But we’d survived.
By the time I was loaded, I was pretty sleepy, though. I wondered if being afraid could do that. Or maybe it was the morphine. Or maybe just too much vitamin O. The last thing I remember before conking out was wondering if I’d have to spend the night in the hospital. I hoped not. If I could get out early enough, maybe Chip and I could still make it to a late dinner.
Crash or no crash, we still had a lot to celebrate.
Three
I WOKE UP as all hell was breaking loose in the trauma bay—but that’s not the first thing I noticed. The first thing I noticed was my back hurt like fire. And as soon as I noticed it hurting, I realized it had been hurting all along—since back at the crash site, even.
It sounds completely crazy, I know, but it wasn’t until I noticed the pain that I remembered it.
“My back hurts,” I said, to no one in particular—and I wouldn’t have even known who to say it to because there were at least twenty people moving in and out of my peripheral vision in utter chaos, calling to each other in words so fast they just sounded like noise. I recall sounds and sights in little pinpricks of memory from that room—noises and images I can’t even put into the right order. People in aqua scrubs moving with purpose, arms and bodies in motion, machines beeping. An unearthly light rained down from the fluorescent fixture above and blurred out the edges of my vision. Someone changed my IV fluids. Someone else asked for a catheter. I heard the words “x-ray” and “CT scan.”
My neck was uncomfortable in the collar, and I asked a plump male nurse with a kind face if we could take it off.
“Not until the C-spine is cleared” came a voice across the room.
“A little longer, sweetheart,” the nurse said.
Was I allergic to medications? No. Did I have any preexisting conditions they should be aware of? No. Was I pregnant? God, I hoped not.
“Healthy as a horse,” I said.
A guy I later came to recognize as the neurosurgeon paused to tell me that they were evaluating me for pressure and sensation with pinprick tests, and they were starting me on a steroid to prevent swelling because the benefits of its use outweighed the complications.
“Okay,” I said. But it didn’t occur to me until after he’d stepped away to ask, “Swelling of what?”
I said it to the room, but I got no reply.
After the evaluation and CT scan, the neurosurgeon popped into view again and began to talk nonsense. “Your scans reveal a burst fracture to your L1. We’re sending you to surgery to clear out debris. Your evaluation shows some deficits, but there appears to be some sacral sparing. The good news is that your iliopsoas seems to be functioning, and we believe at this time it’s an incomplete injury. Of course, we’ll know a lot more once we get in there.”
“Incomplete injury of what?” I asked at last.
He blinked, like he thought I already knew. “Your spinal cord.”
I held my breath a second. “Is that why my back hurts?”
But he’d turned away to a nurse with a question. When he turned back, he said, “You’re lucky. The L1 was good and crushed, but it didn’t sever the cord. Now we just need to get in there to stabilize and clean up.”
“Now?” I asked.
He nodded. “We’re heading to surgery. And while you’re there, we’ll have a plastic surgeon evaluate your face and neck and the area above your trapezius—maybe debride what he can. But that’ll be a second surgery. After you’ve stabilized. First things first.”
“What will be a second surgery?”
“The skin grafts. For the burns.”
The skin grafts. For the burns.
The surgeon was ready to get moving. “Do you have any questions for me?”
I wanted to nod, but I couldn’t. Yes, I had questions for him. A thousand, at least. I just couldn’t figure out what they were.
Instead, I asked the only question I could come up with. “Could somebody please find my mother?”
*
NORMALLY, MEMORIES HAVE a chronology to them. Even if you’ve lost pieces of the story, you usually have a sense of order, at least—this led to this. What I recall from the ICU is just a pile of images, sounds, and feelings so jumbled, it’s like a game of pick-up sticks.
They say everybody loses time in the ICU. It’s basically Vegas in there, minus the showgirls and slot machines. No windows, for one. Bright fluorescents humming at all hours of the day and night—dimmed, sometimes, but not much. Doctors, nurses, techs, residents, physical therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, case managers, administrators, family members, and just about anyone else who feels like it walking through at all hours. Machines beeping and hissing. Rolling carts with computers. Shoes squeaking the floor. Phones ringing.
It annihilates your circadian rhythms, to say the least.
Plus, you. You’re asleep, then you’re awake. The world is blurred with drugs and pain. You’re woken at all hours—to take medicines, to be turned to avoid bedsores, or even just because someone, anyone, has a question for you. You’re a passive, drugged-out element of an unearthly ecosystem that churns day and night to keep you alive—but you’re about as far from alive as it’s possible to be.
Short of being dead.
I know from my mother, who arrived with my dad just after they wheeled me off to surgery (and found Chip in the waiting room looking “devastated—absolutely devastated”) that the surgery took about two hours and they screwed rods to either side of my lumbar vertebrae to stabilize my spine.
I was stable enough the next day to go back in for a second surgery to skin-graft the burns. I heard all about this later from my mom as well. Ever the overachieving student, she took copious notes in her tidy cursive, and used them not only to tell me the story of my life but to teach me many new vocabulary words, as well.
She explained that I was lucky, in a way, that the burns were so bad. Third-degree burns don’t hurt because all the nerves have burned away. She explained that the spinal surgeon met the plastic surgeon in the OR to arrange me on the table so they could get at the burns on my neck without more damage to my spine. She explained, too, how he shaved off the black, crispy, burned skin with a “weck blade” (I imagined it like a carrot peeler), and then harvested skin from two donor sites just under my collarbones (the “superclavicular” area) for “full-thickness skin grafts” on my neck. They sewed the new skin down with “Prolene sutures” in crisscrosses, like quilting.
I was in recovery for both surgeries in the ICU for seven days, and the entire time, I had a dressing over my neck attached to a suction tube sucking the moisture from the skin grafts as they waited to see if they would take. My mom took a picture with her iPhone before deciding it was in bad taste. She let me see it many weeks later before erasing it entirely. I looked like I was being attacked by a giant albino lamprey.
Apparently, the first person I asked for after both surgeries was Chip. He came in after the first (though I have no memory of it), but after the second, he’d gone home to sleep, and they sent my mom in instead.
Other things I know but don’t remember: I had an “indwelling Foley catheter” draining into a bag, and my bowels apparently had to be “manually evacuated” by some hospital tech with a very unfortunate job. What was left of my hair kept getting caught in my dressing, and so someone had trimmed it, unceremoniously and without asking—possibly while I was asleep. I took more drugs in one week than I’d taken in my whole life put together—massive doses of acetaminophen, Valium, Cipro, nizatidine, OxyContin, Clonis, Maalox, and a blissful little substance that makes you forget everything called Versed. Visitors were only allowed in for ten minutes at a time. Mostly, I was alone, surrounded by machines—and herds of strangers.