Priss Rader made quick travel arrangements and was on her way to Denver within hours of hearing about her son’s motorcycle accident. She called her baby sister, Meegan Kicklighter, who joined her without hesitation. Priss’s husband drove the sisters from Umatilla to Orlando International Airport. After hugs, a quick kiss, and agreeing to phone his wife as soon as possible, Robert Rader drove away from the women as they darted into the terminal. America was still two years away from the tragedy, which has since become a numerical reference to a date. 9/11 had yet to make this nation's lexicon. In 1999, Americans traveled like they were going on an expensive, tedious, time-consuming ride at a poorly run amusement park. Security was what you got when you bought traveler's insurance from a portable booth set up in the airport. Given these simpler times, one could arrive at an airport with only minutes to spare and still make a flight.
The frantic sisters ran through the terminal doors as quickly as their weekend gardeners’ legs would carry them. Priss and Meegan arrived at the end of the line, waiting to check in long before being able to see the counter. As politely and determined as possible, Priss moved to the front of the curling, slowly pumping artery of luggage and people. At the front of the queue, a middle-aged woman waited for the next available attendant. The sisters approached the stranger, and Priss fought to remain calm as she told the unknown woman her story.
“My son is in a hospital in Denver. My flight leaves in less than half an hour.”
Oddly intrigued, "Do you know what hospital he's in?" the woman interrupted.
“Denver General…”
The next available ticket clerk waved toward the trio of women.
“–I’m a nurse there. They have some of the best doctors in the country.” She nudged the silent women toward the check-in counter, “You wouldn’t want a better bunch of doctors working on him.” Priss and Meegan moved stiffly toward the ticket attendant as the woman told them, “He’s in good hands.”
Priss and Meegan would never see that anonymous nurse again; however, they were soon to meet just as many dedicated anonymous men and women. As the sisters boarded their flight, those other strangers, already in Denver, worked to save the life and limbs of Priss’s son. Her recently divorced, twenty-nine-year-old man-child had been a source of growing concern. As she flew in silence with her sister, her worst fears about her child’s fate played before her field of vision. She prayed to God she would not be arriving in Colorado to bury her youngest son.
* * * *
Priss’s youngest son, me, had been involved in a motorcycle accident. No, let me rephrase. My mom, Priss, and her baby sister, Meegan, were flying to Denver because I had caused a motorcycle accident. The sign at Eighth and Mariposa read “STOP,” but the 600 ccs of Yamaha FZR I was straddling urged me past it. The fact I was missing time to drink beer with my friends was just as influential on my decision to accelerate into the intersection of the aforementioned streets as the crotch rocket I had ridden to the Colorado Rockies’ baseball game earlier in the day.
I wore denim shorts, a Denver Nuggets tank top, and a Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball cap instead of a helmet. I was barely protected from the wind rushing past me, much less my stupidity, as I coasted past two cars obediently heeding the crimson octagon. I accelerated through the stop sign and gunned the Yamaha’s engine. It stalled. I wasn’t a very good motorcyclist. A Ford F-150 was traveling east on Eighth Avenue as I crossed it and headed southbound on Mariposa Street. The truck’s twenty-two-year-old driver slammed on his brakes and pulled his steering wheel hard to the right, trying to avoid me. My speed at the time of impact remains unknown to me. The unfortunate driver of the truck claims he was "doing less than 30 miles an hour” when we collided; we'll take his word.
The truck’s initial impact hit me from behind, crushing my right shoulder. My upper body was deeply bruised to the backside of the muscles of my shoulder and down the length of my back. My exposed flesh was torn against the headlight and left quarter panel of the late model, white Ford. The force of the impact separated my right arm from my body as it shattered my humerus. My upper arm was snapped in two, splitting the bone in half—just below the shoulder. The shattered limb was torn from my torso, with only a thin stretch of skin keeping my splintered arm attached to my body. Deltoid muscles from my decimated right shoulder and the triceps of my arm were either completely ripped away from their points of origin or shredded and dangling from shattered points of insertion.
The truck chewed the Yamaha into the street as it braked violently toward the curb. My legs were dragged underneath the Ford along with the tangled mess of metal the motorcycle had become. The Yamaha’s rear axle snapped with the fragility of my bones, and its thick metal screamed a half-inch deep scar into the soft, black tar of the street. With me in their maw, the machines screeched and howled to a violent halt. Most of the flesh of my left knee and shin smeared a gory path for the axle’s gouge. The metallic screaming came to an abrupt, final crash when the vehicles and I hit the curb of Mariposa Street, and I was launched into the air.
According to rumored stories of eyewitnesses, as the truck came to a violent halt, I was thrown into the air several yards from the truck, far enough away from the smoking truck and crushed motorcycle so I was not readily seen from the steaming wreckage. I was told I landed amazingly on my feet. The velocity of my flight, combined with my freakish grace, caused my right leg, about six inches below my knee, to explode in a burst of bone, muscle, and flesh. Pieces of my tibia and fibula spiked into the ground like shrapnel from the skeletal grenade my leg had become. Emergency Room surgical reports would tell me years later over six inches of my right leg were "absent." According to similar EMT reports, my right arm was “split in half with at least half an inch of the bone missing.” My humeral artery dangled from my arm, spraying my life into the air like an angry, red sprinkler. My femoral artery similarly spewed my blood toward the ground from my right leg. Both the limbs on my right side viciously spat my life into the air. I fell backward to the ground, my own blood having softened it for the fall.
Soon after being alerted by witnesses and the young driver of the truck, there was more than just one vehicle involved in the accident; the paramedics were shocked to find me still alive. My choking breaths gurgled through the blood flowing freely from my nose and mouth. Being discovered alive, I had beaten the odds for the first time that day.
I have learned the brachial artery supplies all the blood flow to the arm. It’s one of the largest arteries in the human body. I have been told by my orthopedic surgeon ninety-five percent of the people who sever this major blood vessel die. The remaining five percent lose their arm. I have beaten the statistical odds by keeping a relatively functional right arm following my injury. Never mind my survival in general.
I have also learned that the femoral artery of each leg carries even greater pulmonary importance than the brachial artery of either arm. If either of these major blood vessels are severed, around 40% of the blood in the body gets pumped into the air with each heartbeat. I should have been a fatality statistic—another bonehead dying on a motorcycle without a helmet.
The EMTs, however, had another plan. Long before ever meeting me on that day, and even knowing my stupidity had landed me where they discovered my near-corpse, they had decided to save my life.
As I was loaded into the ambulance, these professional friends of Lazarus worked to get my life’s fuel back into my increasingly bloodless but bloodied body. For the moment, only their professionally frantic efforts and my unconscious stubbornness were keeping me alive. Since I didn’t die on the side of the road, my death would then most expectedly have to have been in the back of the ambulance I rode into the hospital.
According to my research, there is no record of my ever having "flat-lined" or having to have been "resuscitated" while en route to the hospital. In retrospect, with the multiple traumas my body had suffered, compounded by the extreme loss of blood, I should have died in at least two different instances. I should have "seen a bright light" or “hovered above my own body.” I did neither of those things. With the professional help of people, I would never actually "see." Nameless paramedics scraped me into the back of an ambulance.
I was rushed to Denver General Hospital (DGH), luckily, less than three blocks from the scene of my accident. On the short trip, paramedics intubated me to reinflate my lungs as they continually replaced my body’s blood supply. My mom would later be told there was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in my system, but only because my own blood wasn’t in my body when I was tested. All my original life’s blood was sprayed over the corner of Eighth and Mariposa.
After I was stabilized by triage nurses, emergency physicians, and even more nurses prepared to save my arm and leg. They reviewed notes on a procedure they would try for the first time on my fragmented humerus and ruined shoulder. I was blissfully unaware of their surgical unfamiliarity. Still, a roomful of masked unknowns spent the next several hours rebuilding my body without the least bit of concern for my identity. Their professional enthusiasm would prove to be more important to me than I wouldn’t realize until months later.
When the truck and I collided, my wallet had flown from my back pocket. Unconscious and unknown, I was wheeled into emergency surgery as a “John Doe.” It would be a couple of hours before anyone found out who I was and that I had a family. After the first round of life and limb-saving procedures were complete, I was a “John Doe Frankenstein”–an anatomical hodgepodge of surgical steel, titanium, rubber tubing, emergency tissue transplants, and more stitches than the sheets of my hospital bed. Lying alone in the ICU, my hours of anonymity waned. My life as a Mary Shelley caricature had just begun.
While my life and limbs were being saved at DGH, the police back at 8th and Mariposa were wrapping up their administrative responsibilities. After being refused a signature on the Death Certificate for “John Doe” by badass emergency orthopedic surgeon and Discovery
Channel celebrity Dr. Wade Smith—No kidding, my mom would see him, years later, on the Discovery Channel. —a Denver Police Officer was sent back to the once-chaotic mess of the slowly disappearing accident scene to find my wallet. A social service worker and acquaintance of mine recognized my name and face from my recovered driver's license, which the officer eventually gave her. I’ve never seen evidence of that Death Certificate. I guess John Doe got a pass, too. I've never thanked that social worker, either.
Called in from a recreational hockey game, where he passed the time between rebuilding bodies when on-call, Dr. Smith had decided long before his arrival into surgery, “This one’s going to make it.” Still anonymous to him and to this day, a stranger to me, Dr. Smith and his team practiced medical macramé to reattach my right arm. Comparable metallurgy was used to temporarily hold my ruined right leg together while even more dedicated strangers performed innumerable, unpronounceable surgeries to save my life.
Around a week after my initial series of orthopedic surgeries, after consultation with Priss Rader–who arrived in Colorado the day after my accident– muscles were transplanted from the right side of my stomach to rebuild my right leg from just below the knee to above my ankle. The external Erector set holding my leg together until this procedure was approved and completed was removed. A titanium shaft running the length of my fragmented tibia and fibula and nearly a dozen blue titanium screws were used in the repair. A heavy, flat metal bar and another handful of screws were used to rebuild and reattach my arm temporarily. After the masked doctors and nurses completed their gory, smithy work of rebuilding me (for the time being), I was transported to DGH’s Intensive Care Unit. My Aunt Meegan, Mom, and anonymous nurses then set about trying to rouse me from the coma I had been kept in.
The Intensive Care Unit at DGH is affectionately called “the Denver Gun and Knife Club" because most of its inhabitants are recovering from either near-fatal stabbing or gunshot wounds. An understandable amount of cynicism circulates through the staff, and family members are required to assist in caring for their own wounded in the gymnasium-like ICU. The secondary consequences of any near-fatal bad decisions are immediately reaped by the decision-makers family members—who are usually just getting involved with the injured’s life upon their arrival at "the Denver Gun and Knife Club.”
"You had to pass through a metal detector to enter the ICU. There weren't separate rooms. It was just like a high school gymnasium. There were bodies and beds everywhere, with no walls separating them. There were just rows of bodies.” Now, my mom relays her retrospective description with more awe than repulsion, "The nurses made no bones about the fact it was a very 'hands-on' experience for the family members who were there.”
I’ve been told this was a more trying experience than neither my mom nor her sister would ever let me believe. Between helping nurses, who became fast friends, giving me sponge baths, assisting in linen and dressing changes, or exercising my rebuilt body, the sisters spoke to me incessantly, trying to roust me from that senseless, nether world where I had taken up recent residence. I still don't know where I was or where I had been. I wasn’t even aware of who was at my bedside, but as my family talked about the sleeping science fair project, they hoped I would regain consciousness and become the person they loved. I had no idea how many people were working to get me back to life. My mom, her sister, and people I'd never met called me until I returned.
Pat. Pat. It’s Mom.
I’d mumble something incoherent through dry, cracked lips.
Pat? It’s your Mom. Do you know where you are?
“I’m in Texas.”
She'd be rattled by my lack of comprehension but excited by my reaction: "What happened to you, Pat? Do you know what happened to you?"
“I was thrown by a bull,” I’d creak.
She’d get teary-eyed until a nurse told her, "Don't worry, hon. Last night, he was in
Philadelphia, and he had been shot. He’s getting closer.”
It was Aunt Meegan who retrieved my first hoped-for reaction. June had leaked into July, and Meegan’s and Mom’s efforts to wake me from my week-long escape from life were getting more insistent. The pair were trying everything they could think of to get me to respond. Hospital staff told them their reactions would encourage me to be more responsive once I reacted positively. About eight days after I ran that STOP sign, Aunt Meegan tried again to rouse me as
Mom changed my mummy-like dressings.
Pat. Pat! Meegan yelled.
I was starting to react more favorably to their efforts, but they were tiring.
“Pat. Pat!” Meegan shouted, “Who is the biggest Nebraska Cornhuskers fan you know?”
Now, when trying to wake someone from a coma, one does not use an “indoor voice.”
For my diminutive aunt Meegan to practically shout her allegiance to Colorado University’s (located less than an hour from the very spot where she stood in her funky-colored Converses), arch-rival Cornhuskers took balls of steel. The memory of the grin of recognition creeping along my face brings us to tears even now.
My response, “He-heh…Aunt…Meeegan,” makes us pause at every retelling of the moment. —And, I don’t even remember it.
After regaining consciousness, I could not grasp the scope of my injuries. The immediate concern of my family members seemed to be over my lack of appetite. I just wanted the pain to stop. That desire to avoid pain might be why people don’t come out of comas. When you do
wake up, the pain starts.
My first memories of consciousness are of white-hot pain. I couldn’t discern which limb hurt more. As far as I knew, every cell in my body was suffering some sort of traumatic pain. I’d not yet read Chuck Pahaluniak’s Fight Club, but I knew my pain was not “a white ball of healing
light.” It was searing and crippling and rang in my ears
No longer needing intensive care, I was moved from the ICU through a hallucinatory trip out of the hospital and into a private room, where I could begin a whole new set of hallucinations. Aunt Meegan had her own family to get back to in Florida. Though I didn’t know it, Mom and I would be alone, in the company of strangers, for our last nights in Denver.
* * * *
As my rebuilt body was forced through a day’s therapeutic routine, my winces and grunts fell in time with the machine
I’d been strapped to. You turned away from the sadistic scene. You’d broken no bones, but I saw my pain in your eyes.
I saw you cringe as each new doctor prodded and poked my shattered frame. I kept my suffering private choked back my tears as scrubs-clad mechanics marveled at their work and joked. It was me who'd been scarred, but it was you who cried.
For days, I never knew you were there. Your only comfort was your sister, who'd come with you. For hours, both of you’d try to wake me with a whisper,
“Friends have been by…”, “A pretty girl was here. You just missed her.” Lonely boy in a sterile, cold room, I slept despite no lullabies.
Those days would fade sooner than thought and become months we'd both work to put behind us. All this agony from a STOP sign I failed to heed.
I’ve long since shaken my walkers and canes, but I haven’t told you since I’ve been freed; far too old to want my Mommy, I still needed you by my side.
* * * *
I’m told my immediate prognosis was "optimistic." Dr. James Ferrari later led the Doctors Frankenstein of Denver, and he predicted my reconstructed right arm would be little more than “ornamentation.” He predicted further that I would most likely use a cane for the rest of my life. On the bright side, I had months of therapy and a list of further surgeries in my near future. My more immediate expectations revolved around getting me out of DGH. At the insistence of a hospital kitchen worker, who had been assigned the task of making me eat by Aunt Meegan before she left, I was eating semi-regularly and gaining strength. The Doctors Frankenstein were planning to send me to a local rehabilitation center, which equates to "an old folks’ home” in lay-speak. This idea sent my mom into a tailspin. After learning of the doctors’ intentions, she started planning her move to Colorado so she could oversee my rehabilitation. She drove back to my apartment, which she was packing up, planning how she would tell her husband she was moving to Denver.
I am the second youngest of my siblings. My parents had raised their children, and my parents were years removed from not living alone. Dad’s response over the phone to Mom that night was calmingly simple: "Bring him home."
I'm not sure if it's the orthopedic trauma, the drugs I was on, or the ventricular shunt removed from my skull that hampers my recollection. Still, my memories of my last week in Colorado are dominated by the notion the light fixture over my hospital bed resembled an oversized version of one of those old-fashioned, metal, two-piece ice cube trays like they used in the fifties. As my body throbbed, the pulsing of the world around me caused the old fixture to flex as if being twisted by invisible hands trying to dump its contents. I waited for it to empty its frozen contents on top of me every day. My family made plans to fly me back to Florida. The Doctors Frankenstein of Denver consulted with orthopedic surgeon Dean Cole in Orlando, who would continue my muscular macramé and skeletal metallurgy. I passed the time by increasing my body’s tolerance of morphine and awaiting the eventual, crushing fall of those giant-sized ice cubes.
While my mom and more strangers than I could ever hope to say "thank you" for making life-altering decisions for me, I can remember my friend John Fuller coming by with a Playboy and an ESPN: the Magazine. After he left, I tried to read the magazines, but the letters looked like text from a Japanese manga comic. Having temporarily forgotten how to read, I found solace in the fact the women of Playboy were both beautiful and naked. I awoke the morning after John visited with my first erection following my return to semi-awareness. I hadn't thought about the possibility of losing this most basic biological occurrence. Still, I tearfully shared my revelation with any willing listener the day of my apparent re-animation. Being illiterate for the rest of my life failed in comparison to not being able to get a boner. My male nurse shared in my celebration by making me painfully sit up in bed for the first time in weeks. I paid homage to him before leaving Denver by having him shave my scabbed and stitched-up head to resemble his handsomely smooth cranium.
I had been kept in a coma for around seven or eight days following my accident on June 24th. The first date I can remember fully is July Fourth. A day or two after the return of my masculinity, my friends Bryan and CJ stopped by on Independence Day. We watched fireworks over the Rocky Mountains from my room’s window. The exploding fireworks were an easily made metaphor for the explosions of pain my body kept igniting even after those over the
Rockies had long faded, and my friends returned to their pain-free lives. During my last days in Colorado, I was never alone. Nurses, hospital staff, friends, family, and pain kept me company. I eventually remembered how to decipher written words, but my most constant companion could prove to be a formidable distraction to any task. Even today, pain can make the words fall off the page, and I'm left with a jumble of letters at the bottom margin.
Pain can be so intense it supersedes visual metaphor. White, hot bursts; spiky, gold flashes like lightning; steady, red thumps, these familiar descriptions fail to compare to the screaming your body makes as it starts to realize how much of itself is missing or has been replaced by metal. Pain doesn't need to breathe. Its screaming is incessant. On an awful night, I could hear stitches stretching or the sound of my bones pushing their way through torn muscle to rejoin fractured ends; the screws in my body squeaked as they turned in the wood of my bones.
On quieter nights, the sound of blood being pumped through recently torn sutures would lull me to sleep like ocean waves. If not, there was always more morphine.
I left DGH on July 9, 1999. It would be three years before I returned to Colorado for a friend’s wedding. In 1999, I was leaving Colorado, having enjoyed most of my five years there. I did what I wanted, when I wanted, just as I had since deciding to do so back in high school. Being an adult just gave me carte blanche to behave as juvenile as I desired. I was paying the consequences for being in a hurry to get from one good time to the next. It would take a couple more parties for me to figure out what he meant.
In my last hours at Denver General, the irascible Dr. Ferrari brought a group of interns to the foot of my bed and told them, “We’ve done all we can do for this one. He’s either going to get it, or we’ll see him again.”
I could barely sit up in bed. It hurt me to breathe the words, “You won’t see me like this again. I get it.” I didn’t know it at the time, but I was lying to Dr. Ferrari. It would be quite some time before I figured out what it was.
It’s been over twenty years since I ran that stop sign. Even after learning to throw a baseball left-handed and earning my Master of Fine Arts degree, I’m still not sure if I know what Dr. Ferrari meant on that day. I do know, however, that if it were not for the selfless efforts of countless people that I would neither ever meet nor have ever personally thanked, I would not be here still trying to figure out what it is. I also know it’s because of the dedication of strangers that I am alive to say "mahalo" to them all—and mean it.
Maybe that’s what Dr. Ferrari was talking about.
PROF. RADER
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