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...
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