It Was a Tuesday Afternoon…
June 24, 2018
That Tuesday, like most days, Sam got on his road bike to ride his daily 30-40 miles before his twelve-year-old son would get home from school. A 38-year old avid runner and cyclist, Sam was a week away from running his seventh local marathon and was actively training to qualify for a national cycling competition. A single dad with sole custody of his only son, Sam had owned his own business for years. Being self-employed gave him the flexibility to work and train during the day while his son was at school. Sam spent his evenings being a dad. Their life was simple, just the two of them. They liked it that way.
Everything changed that Tuesday afternoon. Less than a mile from home, riding on the same route he’d ridden hundreds of times before, Sam got hit by a car. The car was estimated to be driving at 25 mph and speeding up. Sam was riding at a solid 17 mph. At the point of impact, Sam crashed through the windshield head first, catapulted through the air, then landed on his head on the concrete. Somehow Sam managed to stand up and stumble out of the intersection over to the grass. The impact of glass and concrete had broken Sam’s neck, his right thumb, and, most significantly, his brain.
At some point EMS arrived on the scene and took Sam to the “go to” hospital in his part of the city, which happened to be nearby. This was the same hospital that treated Sam’s grandfather when he had cancer, the hospital that treated Sam’ grandmother when she had cancer, and the hospital that brought Sam’s son into the world.
After initial X-rays, the doctors there determined they were not equipped to deal with the level of trauma he had suffered.
Sam was then transported to the central medical center location of the same hospital. Upon arrival, Sam was hurriedly scuttled to the place specially reserved for Sam and others similarly situated—potentially fatally injured, but without insurance. Pushed around like a slab of meat on rollers, Sam’s gurney was shoved in and around dozens of other patients, also being rammed around on gurneys. There were no private rooms here. There weren’t even those privacy curtains that give the slight illusion of having your own space. We are talking about a massive room similar to a mess hall, with gurneys so close to each other they were hitting each other side by side, diagonally, head to head, head to foot, and in every other combination you could imagine.
Bright lights and chaos surrounded Sam as he helplessly laid there on his gurney in a neck brace, unable to move, and in complete shock and confusion. As doctors haphazardly moved from gurney to gurney, sometimes leaning into or knocking into patients to yell over at other patients, any hopes of order, privacy, or dignity that could have possibly survived his arrival at this new place were quickly smashed. The noise and chaos were only broken at some point by the screams of agony of a guy one gurney away, who had been smashed in half by his trailer having fallen on him earlier that day. Unable to move due to the neck brace and frozen in terror on the inside, Sam laid there in what he was sure was a waiting room to hell.
X-rays confirmed what EMS suspected based on the way Sam was unable to move his neck from a bent position after he was hit by the car--Sam had broken his neck. He had also broken his right thumb, which would prove to be an issue for him later on since he was right-handed and relied on his hands to operate his business.
MRIs did not reveal much of anything. While MRIs can show doctors swelling or bleeding in the brain, they do not really reveal anything else. They do not, for example, reveal the micro-tears that often occur when a brain is sloshed from one side of the inside of the skull to the other, which is what happens when a person gets hit by a car, breaks a windshield with his head, and then ricochets back onto the street, landing on his head. Despite being at a hospital that touts having “the brains” to have a neuroscience program led by the “brightest, most forward-thinking minds in medicine,” no one ordered any further testing. No one suggested that Sam be further evaluated by one of these “forward thinking” neuroscientists. No one mentioned post-emergency-room treatment. No one even discussed what Sam might be facing with the injuries he had suffered.
Instead, Sam was left in a living nightmare that only seemed to worsen as the hours ticked past the ever permanent line created that Tuesday afternoon, the line that created the divide between “before the crash” and “after the crash.”
Seemingly biding their time until they could release him, hospital personnel finally shoved Sam into another part of the hospital that probably does not make the glossy brochures. While there, Sam was pumped full of morphine and somehow became the target of a twisted romantic conquest competition going on between random female hospital personnel, including an administrative assistant who Sam later learned was pretending to be a nurse. (Yes, I said “pretending to be a nurse,” as in she even wore scrubs to carry out the charade.) Perhaps more shocking than the advances themselves was the fact that Sam’s mother seemed not only (stunningly) not at all phased by what would in any sane world be completely inappropriate advances by hospital personnel, but she was instead encouraging a nearly comatose Sam to go along with the awkward charade. Later, Sam would be able to see these bizarre actions by his mother as early signs of her already questioning her own ability and/or willingness to care for Sam now that he would clearly need more help than he ever needed in his entire life.
His last night in the hospital was a special kind of torture. That was the night Sam thought he was going to die for the second time that week. All of a sudden, without warning, one of Sam’s legs started shaking. But this was no mere tremble. His leg was shaking so hard it was jumping off the bed and crashing back down, completely out of control. Before he knew it, Sam’s other leg had joined in, now both legs were convulsing out of control. It might have been at this point that Sam started to scream in terror, having no idea what was happening to his body. As he screamed the erratic convulsions continued to intensify and spread up through his body, into his chest, and all the way up into his head. Sam passed out in a full blown seizure. He thought he was dying, and so did everyone else in the room.
The next day, after having spent a total of 3 nights in the hospital, Sam was released. Given morphine and other pain medications, Sam was told to go home and rest. That was it. As far as hospital personnel were concerned, Sam’s near death experience the night before was “probably” due to an “allergic reaction” to all the medication that they were giving him. This conclusion was reached without any tests being administered, and there was no acknowledgement of whether or not the various pain pills they were shoving Sam out the door with were any different than what had sent Sam into seizure the night before.
“Take it easy,” they seemed to say as Sam was wheeled out of the hospital by none other than the administrative assistant who had been pretending to be a nurse, alongside various of Sam’s family members. If there were any instructions given on how to care for someone with traumatic brain injury, Sam couldn’t hear or remember them. And, looking back at what happened next, it doesn’t appear anyone else heard them either.
One thing was certain—no one could have prepared Sam for what happened next. It wasn’t just discovering what traumatic brain injury would do to his life, which itself was heartbreaking, confusing, and, at times, downright terrifying; it was discovering the devastating way his own family treated him after the accident and, in many ways, because of his brain injury.