Chapter 2.)
A Silent Pause – my twenty eight year old son was sleeping.
The hardest part of hearing that someone is in a coma, is the fear they won’t wake up, which then becomes front and center to all thoughts. For me, knowing my son was in a coma was a shock. I watched him lay in bed so still and he had the look of being in a deep sleep. No one can say how long one is to be asleep or when they might awake, so looking at my son resting peacefully didn’t reassure me that everything was okay. The first day was the hardest in respect to just looking at all his injuries.
By the second day I had resolved to accept his injuries, but with caution. As I entered ICU the next day, I went right over to the side of the hospital bed and took a hold of his hand once again. A warm feeling of skin was all I had. It was hard for me to reach over the rails of the bed as the bed seemed to be higher than I was, so I had to almost stand on my tip toes to reach a level where I could see him. The neck collar that the paramedics placed on him was of hard plastic and seemed to engulf his whole neck and chin. There was a temporary trachea hole in the neck area, where a plastic tube was hooked up to a ventilator to help him breathe. It took every muscle in my legs to pull myself where I could bend over to give him a kiss on his cheek. His head was so large from the swelling that it looked like someone had blown his head up like a balloon. I reached the right ear area and softly whispered into his ear, ‘Good morning son, it’s Mama.’ ‘You are going to be just fine; you just need to wake up sweetie.’ I recall saying each morning, the same thing; “it’s time to wake up now son.” The words were futile, but I felt he heard me. The only sound in the room was the roar from the ventilator. Nurses came in to check vitals, look at monitors and access. There was a cream substance all over my son’s forehead; it was to help heal the road rash that had damaged that area. His entire left side had sustained the injuries. There was a large indentation to his left cheek and ear area, from a corn stalk that he had laid on for hours. It was hard for me to stand on the left side of the hospital bed area, as it was just too much to see and deal with it.
The coma continued for hours, then for days. I prayed and prayed to have him wake up, just to wake up and look at me. I wanted to see his beautiful dark brown eyes again. The eyes were swollen shut, the left eye area had 9 stitches and he suffered from a broken eye socket. I didn’t know if he could see or even when he would see again. They manually opened his eyes to clean the area of matter that oozed out. I stood on my feet next to his bed for a long time during the days; everything that the nurses did had me in disbelief. Why, was my son in this condition? Why, did this have to happen to him? Why, why why? My heart ached, my soul was empty and it had only been three days. I wanted him to wake up and he still would not. I wanted him to say something to me, but there was nothing. I, the only person that stood there for hours wondering about everything, didn’t know what the next phase of all this would be. I took it hour by hour; there was no day-to-day like others speak of. Each hour was unfolding something new. A new line was attached to some other line, the bag for his collapsed lung had to be changed, same with the catheter bag. There were syringes being pushed into a lead line of his arm regularly.
While I looked upon my son’s face and thought back to when he was a young boy, I could recall only the good times. The times he had played baseball, he was so good at pitching, probably could have gone to one of the big leagues if our small town back then had scouting agents. I thought of his first bike ride and how he had loved to play with his brothers in the back yard. Then I recalled the time he went to the prom, and how proud I was of him standing in the living room with a deep black full tux adorning his body. He absolutely glowed with excitement as he held onto his date. Then came the first truck he bought, a bright red older truck he spent hours fixing up. I kept seeing him standing in the White River casting out his fishing line and snagging a beautiful rainbow trout and then giving a grin. Memories of this childhood went into a grown young man who now was fighting for his life. A life he never knew would be like this. One day he was driving down a road and sees a female who needed a helping hand, the next minute he was lying in a hospital bed in a coma. Why? Where was someone else’s helping hand on that road that day? Where was another kind helping soul to aid ‘a damsel in distress, other than my son being a saint? So many why’s to so many things, but as the hours passed by, my only thought was for him to please wake up. I could handle anything, if he would just wake up.
Day 4, still in the coma and now the nurse’s said that he had to go into the operating room to have the temporary trachea taken out and have a regular one inserted. Not only that, but now he needed a feeding tube inserted into his stomach, to help him get food. I signed the release form for surgery and waited. Each hour I keep thinking to myself, this must be a dream, a very bad dream and I will wake up. The sound of the doctor’s voice jarred me from my thinking state back into reality. The surgery went well, but still my son was not awake, now he was heavily sedated on morphine and sleeping even more. They wheeled him back to ICU, to a room that would be ‘his’ room for 21 days. I sat and waited, I stood at his bedside, when everyone left to go to dinner or back home; I stayed right in the room. I couldn’t leave, I was motionless, just trying to understand what this was all about and the reasoning behind the ache I still had in my heart. Yes, my son was alive, but for how long? I remember leaving his room for the night and walking through the long waiting room to the elevators and still feeling numb. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and all I did was cry. I’d get back into my room at night and fall all apart. Tears rolled down my face and nothing seemed right. Every family member, every friend that talked about the accident wasn’t helping me understand the pain we all were going through. This was my little boy, a grown man that was hurt, in pain and barely alive.
Day 5, I arrive early and stand beside the rail of his bed as I had been for the past 4 days. I reached over the rail and took his hand into mine and said, “Good morning son.” He opened one eye to a squint and I felt him squeeze my hand. I was overwhelmed with joy. I said, “Tyrrell, can you hear Mama?” He squeezed my hand again. I felt new tears falling down my face, but didn’t stop to wipe them away, as all I could do was to smile and hold even tighter to his hand. I leaned over again and said, ‘Tye, it’s Mama and I love you very much.’ I didn’t want to upset him in anyway, as he wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t talking, because he had a ventilator in his throat and still couldn’t move. He had woken up out of the coma, after 5 days. Everything else was the same; the injuries had not looked any differently to me. His forehead was terrible looking, as the cream that they smear on is for burn patients and after it sets for a few minutes, it bubbles up like if you had just poured hydrogen peroxide over a fresh cut. A surgeon had come to his bedside and stitched up the left hand area that had deep lacerations into the tendons. Now, there was a bigger bandage covering the left hand. He slept some more, but now I had a slight feeling of relief that he had woken from the coma and was just sleeping. I recall asking, ‘can he go back into the coma?’ I didn’t want him to slip back into the unknown, as I couldn’t have taken that. For now, for this one day I saw that he had opened his eye to me and he knew I was there. Every family member came, held and said the same thing, ‘you’re going to be just fine Tye’. Somehow for me, I had it in my mind at that moment to never leave his side.
For 5 days there was a silent pause to my son’s life. There was a time in there that he wasn’t with the living world as we know it, he was sleeping, but what he saw, felt, heard or experienced in his silent period, only he would know. The first week was draining; everyone had emotions that overflowed into different personalities. I was to be the strong one, the one that took hold and kept the family together, because after all I had three other sons. What were they going through, what was their take on all this drama? One fell all apart and cried and cried at Tye’s bedside. One poured out his tears quietly while others (he thought) weren’t watching. One took on a whole new personality that I had not seen before. Each was grieving and struggling with their feelings in their own way. The first 5 days were the hardest, yet there were many more to come. The roads journey had just begun and I had no idea to what degree I would have to put my faith and trust to the ultimate test. There was a Chaplin that sat with the family the first night, who tried to console and comfort everyone involved. The words he spoke, again were muffled by the pain in my heart. I was angry, hurt and emotionally drained, but I sat and listened to every word from the Chaplin. We prayed, we talked, we cried, but nothing seemed to help. I would leave the waiting room only to return to Tye’s bedside, just to check and see how he was. Didn’t matter that he was resting, I just wanted to be with him. He was a survivor, or he wouldn’t have made it through the 6 ½ hours lying in a cold corn field. He would have to fight for his life, he was strong and healthy, but it would be quit a battle of strength on his part to conquer this blow.
The Awakening has its struggles: the story continues
