From Deaths Door to Opening Your Own Door
Sept 21 will forever be a day that has pause. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare; you wake up to a phone call from a stranger’s voice. They speak softly, yet have sternness to their voice. “Your son has been in an accident, he is stable but it doesn’t look good, he may not live through the day.” You hear every word, but now you are numb to the sound they are making. As you place the receiver down you think you might have just dreamed what you had just heard. Frantically you place a few telephone calls to close family to give them the same information, all the while still in a fog about what is going on around you.
This was my journey for 54 days:
They called it TBI (traumatic brain injury). What they don’t tell you is all about the factors involved with it. Hospital case workers are great to hand you all kinds of reading material on something so intense that you think they are joking. Every paper I was handed said the same thing other than a few variations. Then one day I finally got a real doctor that said DAI (diffuse axonal injury), I went to a computer and looked that up and read all about it. Then it all made sence, DAI was what happened, the TBI was the result of the DAI. My son had crashed on his motorcycle and was thrown 125 feet and then had landed on his head. The whole left side of his body was injured. It was told to me in the aspect of shaken baby syndrome, only it had happened in an adult. The heavy blow to his head shook up everything inside. There wasn’t one bruise, there were many, and there wasn’t one bleeder, they were all over. His head was four times larger than normal. He was in a coma for 5 days, with a ventilator helping him breathe. His head looked 4 sizes larger than normal. I asked the doctor’s to tell me everything regarding his injuries, and so they began. C1 and C2 fracture, pulled ligament to neck, shattered eye socket, broken collar bone, scapula fracture, collapsed lung, left hand cuts to knuckle area that went through tendons, 3 broken ribs, and knee injury. He was fighting for his life. As I entered ICU, I saw a man I knew (my son), but he wasn’t looking the same. Every kind of tube, hose or apparatuses was on the thin tall figure of my son lying on a white sheet of a hospital bed. His hands were swollen, yet I took his right hand into mine. I looked at my son and softly said, ‘Mama is here son’, you are going to be just fine. I leaned over and slowly whispered into his ear, I love you with all my heart. I was told by a victims advocate that there was a female on his bike. I asked them how is she and a voice said, that she did not survive the accident. My heart sank, as there was a sadness unknown to me. I looked back over to my son’s face and all focus was now on a boy who had been brought to the hospital barely alive. They told me he had laid out in a corn field for 6 ½ hours until a farmer found the scene. Every word I heard was muffled by the intense pain I had in my heart. I just wanted my son to open his eyes and look at me. I knew he could not talk, as they had already told me that the ventilator would not allow that right now. His eyes were so swollen that he looked like he had been in a fight, rather than a crash. Nine stitches to his left eye area and a cut to the teardrop area. An orthopedic surgeon was on their way to sew up his hand area.
Family members were talking around the bedside, but all I recall is still holding onto his hand. I didn’t want to let go. I just kept softly saying, ‘Mama is here and everything will be okay. I won’t leave you.’
