It's Nice to be Somebody's Hero.

April 10th, 2012 is not a memorable day for most people, but it is a day I doubt I'll ever forget.  On that day almost a year ago, I was involved in a potentially deadly car accident.  It's one of the reasons I'm choosing to begin my CDT hike as near to April 10th as possible; to commemorate the first anniversary of my and a few of my friends survival.  In this post, I'm going to attempt to give you my perspective of what happened that Tuesday, and possibly a look into why it effected me so deeply.

Here's some background information (If you already know this information, feel free to skip this paragraph): At the time of the accident, I was working as a field staff for a wilderness therapy company in Southern Utah.  It's a program that helps adolescents and adults work through their struggles while in the wilderness; which basically means they're placed in one of eight numbered groups in  the high deserts of Utah/Nevada for multiple weeks with trained staff and a therapist at hand and hopefully come out the other end having made some sort of progress.  As a staff, I worked with a team for 8 days in the field and had 6 days off between shifts.  We'd go in and out of the field- a two hour drive one-way, half of which is on dirt roads- on Tuesdays to switch out with the other  shift- the staff who're in the field working with the clients while we had our days off.  This transfer of people/information is called "switching out".

On the afternoon of Tuesday, April 10th, Elise, Dave, Charlie, and I were driving out to Group 7.  Elise was driving the Ford F250, with Charlie in the front passenger seat, Dave behind Charlie, and I was sitting behind the driver. It was a lovely afternoon, the sun was out and the roads were dry.  Spring had finally arrived in the high desert and we were all excited about the rising temperatures.  On the drive out, we went through our routine: set weekly goals for ourselves, and talk about how we can support one another in achieving those goals.  We also talk about what each client is working on in their therapy, and how to properly support the group.  As we were driving along on the dirt roads, Elise had just finished updating us on a particularly tough client when she began going around a right-turning curve.  We fishtailed on some loose gravel in the turn, and the driver proceeded to try and straighten out the truck by turning the steering wheel and attempting to take her foot off the gas pedal to step on the brake.

It didn't straighten us out. The truck went off the road on the inside of the turn, and we were in the sage brush. I was looking through the windshield thinking it was going to shatter with all the sage hitting it, so I ducked my head down into the center of the backseat and closed my eyes to protect them from broken glass.  After that, the trucked rolled and I just remember the sound of my seatbelt catching right before my head smashed into the roof of the truck (or it may have been the roof smashing into my head). Surprisingly, the truck came to a halt upright in the middle of the road.  As the dust was settling, we all checked to see if we were alright:

Charlie: "Is everyone alright?"
Me: "Yeah, I think so."
Dave: "I'm alright."
Elise: "I'm not alright. I'm not alright."

Since the roof of the truck was crushed in, the doors didn't open.  Thankfully, all but Dave's window and the front windshield had broken out, so Dave and I jumped out of my window to help Elise.  She was sitting in her seat with her seatbelt on. I told her I was going to hold her hand, and took her left hand in mine.  She said she had shooting pain down her arms (indicative of spinal injury) and she thought her foot was stuck under the brake pedal.  Just then, Dave yelled, "There's fluid leaking out of the  truck! Turn off the truck!"  In my and Elise's mind, that meant we needed to move away from the truck- we'd all learned in our Wilderness First Responder classes that if the scene is unsafe, don't approach it.  Since we were already in the scene, we had to move.

Elise: "My foot's stuck, I can't get out."
Me: "Well let's see if you can move it."
Elise: "You're going to have to help me."

Her foot wasn't actually stuck; in her delirium, she thought it was. Her ability to move her foot also showed me that the spinal chord wasn't severed, which is something I was fearful of in the back of my mind.  I reached over her and unbuckled her seat belt, and aided in turning her back-first towards the door. Tucking my arms under her armpits and then supporting and stabilizing her head/neck with my hands and torso, I stepped onto the running board of the truck and lifted her straight up out of the driver's window.  By this time Charlie had turned off the truck and then came around to the driver's side.  As I was supporting the upper portion of her body, he carried the rest of her and we walked about 50 ft. or so down the road away from the vehicle, placing her down gently.  I then began to talk with Elise while checking her for any outward signs of trauma while Charlie got some supplies from the items that had flown out of the truck bed during the roll-over.   We were about 15 minutes from pavement, and Dave barely had cell phone service to call our field director, "We just had an accident, we're going to need an ambulance."

Just as we placed Elise down, we were all momentarily silenced as a jet fighter flew very low over us, it was so surreal.  I noticed blood in Elise's right ear, and had a moment of panic (bleeding ears generally suggests a cracked skull/head trauma). Thankfully it ended up being a small cut from glass, and since she was covered in broken glass, it made sense.  After we laid her down on a sleeping pad and stabilized her head/neck, another truck full of  field staff rolled onto the scene.  This helped, as all of us from the accident were very much in shock.  I chose to stay with Elise, taking turns holding her head or her hand and trying to keep the fine road dust from getting blown into her eyes/mouth/nose.  She kept apologizing and was fully conscious the entire time.  More and more people began arriving, including more staff teams, the head field director, and police. When the ambulance arrived on-scene, with me at her head (again) we rolled Elise onto a backboard after they put a neck brace on her.

After Elise was taken to the ambulance to await the helicopter to the hospital, time seemed to speed up again for me.  Here are some snippets of the rest of the day, possibly in order:

The accident investigator asked us how many times we thought the truck rolled- Charlie, Dave, and I all agreed on once.  He then told us the truck actually flipped twice, and showed us the divots in the dirt to indicate the two flips.  He also asked us if anyone had been ejected as well as if the airbags went off.  Neither of those things had happened, and we all looked at one another, baffled as to be so fortunate to be uninjured.

A friend of mine (who was on another staff team) told me that the head field director had told her that she wasn't going into the field.  He had thought she was in the accident, instead of me.  Dave,  Charlie, and I were asked to fill out multiple pieces of paperwork; one releasing the ambulance from taking responsibility of us, another for the program we worked for detailing the accident, another for the doctor we went to in St. George to get checked out.  Photos were taken for insurance, and the helicopter took Elise to a hospital in Las Vegas.  Dave, Charlie, and I got a ride out of the field with another driver.  I ended up having a cut on my neck from my seatbelt, and head pain from my head hitting the roof (or the roof hitting my head).  The doctor we all went to gave us pain killers and muscle relaxers and told us we were all fine.

The x-ray after the fusion

I don't believe it truly hit me about how fortunate I was to walk away from the accident until we were back at the program's office and the woman who handles HR looked at me, cringing, and said, "I saw where your head was" after she had seen the photos.  The driver's side of the truck had hit first in the rolls, so it had crushed in more, with the driver's headrest bent in from the roof and the rear passenger's (my) roof crushed in to the headrest.

It took me half an hour in the shower to comb the knots out of my hair because of the wind and all the dust in it. At the end of the day, Dave, Charlie, and I all sat around a table in Dave's yard, looking at each other in disbelief.

A few days later, another friend and I drove down to visit Elise in the hospital, where she had undergone surgery the day after the accident to fuse some of her vertebrae together- she had broken her C7 vertebra in the accident.  She was so excited to see us, and I got to meet her mom. I was told that the surgeon came out after the surgery and told her mom, "You're daughter's here for a reason" and then went on to explain that he's never seen a spinal injury that severe on a person who wasn't already dead.

To this day, Elise calls me her hero for taking control of her head at the scene of the accident.

I tell her I hope she never ever pays me back.

Elise is currently enjoying and appreciating
life more than ever before.