Philippino princesses and the daughters of California seed barons. I had won elections and kissed cute water polo players, raised money for charity and been selected as the one freshman for campus’s most prestigious job. Winter break was the perfect opportunity to share tales of my new life to the people back home that had always seemed to see me as the farm girl who commuted from out of town.
Back home in the wintery winds of Wyoming I was reveling in the warm admiration for the stories I shared about this new life I was living on a cliff by the sea.
But on my last day back in Wyoming, after lunch and on the way to my very own 19th birthday party, my script took a dramatic turn.
In a freak accident in the middle of the afternoon, my car crashed. The police report said that I went to take an exit and instead my car rolled, 5 1/2 times, and my body was ejected out of the windshield, flying over the length of a football field to land on entrance on the other side of the highway. I landed more or less on my head.
Semi-conscious, I was picked up off the freeway and rushed to Cheyenne Medical Center. In the ICU they discovered that my femur had broken coming out of the car, I had fractured my 7th Cervical vertebrae (which usually results in paralysis), and my faced had been smashed, with every single bone broken, including a crack in my jaw and the complete loss of one of my front teeth.
That wasn’t the worst of it. Around 11pm that night, the doctor told my mom that they found bleeding in my brain, that it required surgery if I were to live, and that I, her oldest child, probably wouldn’t survive the operation. If I did make it, I would never be the same daughter that she knew. They asked her — did she want them to proceed?
For the next 21 days I was sedated, in a drug induced coma, being fed by a tube in my stomach and breathing through the tracheotomy tube they had inserted into my neck.
My mom immediately and without question told the doctor to get to work. And so a neurosurgeon shaved just the left half of my head, removed the front left quarter section of my skull, and operated on my brain to relieve the bleeding caused by a subdural hematoma.
For the next 21 days I was sedated, in a drug induced coma, being fed by a tube in my stomach and breathing through the tracheotomy tube they had inserted into my neck. I was told later on that the piece of my skull they removed was left in a freezer in the hospital basement until the swelling had gone down (gross!) and another surgery placed a titanium rod inside my leg along my snapped femur.
Through it all, I stayed alive.
During the sedation, it’s not like I was out cold — the nurses would bring me to consciousness every few hours and ask me to respond to a few tests — to wiggle my fingers or blink if I could hear them. The good news? I was responsive from the very first day.
Little did I know how much I had changed. That the characters in that old story weren’t going to be able to accept the new version of me in my old role. That I’d exhaust myself spending the next 10 years doing everything I could to get back on a script that was no longer mine.
But that’s one of the things about scripts. They drive you. They propel you forward, often unconsciously. They give you a role to play and a way to be in the world that is defined by how you look and show up. And when you try to live within a script that is no longer yours the world will do its best to give you clues — I was just too stubborn to listen.
**Follow me on medium to hear what happened next — each week I’ll share a post that delves more into the car accident that changed my life, my recovery, and the lessons I’ve learned.
