O
Introduction
My Story
N
THE FINAL
day of my sophomore year of high school, I was hit in
the face with a baseball bat. As my classmate took a full swing, the
bat slipped out of his hands and came flying toward me before striking
me directly between the eyes. I have no memory of the moment of
impact.
The bat smashed into my face with such force that it crushed my
nose into a distorted U-shape. The collision sent the soft tissue of my
brain slamming into the inside of my skull. Immediately,
a wave of
swelling surged throughout my head. In a fraction of a second, I had a
broken nose, multiple skull fractures, and two shattered eye sockets.
When I opened my eyes, I saw people staring at me and running
over to help. I looked down and noticed spots of red on my clothes.
One of my classmates took the shirt off his back and handed it to me. I
used it to plug the stream of blood rushing from my broken nose.
Shocked and confused, I was unaware of how seriously I had been
injured.
My teacher looped his arm around my shoulder and we began the
long walk to the nurse’s office:
across the field, down the hill, and back
into school. Random hands touched my sides, holding me upright. We
took our time and walked slowly. Nobody realized that every minute
mattered.
When we arrived at the nurse’s office, she asked me a series of
questions.
“What year is it?”
“1998,” I answered. It was actually 2002.
“Who is the president of the United States?”
“Bill Clinton,” I said. The correct answer was George W. Bush.
“What is your mom’s name?”
“Uh. Um.” I stalled. Ten seconds passed.
“Patti,” I said casually, ignoring the fact that it had taken me ten
seconds to remember my own mother’s name.
That is the last question I remember. My body was unable to handle
the rapid swelling in my brain and I lost
consciousness before the
ambulance arrived. Minutes later, I was carried out of school and taken
to the local hospital.
Shortly after arriving, my body began shutting down. I struggled
with basic functions like swallowing and breathing. I had my first
seizure of the day. Then I stopped breathing entirely. As the doctors
hurried to supply me with oxygen, they also decided the local hospital
was unequipped to handle the situation and
ordered a helicopter to fly
me to a larger hospital in Cincinnati.
I was rolled out of the emergency room doors and toward the
helipad across the street. The stretcher rattled on a bumpy sidewalk as
one nurse pushed me along while another pumped each breath into me
by hand. My mother, who had arrived at the hospital a few moments
before, climbed into the helicopter beside me. I remained unconscious
and unable to breathe on my own as she held my hand during the
flight.
While my mother rode with me in the helicopter,
my father went
home to check on my brother and sister and break the news to them.
He choked back tears as he explained to my sister that he would miss
her eighth-grade graduation ceremony that night. After passing my
siblings off to family and friends, he drove to Cincinnati to meet my
mother.
When my mom and I landed on the roof of the hospital, a team of
nearly twenty doctors and nurses sprinted onto the helipad and
wheeled me into the trauma unit. By this time,
the swelling in my brain
had become so severe that I was having repeated post-traumatic
seizures. My broken bones needed to be fixed, but I was in no
condition to undergo surgery. After yet another seizure—my third of
the day—I was put into a medically induced coma and placed on a
ventilator.
My parents were no strangers to this hospital. Ten years earlier,
they had entered the same building on the ground floor after my sister
was diagnosed with leukemia at age three. I was five at the time. My
brother was just six months old. After two and a half years of
chemotherapy treatments, spinal taps, and bone marrow biopsies, my
little sister finally walked
out of the hospital happy, healthy, and
cancer free. And now, after ten years of normal life, my parents found
themselves back in the same place with a different child.
While I slipped into a coma, the hospital sent a priest and a social
worker to comfort my parents. It was the same priest who had met
with them a decade earlier on the evening they found out my sister had
cancer.
As day faded into night, a series of machines kept me alive. My
parents slept restlessly on a hospital mattress—one moment they
would
collapse from fatigue, the next they would be wide awake with
worry. My mother would tell me later, “It was one of the worst nights
I’ve ever had.”
