The Promise: A Tragic Accident, a Paralyzed Bride, and the Power of Love, Loyalty, and Friendship (8 page)

CHAPTER 14

Getting Through

About two months after the accident, I had my first
intense conversation with that friend we were all so worried about. Everyone had been quietly thinking about her, hoping the worst had passed and she’d healed from what had happened. My brother had come out from Virginia Beach to stay with our family, and I learned that in the wake of the accident he had made a point to take her aside and tell her that I asked about her often and that I loved her. He wanted to make sure she was okay. We all did. I’d hoped it had been enough, laughing with her and having her see me in rehab really doing well.

There was a little garden area at the rehab center. It was always so freezing cold inside that I’d spend as much time as I could sitting out in this garden. It was hot out, around 100 degrees. I used to make people sit out there and stay with me, even though for them, it would have been more comfortable inside. My body had lost the ability to regulate its temperature, so I always felt cold. Some days, I simply could not stand being inside.

One afternoon, this friend was visiting. I had never brought up the incident because I didn’t want to upset her. I knew she’d come talk to me when she was ready. And that day finally came.

Her face wasn’t so much sad as it was very serious. We had made our way to the garden and she said, “I’m really sorry this happened.” I think she just wanted to hear that I had forgiven her.

For me, it wasn’t even about forgiveness. I’d have had to have thought that she did something really wrong to forgive her. She hadn’t. It could have happened to anyone, and I didn’t blame her.

She said, “I feel really bad about this. I’m so sorry.”

I said, “Don’t be and don’t feel bad. I’m okay. I’m honestly at peace with it. You should be, too.”

I had made peace with it in a very short amount of time. During this conversation I knew she had not yet found peace in the same way I had, but I thought she would soon. I was naive as to just how much she was hurting and how bad it was at that moment. I assumed that since I was okay, she’d be okay—that she just needed to hear me say I was all right.

She nodded. She was holding it together. “Are we okay?” she asked.

“Of course. I love you. You’re one of my best friends. I don’t blame you for this.”

I thought, or maybe I hoped, that that would be enough. She didn’t cry or break down, but deep down I guess she was putting on a good front. She was being strong for me, but she must have been hurting inside.

“When you’re upset, talk to me. Call me. I will talk about this with you anytime,” I said. I told her she didn’t need to pay anyone to help her sort through her feelings, that I was there whenever she needed to speak, day or night. Maybe that was a mistake, but not really knowing how deeply affected she was, I suppose I believed she could shake it off. The problem was that we were accepting two different realities. We were both badly hurt that day, but in two completely different ways. I could work hard to make the best of my situation. She really couldn’t. There was no upside to living with that hurt. There was no finding a way to put a bad situation to good use. It was just a tragic event that could have happened to any of us that night. I’ve had my share of horseplay in the water, that’s for sure. Everyone has.

She thanked me that day, and I thought all was sorted out and we’d both be okay, leaning on each other for strength. Sadly, the worst was yet to come for her. She’d have to face this all later when the media circus began, which none of us saw coming.

CHAPTER 15

My Competitive Spirit

I was pretty active as a kid. When I was growing up, my
dad never just let me win a game. He allowed me to lose, and I wanted it that way. I was really good at board games, and I could usually win, even against my dad. Once though, he beat me at Pretty, Pretty Princess and he had to wear the crown and beads.

I loved sports and often played with my dad. He took me to basketball games as soon as I could walk. I liked to keep score, hug the mascots, and talk up the cheerleaders. We used to collect trading cards, too. Once, we were at a summer league game where prospective pros were scouted. My dad pointed out a player, Joe Smith, and told me he was going to be the number one draft pick. I was four years old at the time.

I said, “I want his autograph.”

Instead of going to get it for me, my dad handed me a pen and a paper and said, “Go ask.”

Of course I got it, but I was a little bummed not to have been treated like one of the guys by this player. He called me cute.

I think I always wanted to be one of the guys because I so loved hanging around my dad. During recess in fourth grade, I walked up to the boys and asked if I could shoot some hoops. One said, “Girls can’t play basketball.” I made them give me the ball, took one shot, and swished it. After that I was always invited to play with them.

I worked with kids when I graduated from college, and we didn’t even keep score until they were eight years old, because we didn’t want the kids to get upset about losing. The thing is, if kids haven’t ever lost until they are eight, how are they going to handle losing later in life? They will inevitably lose something. I knew when I had won. I knew when I had earned it. And I think that just made me more competitive. Not only that, I enjoyed working toward something. I really did. I enjoyed an accomplishment, however big or small.

Basketball was where my dad and I really bonded. On the court the winner won. He didn’t allow me to get a free shot in, nothing. He made me work for everything, and I think I drew on that for strength after my accident. That was real life. You won some, you lost some. How you handled the ups and downs revealed your true character. Even when I was really little, my dad would never throw a game. People never believe me when I tell them that.

My dad and I would play the game Horse all the time, from when I was four until I was in high school. It was one of our things. We had a basketball hoop in the backyard and, as in everything else, he’d never let me win. He wouldn’t go all pro player on me—he wasn’t mean about it—but he played for real. I might get a few letters on him, but if I started catching up, then he’d up his effort and I’d lose. He’d just never
let me
win Horse. Never. Once when I was a teenager, I actually beat him at Horse—it was the one and only time. But it felt like the biggest accomplishment ever because it took me ten years to do it. The funny thing wasn’t just my reaction, but his. He didn’t like to be beaten, but he was so proud of me. He said, “You finally did it!” Of course, I couldn’t help but shove it in his face and celebrate my sweet victory by talking some smack, but boy was I proud.

We were a sporty family, and we used to do a lot of activities together. We also played catch and football; I was kind of a tomboy when it came to that stuff. My dad worked sixty hours a week usually. But Sunday was our day. When spring hit we were outside on Sunday afternoons, playing sports.

Right after the accident, I was fighting as hard as I had fought in sports or games. I drew on that. I didn’t want to break; I didn’t want to lose the new battle. I guess I saw it as being weak, and I didn’t like to be weak. Of course, no one would have blamed me for being crazy and breaking down and crying. But I saw it as a game I was trying to win, like I was trying to be the best at recovery. To have the best attitude.

This injury was almost like the Horse victory that was ten years in the making. I knew there were going to be little moments where I was going to have to suck it up and fight and beat those challenges. And I was determined to win.

Every time I lost at Horse, I didn’t feel defeated. It made me feel more determined. I understood that it would be a miracle if I ever beat my dad at a game. I never expected to beat him, to be honest, but I always tried my hardest regardless. Being competitive at sports made me competitive at life, and this injury, well, I wanted to win. As I prepared to leave rehab, I drew on that inner fight and spirit my dad had spent a lifetime instilling in me.

Toward the end of rehab, my mom and I were in full prankster mode. I had a roommate in rehab, a lady who had worked at ECU. She had gone on a bike ride, fallen off the bike, and actually been stung by a bunch of bees. She broke her neck in the fall but ended up walking by the time she was out of treatment; she was an incomplete injury. It was so weird to see someone as paralyzed as I was, and then right before my eyes, see her walking. I think that happens a lot in rehab. I was definitely the most screwed-up one there at the time.

Anyway, her husband walked into the room one day, and my mom was in bum clothes, with no bra, so when she heard him coming, she opened the closet door to hide. It was like a dorm closet, a big cubbyhole with a door, so she opened the closet door very fast and fell into the closet and was basically sitting down. We were laughing so hard over the fact that she could fit into the closet, so I said, “Mom, stay in the closet.” We called the nurse, Tammy. She came in and I said, “Tammy, I’ve got this beautiful dress, and I want to wear it out.” (I was able to go on day trips once I was cleared, and my family could transfer me into a car. So I had been out in public by this time.) I told Tammy, “Look in my closet and get the dress out.” She opened the door to find my mom just sitting there. Tammy screamed and threw a pillow at her, and we laughed hysterically.

Since Mom could sit in the closet, I wondered if I could, too. My mother checked. It was big enough to get a chair into, just a plastic chair. So this time we got Tammy on our side to scare the doctor. Tammy happily got in on our scheme and a couple of therapists did, too. The night before our prank, I practiced how I would fit, and it totally worked. And then the next day we scared some more people. We spent the day, my last day at the rehab hospital, using this trick. I remained in the closet while Tammy or a therapist brought someone by. Tammy was so funny because she’d have to create elaborate lies to get people to open the closet. She told my caseworker I was hoarding catheters. She told the supply guy that I’d stolen a box of medical gloves. She even told the doctors I was stashing medication in that closet.

That was the day I left and got to go home. Everyone had made such a significant impression on me and my life during my time there. They were such wonderful people. I guess I’m glad the closet gag gave me the chance to leave an impression on them . . . and maybe let them know I’d be okay once I left their care because I had a good sense of humor and was surrounded by a lot of love.

CHAPTER 16

On My Own

I left rehab on August 13, 2010. I had so many mixed feelings
about leaving. I knew I was ready to go, and I remember around the time I was being released thinking that if I had to stay there one more minute, I would snap. There were so many people there with lower-level injuries who had more function than I did, people recovering quickly, and they complained often; sometimes the negative energy took the wind out of me. I had reached the point where I simply couldn’t take it anymore. I felt for everyone and didn’t mean to judge. Not everyone had a great network of friends or a committed family, and I understood that. But sometimes the negative energy consumed the space in there. An exciting world still existed out there, and I was more eager to tackle the new challenges than to dwell on what I couldn’t do. I wanted to learn and grow and take it on. Also, I missed my dog PeeDee very much. I missed my house and my old life, which I knew was going to be at home waiting for me.

Of course, that’s what terrified me, too. Just because I was okay with challenges didn’t mean they weren’t scary. My old life was just that: my old life. Nothing was the same except my love for Chris and my family and friends. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get up to the second floor to my bedroom. The house was my home, but it was no longer what it had once been to me. I had been there only as an able-bodied person. There would be a lot of change ahead of me. All of my care would be up to us, and lots of little things could go wrong.

One of the most significant changes in my life was that my mother would have to live with us. Chris had to go to work, and my mother had to get me out of bed. I was thrilled, but I realized it would be a tremendous hardship for her, leaving her job and her husband. We all thought about me moving in with them, but that would have kept me from both Chris and rehab. We discussed briefly both of my parents moving to Knightdale, but my dad had an army-navy surplus store in Norfolk and couldn’t leave it. We knew eventually he’d sell it and retire, but until then my mother decided to spend five days a week with me and weekends with my dad.

It was hard for her, but she moved in without complaining. We knew we all had to change our lives drastically, and I appreciated that she agreed to change hers as well. I knew when I returned home from rehab that I’d continue to see my friends, go to ECU football games eventually, and eat at the restaurant that I always went to. I was able to come back to my house and be in my own environment with the people I cared about. So, in a sense, I did return to my life, but she couldn’t. We decided as I left rehab that hopefully one year or so would be enough to get me settled.

I knew then that I could manage only halfway on my own. If I wanted to wear sweatpants and a T-shirt every day, I could put that on myself. I hadn’t learned to transfer from my bed to my chair and wasn’t sure if I ever would, so my mom would have to get me out of bed and up every day. I knew having her there would make things feel as normal as possible for me, and I was grateful for her sacrifice and willingness to play my unsung hero. I learned the true meaning of friendship from my mother. She was my best friend growing up, and she set the tone for all of my other relationships.

I realized quickly that caring for me was emotionally draining for her. In addition to needing help moving, there were serious medical complications that plagued me, and seeing me struggle upset my mother terribly. She had to always be on high alert, because we realized quickly that my blood pressure dropped so low that there were days when I had a hard time keeping my head up without passing out.

I also suffered from severe nerve pain, which was an unexpected yet overwhelming side effect. On a normal day I would spend a good hour getting out of bed, because I had to wait for the nerve pain to go away. This pain doesn’t happen to everyone, and there’s no explanation as to why it happens in some with spinal cord injuries and not in others. Mine in particular was pretty debilitating, occurring mostly when I woke up but lessening during the day. In the early morning movement was impossible. Nerve pain feels like fire, it feels like needles, it feels like beatings all over, or even like a thousand bees stinging me all at once. Basically, wherever I had no normal feeling is where I would have this nerve pain, everywhere from my chest down. My brain would try to connect with my body. When it was unable to, it would send a signal back in the form of pain.

The nerve pain was one of the harshest realities of my injury, and I was told I would likely live with it forever. It gradually became a part of my life, increasing bit by bit each day. It became worse when the weather deteriorated, and some days it grew unbearable. If I had known how bad it was going to be, and how overwhelming the pain, I never would have survived this experience. Initially, I felt upset because I learned it was a rarity—very few people with a spinal cord injury experience my level of pain. Whenever I mentioned it to other friends in a chair, they all told me it was something they’d gotten used to, which indicated to me that we were not talking about the same pain. This was not a tingling “sensation.” It was absolute torture. If you asked me, “Would you rather walk again, but live with the nerve pain, or stay in the wheelchair and be pain free?” I would choose the latter.

I remember the first few times it happened, I was screaming as I was awakened by the pain. I could hear my mother sobbing in the other room, upset that I was suffering. I felt so badly for her. I tried multiple pain-relieving meds, but none seemed to work. It was frightening because the main one I took would essentially destroy my life over time, which made me realize it would have been nice not to be on any meds at all; I couldn’t be sure that they were even helping me or having a positive impact.

My mother and I dealt with logistical issues, too, once home. Once, on a really hot day, my mother was trying to get me into the car, and I fell on the hot pavement in the driveway. She couldn’t lift me because I was too heavy. I was in shorts, lying there, and she started to panic. She thought my legs would burn on the hot asphalt. I said to her, “This is not the time to panic. I’m okay.” She ran into the garage, found a very low-rise lawn chair, and managed to get me into it. I had some scrapes on my knees but really nothing major.

The other issue we knew we’d face out of rehab, which was a major concern, was that if we had any kind of problem medically, and we did occasionally, we’d have to go to a doctor or hospital. There was no longer a nurse’s button to press for help. There wasn’t all this great equipment, or fast diagnoses, or people checking up on me all the time. It was on us. Period.

Very few local places had experts on spinal cord injuries. A couple of months after I returned home, I had an incident that sent me to the emergency room. When I was in the hospital recovering, at least I knew there were people around to help. But when I was home, it was scary when something went wrong. In order to go to the bathroom, I had to insert a catheter, and one day when I did that, there was all this blood. I had no idea what was going on. I was dizzy, and my body was reacting badly. My mother and I were alone, and we didn’t know what to do. Normally, at the hospital, we’d call a nurse in, but we were on our own, and I couldn’t even sit up enough to get into the car and go to the hospital. We had to call an ambulance. So I had to have EMS come to the house and put me on a stretcher, because I was so dizzy. I had an infection, and my body had to tell me in a different way than another person’s body would tell her. I was extremely lightheaded, and my blood pressure was sky-high. It was a traumatic moment. I was thinking,
This is not supposed to be my life. I am not supposed to have EMS coming to my house and getting me.
It was a moment when I had to suck it up and fight through it.

It turned out it was a really bad bladder infection. For an uninjured woman it would hurt like crap, and she would know something was wrong early on and of course go to the doctor, get some medication, and clear it up. But for me it was different because I couldn’t feel anything. An infection wouldn’t alert me with pain. My body had to react in a different way. I got clammy and sweaty, had goose bumps, and felt dizzy. They were all signs that something was wrong with my body.

These were symptoms of autonomic dysreflexia, which affects people with spinal cord injuries like mine. Because I was hurt at a higher level of injury, my autonomic nervous system was also affected. If I had been hurt below a T-7, which is someone paralyzed only from the rib-cage area down, then my autonomic nervous system would have been intact. My blood pressure would have been normal, I would have sweated regularly, and so on. But when there was pain in my body and something went wrong, my nervous system reacted and my blood pressure shot up. I got goose bumps, felt sort of clammy, and had the shakes. I could die if I didn’t figure out what was wrong quickly. I could wind up dying from a urinary tract infection because my blood pressure increased so dramatically.

I was lucky that I experienced it only twice. Some people get it all the time. If I was wearing pants with a zipper on them and they were poking into me, I’d become really dizzy and I’d have to look at my body and try to determine what was wrong. It was scary because I couldn’t feel anything from my chest down, so numerous things could be the cause—it was a large area!

One weekend, Lauren came to visit and stay with me. My mom was like a second mom to her, so we all hung out together all weekend. She caught a real glimpse into the reality of my injury. Chris was still carrying me up the stairs on his back at that point, as the house hadn’t been updated yet, and since I was cold all the time, I had to sit near the heater. She’d heard all about this from the other girls, but seeing it was different. We had a really fun Saturday, all of us, going out to eat and laughing, but on Sunday, before Lauren even woke up, my mother and I had to go to the hospital because I had another UTI. Lauren called us when she woke up, and it seemed like we were going to be at the emergency room for hours and hours, so she headed back to Charlotte.

I think it was an eye-opener for her, seeing the day-to-day. She did get to see me play quad rugby, which was cool, and we did hang out, but the reality of it all wasn’t lost on her. She even told me later that her life’s mindset was different after that, that her perspective on life and enjoying it was so altered—she appreciated everything she had so much more. And her love of our other friends was strong and genuine. She told me she was speaking to one of the other girls once, and that girl said she was going to run, to use her legs as much as possible, to honor me. I thought that was pretty cool. I know each of the girls handled and processed the accident differently.