March 30th, 1997 - March 30th ad infinitum - Part III

Today is the day I complete Lisa's story.  It doesn't mean that her story is over.  Far from it.  I can't tell you how excited I am though that I get to be the one along for the ride, to live with her, love with her, laugh with her, survive with her.  I get to catalog life's events as they will happen with her. 
It is also the day that Lisa will be delivering this story to her seniors at a rally.  In fact, she is probably preparing in her mind the scope of the speech.  See, she fashions the whole story around choice.  You choose to drink and drive, or drink and not drive.  It is all about responsibility and accountability to your decision making process.  She is also quick to tell you she loathes the attachment of the word "accident" to DUI crashes.  I had never given that a thought until I met her and heard her story.
By assigning the word accident to a DUI, it grammatically absolves the offender and slaps the victim right in the face.  Think about it...I got blasted last night, decided I was only three blocks from home, hopped in the car, ran a curb, mowed down your son/daughter and the news reports it as...an accident?!  Sure, I didn't mean to kill your kid, but I did make the choice to drive home and the one thing that could have prevented it would have been if I decided not to drive.  This is usually where Lisa will add that DUI's are 100% preventable, yet they continue to happen at such a "fashionable" rate...but I digress.
Where we last left Lisa, she was relearning the use of her body.  Battling through the recovery of a broken body, signs of nerve life began to again show up in her extremities.  If you have had to do any kind of physical rehab work on your body, then you might be able to imagine having to do it with your entire body.  A long and excruciating process.
At 22 years old, the collegiate, waitress and aspiring artist had a new full time job, physical therapy.  On this road to recovery, it was something fairly ironic.  As Lisa was finding her way literally back to her feet after six months in and out of hospitals, surgeries and therapy, her offender was finding his way out of prison for good behavior.  He had been sentenced to nine months and had it commuted by three.  To his credit, he did not know the extent of Lisa's injuries.  See, Lisa never made it to the trial to have her moment in court, when she could stand before her offender and the judge and show them what he did to her, because the district attorney's office provided them the wrong address.  By the time they arrived at the correct facility, the judgement had been levied and the only documentation on paper was that a couple had been injured in the crash, one concussion and one broken leg.  Lisa's struggle to survive had been reduced to "female with one broken leg".  That was the entirety of her representation in that court proceeding.
He did have a civil judgement levied against him, but to enforce that would require Lisa finding him and amazingly, he has fallen off the face of the planet.  Go figure.  It was up to Lisa to survive, because that's just what she does.
In the years after her initial nights in the hospital, Lisa has had a few more surgeries directly related to her injuries, even as late as about two years ago.  It is expected that there are more to come and if asked, Lisa would probably just shrug, admit it sucks, but say that it has to be done.  After 15 years of recovery time, Lisa still has physical issues which don't look to ever be alleviated. 
-Nerve damage in both her legs has left her with severe drop foot on one side.  This requires the shackles of a hard plastic leg brace to hold her foot at a 90 degree angle so she doesn't trip on herself.
-That same nerve damage has left both her legs in a state of "pins and needles".  You know when your leg falls asleep and you start to get some sensation back?  Yeah, that uncomfortable prickly feeling, picture living with that in both feet, 24/7.  Yeah.
-Nerve damage in the legs and right arm have left muscles severely atrophied.  Lisa won't be running, climbing or lifting anything heavy for the rest of her life.  On one hand that's probably a cool thing, but on the other, imagine the level of dependence it creates when say, you can't even move a case of paper around your classroom and have to wait for a student to do it for you.
Doctors prepared her by saying who quite knows how her body might further break down in the future because of all the past trauma.  In fact, at the age of 23, Lisa was being told that her physical body was probably more in tune with that of someone in their 30's.  So now in her 30's, Lisa's body is already preparing to take on the likes of arthritis.
Yet she survives.
When she was out of the hospital and trying to find her own path again back in San Jose, Lisa had "earned" a disabled placard.  The VIP parking pass that most of us joked would be so cool to have.  She used it until someone got in her face, because she was "too young and didn't look like she needed it".  It went in the garbage.  Lisa went back to parking with the rest of us.  To this day Lisa qualifies for a disabled placard, but refuses because of that instance.
And she survives.
And let me tell you something else about her that I've always found mesmorizing.  She never holds a grudge against people who drink and drive.  She doesn't get mad at people for drinking.  Heck, she'll be the first to offer a toast and throw a beer back at a party.  She can separate the person from the act and for someone who has endured so much physically, emotionally and even financially around this, I am still amazed that she can separate those aspects.  Drinking and driving does not make the person bad, it means they made a bad decision.  Hopefully it's one that helps them to realize the error without substantial loss, but still, if there was anyone who could just go ahead and be mad at the world and blame people for their mistakes, it would be her you would think, but no, she doesn't.
She continues to survive.
She focuses what could have been that white-hot anger, the embarressement of those who didn't think she was really disabled and uses it to hone her story.  She hopes one teen in that audience today is going to hear it and use it to help themselves.  Doesn't matter if they cry or not, doesn't matter if they come talk to her.  It only matters that they get the message.  Don't make life harder with a stupid decision.  Why? Life is hard enough. 
And that is the other fascinating thing about Lisa's story.  There is no gauge to success.  How many people have survived with Lisa because of her story?  We don't know, there's no stat tracking lack of crashes.  There's no way to know three years from now that a former student on his or her own 21st birthday, living in Chicago, takes the train home after celebrating because they remembered her story.  There's no way to know if a family walking home from the Cubs game now survived with Lisa because that 21 year old left their car at the Cubs parking lot.  There's just no way.
But as long as Lisa is here, she's here to tell her story and hope that everyone out there who hears it will survive.
So I ask:
Do you have the courage to stand in front of 3,000 high school students and try to persuade them that choosing not to drink is not only the right choice (at their age), but a life saving one also?  Do you have the courage to stand in front of a room full of convicted youth, who have been hardened by their gangs, the streets and the society who tells them they are trash and try to convince them, that drugs and alcohol are not a path to success?  Do you have the courage to keep an extra $20 in your purse or wallet so that if you decide the drinks are too good to pass up, you still can afford a ride home rather than choosing to "try and just make it home by focusing on the center line real hard"?  Do you have the courage to not drink so that your friends, your family can let themselves off the hook for a night and know they can trust their lives to you to get them home safe?
Do you have the courage to save a life?

March 30th, 1997 - March 30th ad infinitum - Part II

You might have thought a doctor massaging a heart back to life, the literary equivalent of a happy ending, might have brought about a more euphoric part two here, but no, life and it's sometimes cruel lessons does not always play by the rules.  See, just because Lisa's heart was beating again, did not mean all was right in the universe.  Because when a heart stops, everything stops, so when a heart starts again, everything in the body has to figure how first that it is working and then figure out how to get all those components working together again.
Think of it like this, you ever do a hard shutoff of your computer, maybe because it froze or was taking too long to load something?  And then when you boot it back up, you get a little nasty gram saying you shouldn't have suddenly shut it off and there may be damage or data loss thanks to that?  The body kind of works the same way.
Lisa was alive, but now her blood pressure was waaay out of whack.  So much so that doctors needed to figure out how to regulate it, lest they simply lose this life all over again.  The idea (and a truly lifesaving one) was to pump her full of saline solution.  Adding that water weight and pressure would force the heart and blood stream to work harder to get blood from the brain to the toes and back.  It added over 50 pounds of weight onto Lisa's otherwise svelte frame (notice the good husbandry duty of not listing the weight, while still giving the impact of how much pressure was put on her body).  So just as one problem was solved, it actually created a series of new ones.  Doctors knew she had a broken back, any movement could permanently paralyze her from the waist down (assuming she survived) and now with the water weight, Lisa's body was literally expanded and bloated, so you know that incision I told you about from sternum to waistline, doctors could no longer close that opening.  It was like her skin was a jacket three sizes too small and they couldn't zip it up.
Well, obviously, with an open wound, they wouldn't be able to flip her over to perform the back surgery, so the only other option was to graft skin over the expanded opened wound.  As Lisa so technically puts it, they used a "cheese slicer" to remove layers of her skin from her upper thigh to fuse them to her abdominal area to close the wound, to be able to turn her over, to be able to fuse her spine, to be able to hope that she would one day walk again.
The skin grafting took five tries to finally close her up and be able to get her turned over.
The back surgery installed hardware that in an x-ray looks like a small ladder.  It extends about eight inches in vertical length and for all accounts and purposes, has actually made her lower back one of the strongest points in her body.  It might be hard to convince her of that even today, when she twists a little too quickly and gets a twang of pain, or other days when there's a lingering aching just because that's the way it is.  But besides the installed back brace, Lisa also (her words) had a titanium car antenna fused to that broken leg and some other nuts and bolts put into varying places to help stabilize joints.  A regular bionic woman and up until about 2004 or 2005 a walk through a metal detector would reflect that.  We even kept a note from her doctor verifying that she had metal implants in her body, so please don't strip search her.
From the one event, Lisa incurred 19 scars (a tally that has since grown over the years), an easily memorable number as it matches her favorite hockey player's, Steve Yzerman.  At least she had that going for her, because otherwise, after three weeks of a drug induced coma, Lisa was finally waking to a world that was completely upside down.  Although doctors felt more comfortable after getting her stabilized, there was still no guarantee that she would walk again, or that her mind for that matter, would serve her the same.  But to Lisa, waking for the first time and wondering where she was, taking in her surroundings and trying to figure out why she was strapped into a bed by a bevy of tubes, hoses and other assorted lines, saw and recognized her most devastating injury...her right hand was balled up into a tight fist.  In the scramble to save Lisa's life, things like nerve injuries (to her legs and her right arm) took a back seat to keeping her breathing.  Doctors (and rightly so) prioritzied her injuries and damage caused by the seatbelt to her brachial plexus (the main nerve down the arm) was not viewed as life threatening, nor was it very treatable (at least in 1997), so it ended up "freezing" and shortening her tendons down her right arm, ending in a balled up fist, that not even the strongest orderly could undo.
Why is a balled fist worthy of Lisa breaking out in sobs?  Oh, I didn't tell you did I?  On that fateful trip back to the Bay Area, Lisa was returning to San Jose State where she was an art major.  The kind that uses their hands to draw, to paint, to create life upon canvas, for Lisa specifically, a now-unusable-right-handed-artist.  Not only was Lisa looking to this for livelihood, but she also had felt the lure of art for as long as she could remember.  I personally like to think of her as the five year old who used crayons to draw all over the walls, but it was so good, her parents just couldn't bring themselves to chastise her for it.  She was certain she was destined to be an artist and now all she saw in that bed, while everyone around her were crying out in tears of joy, Lisa saw the door to her future slammed shut.
Now awake and coping with the loss of a normal vibrant college life, Lisa was about to begin the real work.  Soon, it would be time to rehabilitate this broken body, to test what in her body would work and what in this now fragile body, Lisa would just have to learn to live with.  22 years old and Lisa was about to begin the process to attempt to relearn everything you and I take for granted.  Everything.  Do you think about when you lift a soda or bottle of water to your mouth?  Do you worry about missing your mouth, about dropping the bottle because your grip is so weak?  Do you think about when you reach for a fork, lift it, stab it into some food and direct it to yourself?  Do you plan your trip to a bathroom, knowing that it will take you 30-45 minutes to get there and it will still require assistance when you do reach the promised land?
Everything.
More to come...

March 30th, 1997 - March 30th ad infinitum - Part I

"It's not what doesn't kill you makes you stronger...it's that you have to have the strength in you to face it and survive it." - Lisa Pimental

I've started, deleted, amended and restarted this entry about a dozen times and it was all in the hopes of posting it on March 30th, 2012.  It didn't work out that way but I realized for me in this circumstance, the date is not nearly as important as the message.  Now don't get me wrong, this date is infinitely important and so it shall be for the rest of my and Lisa's life, as well as the countless others who were both directly and indirectly involved with the events of that date back in 1997.
Lisa has told this story more times than I can ever know and I've told it both with and without her a number of times myself.  By no means am I an expert on the story, but I like to think I now know enough about it to responsibly share it with all of you. 
This might just be one of the most important entries I ever write whether in this blog or in anything else I do.  I am not writing to shock you, upset you or preach that you are wrong or right in how you live life, I am simply telling the story of Lisa in the last 15 years.  Maybe you'll see the same beacon of light that I do, maybe it will make you think about certain choices you've made in the past, maybe (and hopefully) for those of you with children (especially those entering prom season and soon thereafter, summertime, driving time, party time) you will share it with them.
I've learned so much from Lisa, what she has endured and also about how much strength she has.  I am taking a leap of faith that I can write this, both because I feel like I know the story and since she has shared it enough times, I don't think she would feel I am betraying her trust by placing it here, for "public record" so to speak.  Please, I ask of you, if you've ever read anything I've written here, this is the one that I am asking you absorb into your very being, the one I hope you take to heart and then decide to share with someone around you.  The one you print and place on the fridge as a reminder, the one that like myself, always think about when you decide to drink.
This is the story of Lisa, the light of my life:

March 30, 1997 was a Sunday and it also happened to be Easter that year.  Lisa, a college student, was travelling back from Southern California with her boyfriend at the time (no, not me, we didn't meet until 2001; that'll be another story for another time) via northbound I-5.  Both of them were looking forward to getting home and back into the swing after having Spring Break off.  One final stop was made for food to refuel their bodies and they were off again driving with a sunset to their west over the mountainside.  At around 7pm as they were nearing the Hanford area of I-5, Lisa was nuzzled up in the passenger seat, utilizing the time to catch a catnap when she was awakened by two words sternly yelled out, "Oh shit!"
That would be the last coherent thought Lisa recalled on her own until she woke up nearly three weeks later in a hospital bed from a drug induced coma.  What ensued, was told to Lisa and went like this...While driving in the slow lane, her boyfriend noticed headlights coming up from behind; the amount of reaction time he had was only enough to curse before their small Toyota pickup was flung vertically, end over end seven or eight times up the freeway. 

They had been rear ended by a drunk driver who was travelling near twice the speed they were. 

I am by no means a science major, but to pause on this impact for a moment, Lisa's vehicle was travelling 70 mph, the other driver, about 130 mph.  That Mustang that rear ended them, created an impact with such force it accelerated Lisa's vehicle and actually flung it into the air.  It was the equivilant of something standing still being hit by another object going 60 mph. 
Both vehicles came to rest off the sides of the freeway.  To this day, I've not heard anything about how traffic was impacted around them, but needless to say, on a four-lane highway, one can imagine the backup something like this would cause.  Fortunately, for all parties, there was a group of fledgling paramedics travelling south who witnessed the impact and were able to get turned around and offer immediate assistance to those in the crash.  It didn't take long for police and further paramedic assistance to arrive either.  What they discovered was Lisa's vehicle had been struck so fiercely that the compression had caused both doors on the pickup to swing open leaving Lisa and her boyfriend exposed to the elements through their tumble.  This left her boyfriend with a compound fracture of his left arm and Lisa with severe road rash of her right arm as it dragged on the ground with each tumble.
As bad as that may sound, those were probably the easiest of the injuries to deal with.  But to diverge for a second, so as not to forget about the other car and its occupants, there were four men in that car, who were now out and wandering in the lanes of traffic, possibly slightly in shock, but mainly because they were so drunk, that they didn't realize they were walking in lanes of traffic on an interstate freeway.  The driver of the vehicle was not the owner of the car, but out of their merry band, had decided he was the most sober and so would be responsible and drive his buddies home. 
He blew a .28 alcohol reading into a breathalizer (that is over triple the amount of the legal limit in all 50 states).  As just as a point of reference, the average person drinking alcohol will usually be blacking out or passed out by the time they reach .30 and is beginning to feel the effects of alcohol poisoning.
Back to Lisa and her boyfriend who were being tended for their wounds.  The concern was initially with her boyfriend, who was showing signs of head trauma.  He had bleeding in the eye sockets which typically indicates severe head trauma, whereas Lisa's only outward showing injuries were her arm and a compound fracture of the upper leg.  Fortunately, for her boyfriend, the head trauma ended up being a fairly severe concussion and not something that would be any form of permanent brain damage.

---As a moment of levity to this story, (and as I said previously) Lisa doesn't remember this but has been told, that during her airlift out to a nearby hospital, she got into a fight with the paramedic who was cutting off her jeans to be able to treat her leg.  Not that she thought she was being attacked, but she was mad that he was destroying her brand new, wonderful fitting, cute as hell, jeans!  She tells me this is something that a boy would never truly appreciate, so ladies, I leave you that tidbit, so that you might further understand Lisa's pain of losing a pair of perfect jeans that evening.  Her other disappointment is that she was able to get airlifted on one of those cool super fast helicopters, but can't remember the ride to save her life---

Hidden behind the outward showing injuries of Lisa was the more serious trauma doctors were going to discover once they got her into an operating room.  See, she had been complaining of a stomach ache to the paramedics and had been vomitting intermittently all the way to the hospital.  Now, with her at the facility, doctors took notice of a broken back, two of her lower vertebrae, the leg and the very real possibility that there was internal damage due to the restraint of the seatbelt while tumbling. 
(Mind you, Lisa will tell you that she doesn't blame the seatbelt for her further injuries, without it, this story would have been about the fatality of Lisa, not the struggle to survive.)
It was decided that they needed to go inside and do an exploratory surgery through Lisa's abdomen and find out what exactly was causing the impulse to vomit.  They cut a vertical opening from sternum down to below her belly button and pulled back the skin.  What they were able to find was that the seat belt, while saving her life, had crushed a portion of her colon and it was causing a backed up clogging which would, with enough time, cause Lisa to go into toxic shock and die.  There was no choice, with her opened there, broken leg, broken back and menagerie other injuries, they needed to remove 6-8" of her colon to ensure her survival.  And as the decision was made and they worked to repair her body, they had to now save Lisa's life in a very real way; her heart stopped in the middle of that surgery.

I could be cruel and end today's portion of the story there, recharging my batteries and waiting until I have the strength and steady hand to continue, but I will give you this before I close, one of the more amazing aspects of this story...

Because Lisa was opened up from sternum to waistline, they couldn't do what you so often see on shows like House or Grey's Anatomy, they could not simply put the paddles to her chest and revive her.  First, where would one place the paddles on an open body, second, the jolt could very well cause issues because her body is open, that body bounce could fling some stuff around that really shouldn't be moving.  So instinctually, the lead surgeon reached into Lisa's chest cavity, took her heart into his hands and massaged until it began beating on it's own again.
More to come...