The Promise: A Tragic Accident, a Paralyzed Bride, and the Power of Love, Loyalty, and Friendship (5 page)

CHAPTER 7

One Day at a Time

Someone made a board for me on a giant orange piece of
poster paper, writing the entire alphabet on it so I could spell out what I wanted to say, letter by letter. Visitors would touch a letter with their finger and I would nod when they got it correct. It took a little time getting used to communicating like this, which was rough, but once we had a system in place for pointing to letters, I could at least be understood. The first name I spelled out was that of the friend I knew would be having the hardest time with the accident. I wanted to know if she was okay. I would point out one name at a time, but almost daily, I returned to asking about her. No one had really asked me about who pushed me, even though the families all knew. No one outside of the core group was told. It was one topic that was left alone, maybe out of respect for us both. Everyone just knew not to talk about it.

I was able to communicate through this board that I wasn’t angry. And I wasn’t. Not at my friend or any of the girls there that night, not at myself, and not at what had happened. I didn’t cry and I wasn’t angry. We had a lot of laughs along the way as I tried to communicate all of this, but I was able to at least acknowledge how I was feeling, try to console everyone who was upset, and thank them for being there for me. I told them I was there for them, too. I wanted them to be okay. Even later when I could talk, I informed them over and over again, “I am totally fine.” I think they suspected I was more hurt than I was portraying, which is half true, half not true, but they were just trying to protect me. I was processing information pretty darn well in spite of everything.

After the whirlwind at the very beginning, where there was an urgency to my treatment, after everyone caught their breath and the initial shock began to subside, deeper conversations with the girls really began. Step one was obviously getting myself stabilized and knowing the physical challenges that were ahead of me. That was the most important element of recovery. Next, of course, was the mental aspect of it. Everyone by the pool had had some time to really process, at least to a certain extent, exactly what had happened.

We had a couple of group discussions. The girls wanted to be certain there was no anger. Once I could speak, I was clearer about this: I wasn’t holding back. I wasn’t angry at all. I think because I hadn’t really shown a lot of emotion, they thought I was repressing my feelings. Even at this point, when I was getting stronger, they were still crying. I’d heard they cried together in the ICU. They were extremely upset and traumatized. I had to help them, and this was the first time I realized it was up to me to be the spine for the group. Even though they were still quite emotional, they were there for me, really there. They visited a lot, they talked, they helped, and they were committed. It was a nice feeling to experience that kind of love from friends.

One of the girls told me she’d initially been worried that Chris might leave me, but after seeing us together, and witnessing how he had responded and cared for me, she wasn’t worried anymore. She saw our love firsthand and realized we were both strong individually and our love was strong, too.

I don’t think anyone doubted my strength beforehand, but it was never really put to the test until this accident, so it was never questioned. I never had anyone ask me to think about what would happen if my life took this kind of turn. Who thinks of those things? In this case, there was nothing that had happened to even compare it to. It was a bizarre situation. I couldn’t say how anyone else would handle it. Every day was one day at a time.

Whenever I felt my mind going into a negative place, I literally told myself to stop. I didn’t want negative thoughts to send me spiraling downward into a depression or rage. I never allowed it to get to that point, and it wasn’t just for all of my friends and family; it was for me, too. It was simply a fight-or-flight response for me, a coping mechanism, as if my brain told me not to cry because crying would be bad. Crying wouldn’t do me any good. I didn’t want to feel like crying or being close to tears, and so I would tell a joke or request that my friends come in and then talk to them constantly. I was never alone with my thoughts.

Looking back, sure, that might have been avoidance. Maybe. But at the time it still got me through it.

The tears eventually fell, but not exactly because of my situation as a whole. I cried about incidents that occurred but not where life had taken me. One time, I thought my fingers moved. I was always trying to move them, and I could have sworn that one finally did, and I remember telling my dad that it was the one thing that I wanted back. I had been in a hospital bed in the ICU for six days, and my dad was in the room. I moved my wrist, and it appeared as if my finger had moved. I said, “Dad, my finger moved!” I cried out of happiness then. If my wrist moved even slightly, it made it look like my finger moved. I saw what looked like a twitch for the very first time, and I gasped quietly with happiness because I thought movement and function were returning in my fingers.

Having movement in my fingers would have meant a lot, because small twitches like that are significant. From what I’d heard it would have been a good indication that I’d recover finger movement someday. I’d heard that if you started feeling your digits five or six days after breaking your neck, that was good. In the big picture it would have meant touch, and an ability to do my own hair, or to hold Chris’s hand back when he held mine, or a million other small things we take for granted each day.

It’s funny how even then everyone was saying, “She can’t walk.” Walk, walk, walk, walk. I wasn’t even thinking about my legs. In the beginning I didn’t even know what was moving and what was not. But by the sixth or the seventh day, I was trying to pick up things and use my hands, and I realized,
All I want is my hands back.
I began to understand how much regaining finger function would mean to my life and how drastic an impact it had on my day-to-day functioning. It was one of those things I hadn’t given any thought to before: my fingers and the importance they play in my life. Suddenly, they’d become almost everything, monumental.

A woman from physical therapy came in for an evaluation, and she held my hand to see if I had any twitches or flickers of the muscle. She felt something, too, and it reinforced the idea that I had in fact made my finger move. I got really excited, but I think I knew deep down that my fingers weren’t exactly working.

Sadly, she was wrong and I was right. I waited for my fingers to work again, desperately searching for a sign they would, but eventually I realized they weren’t doing anything at all. There were no more twitches. There really hadn’t ever been any. I learned about my wrist and how it was making my fingers appear to move. I was slowly relearning my body and realizing that there were muscles I hadn’t even thought about that weren’t receiving the signal from my brain to move. It wasn’t one heartbreaking moment or day. I just eventually realized over time that my fingers weren’t going to move.

It’s a toss-up between feeling sex and moving my fingers, but I think fingers would be all I would ask to have back if I could, more than anything else.

CHAPTER 8

Support from Friends

As soon as I regained my voice a few days into my hospital
stay, I was cracking jokes. There was one extremely happy and hilarious moment when Samantha brought my first McDonald’s meal during my stay—it was such a treat. It’s funny that having that burger and fries is one of my greatest memories, but it thrilled me to no end and I was grateful she had smuggled it in. It’s so memorable because we laughed pretty hard about how excited I was about fast food.

There were a lot of little laughs, mostly because I didn’t want to live in a somber, stressful environment. I know my upbeat attitude and ability to laugh off a lot of things was a concern for some people, because they thought I was burying my pain. But when I said I wasn’t hiding anything, I wasn’t. It wasn’t as if I sat there thinking,
I’m not going to share my feelings with anyone.
I truly wasn’t able to cry and I was finding humor in my day-to-day, even in the hospital. Crying is what people expect, I guess—the reaction that reveals to others what’s in your head. Maybe I didn’t process it all, but I didn’t have the ability to cry or scream out; that hadn’t come to me yet in those early hospital days. I just didn’t have the urge to do that. I was obviously scared and sad, but when you’re in that kind of situation, you’re simply not thinking about five or six months down the road; you’re in the hospital and you’re just sick. I was in that moment, trying to get through that day. I wasn’t thinking about not being able to walk; I was just trying to cope with the challenges of that particular day.

I was told that there were never fewer than fifteen people in the waiting room at any given time. The girls fastened together little pieces of purple and gold ribbon and handed them out to my visitors to pin onto themselves and wear as they arrived. My grandparents came with doughnuts every morning, and on some days other people brought food, too. I couldn’t join in, but the Monday after my accident, everyone tailgated out in back of the hospital, consuming all the food they’d had ready for my bridal shower. They got in trouble from security for lighting up a barbecue grill in the parking lot. It was nice, having all these friends. Everyone popped into my room that day and read notes to me, and the support made me feel really good.

Although it was lovely to have so many people around me and to notice improvement daily, I had grown increasingly aware that there would be no wedding anytime soon. I knew, of course, there would be one eventually, but not for a long time.

People slowly started spreading the word that our big day was postponed until further notice. Each relative took the time to contact the people they knew who were invited to let them know what was happening and advise them to cancel their travel plans. On CaringBridge.com, my mom and Samantha posted updates on my recovery and said that the wedding was on hold. My paternal grandmother, Bubbie, and grandfather, Zadie, were paying for the wedding originally, so she ended up cancelling a lot of the food orders and other arrangements. While many brides might have sobbed at the thought of their wedding being postponed, I was just so focused on getting through my injuries and figuring out where my life was going to end up that the wedding wasn’t even a blip. I was excited about it, but I knew it would happen anyway someday. I focused more on healing and rehabbing.

Understandably, all of the energy and concern was directed toward me. Chris, my parents and relatives, everyone put their vibes toward my healing, sometimes at the expense of their own. No one put his or her own health aside more than my mother. Her friend Margie had fortunately come to town to provide my mom with some needed support. One night at midnight the two of them dashed out to get some items they needed at Kmart (and probably Margie wanted to give her a break from the hospital), and they jumped on the carousel there as a release. She said they barely fit, but it was nice to laugh and enjoy a bit of a distraction during an intense time.

Despite tiny reprieves like that, the stress of constantly being on-call for me took its toll. One day, toward the end of my stay in the ICU, my mom left to take a quick shower in Margie’s hotel near the hospital. Out of nowhere, half of my mom’s left eye went dark. She said later she thought it was because her own blood pressure had increased (she’d been monitoring mine). But it wasn’t; it was because of exhaustion, and she wound up being admitted to the hospital for three days herself. She was in a wheelchair, but at the time I had no idea. She’d get wheeled to my room from her room, which I didn’t even know existed, and she’d stand up outside and then come into my room as if nothing had happened. She would leave at a certain time to return to her room, and although I never asked why I knew she didn’t want me to see her sick like that. She didn’t want anyone to worry about her, not me and not friends who had been coming and going during my stay in the ICU.

At around the ten-day mark, my dad asked the doctors often how long I’d be in the hospital. We never were given a solid idea of just how long it would be, and my parents and Chris began discussing rehab and trying to figure out where I’d go next. They were trying to develop a plan for that. The woman at the hospital who handled the rehab process came rushing in one day when only my mother was there with me and said a spot had opened up at a facility in Greenville. She said if we didn’t take that spot, it would be given to someone else. We literally had thirty minutes to figure this all out, and my mother was the only one available to decide. It was incredibly stressful for her, and we were frustrated that we had gotten so few answers on all the days we had asked, then all of a sudden it was, “Take this, or who knows.” We took the spot in Greenville, unsure if we were making the right decision. The next day, I was whisked off.

CHAPTER 9

Rockin’ Rehab

My girls really made my room in rehab rock. It became
a cool place to hang out. They hung up a small whiteboard to replace the alphabet board from the hospital, and they decorated the room to make it fun as well. The white message board became the focal point of my friends’ and my recovery. I didn’t need it to communicate because I could talk by this point, but the board symbolized a lot. People wrote some fun and crazy messages on it. One of the girls drew a palm tree and a beach scene for me, so I could be at my favorite place. “Go Pirates” was also a regular message. People wrote words of love and inspiration and even jokes on this whiteboard. It was a place for everyone to share his or her feelings. Of course, “Let It Be” was a daily mantra. It was written up there and never erased.

The original alphabet board survived the hospital and became part of the rehab decor. One of the girls wrote “You a Badass” at the bottom of the letter board they’d created in the hospital and hung it up as well. She remembered me saying I was badass when the ambulance workers arrived. They even hung an ECU Pirates flag over my bed, and the football and basketball coaches sent me autographed balls. I had an ECU throw, too. Lauren’s sister-in-law was a Redskins cheerleader, so she arranged for an autographed squad photo to be sent my way. The girls made it so much fun and so lively in a place that usually isn’t colorful in any way. This was such a troubling circumstance to be in, but we still all managed to laugh and have a good time with the cards that had been dealt.

The matter of who had pushed me hadn’t really surfaced up to this point. We all felt concern for that friend, and we kept the dialogue very open about the status of my health and how everyone was feeling. But at this point in my recovery, no really serious issues had emerged from that girl. She seemed, on the surface, to be dealing with any guilt constructively, showing up like everyone else. I thought she had gotten through it okay. Maybe in my heart I worried just a little that it would all boil up at some point, but I wasn’t sure.

Despite the gravity of my situation, we tried to have fun and find peace in rehab. It was actually a really fun time, as odd as that might sound. Some of the laughs we had there were the best laughs we’d ever had.

Sometimes, we’d have so much fun that we’d get into trouble. A couple of us figured out where they kept the power wheelchairs. I would get into one, and one or two of my friends would get into one, and we’d go to this really big hallway at the main hospital section of where I was in rehab. It was really straight, and it went on forever. Each chair had two buttons for speed. One had a picture of a rabbit, obviously for fast, and one had a picture of a turtle, for slower movement. I thought that was hilarious. So we’d get in the chairs, and we’d race up and down the hallway. I’d win the most, as I recall. Once we were really moving and this grumpy front desk woman came out and started yelling at us to stop. We stopped briefly, but once she left, we went right back at it. What were they going to do, kick me out?

We participated in calmer activities that made me equally happy. I had grown up singing and was afraid I’d never be able to sing again without a strong diaphragm and core muscles. I hadn’t lost my voice, but I couldn’t yell or scream or even speak very loudly. It was twenty times harder to find the strength to sing, but while I was in the rehab I did sing again; I worked hard to get to that point. One day, Carly and I went into the all-purpose room where they had a piano, and we began to sing as we often did before my injury. I wasn’t thinking about my injury but about how happy singing made me feel. It became something we did together during rehab. People would stop in the halls and listen to us. Our bond was strong, as it was with all of my friends from that night. It always had been, but it was more so following the accident.

Samantha, Lauren, Britney, and Carly had different schedules and lived in different cities, so they coordinated their visits so that at least one of them came to rehab most days. Carly was around a lot, maybe the most after the accident. All four of them were there, but she had a flexible work schedule that allowed her to visit more often. She even slept there sometimes. Now, when something like this happens, you get pretty used to things you might otherwise be bothered by. Carly did two really big things for me that showed me how much she loved me.

Since I couldn’t use my fingers and my nose was full of, well, junk, I was often uncomfortable. Carly went the extra mile and early on would actually pick my nose. I mean, Chris had to do that, too, and I love him for it, but a girlfriend? It was unbelievable what a good sport she was about that.

Also, I got used to people seeing me naked. Carly was with me in the hospital one day when a nurse was inserting a catheter into me. The nurse was explaining to my mom how it would have to be done and when. I was concerned because in addition to everything else, my mom and Chris were going to have to deal with this after I left rehab. There were just so many things they were going to have to do for me because of my lack of dexterity. Carly jumped right in.

“Would it be helpful if I learned how to do that?” she asked my mom.

“Sure,” she said. “It would be a big help whenever you come to visit.”

I laughed. “Carly, would you really do that? You’re prepared to get all up in my business down there to help?”

“Sure. We’re close, aren’t we?” she asked.

The nurse began explaining right then and there. Carly learned to insert a catheter into my urethra, so I could go to the bathroom. I think the nurse was even moved. That’s friendship. That’s love. I think we women, as a group, underestimate our power. Our collective power. I think we all know the power of love between a couple. That’s completely different and significant. But the power of friendship and love between female friends? It’s amazing, and it was something as simple as a catheter insertion that had a profound impact on me and my realization of this power we can all harness by sticking together.