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.”
