Taylor's Gift (7 page)

A
ROUND
M
IDNIGHT
M
ONDAY
, M
ARCH
15, 2010
S
T
. M
ARY
'
S
H
OSPITAL
, G
RAND
J
UNCTION
, C
OLORADO

Tara

“Would you be willing to donate Taylor's organs?” the doctor asked. I looked at Todd and I knew my answer. But I wanted to make sure we agreed. We hadn't spoken to each other about it, but we'd each had conversations with my brother Bill. As I searched Todd's eyes for his answer, the events of the past twelve hours flashed through my mind.

Todd and I had ridden two and a half hours from the hospital in Vail and waited at least an hour in the St. Mary's hospital lobby before the orthopedic surgeon came out to tell us what was going on with Taylor. He was the first medical professional to talk to us since we had arrived at St. Mary's. When he sat down across from us, he introduced himself and his role.

I wanted to scream, “Just tell us how she is!” but I held my tongue.

Finally, he leaned in, rested his elbows on his knees, and told us what we'd been waiting so long to hear: “She has a fractured collarbone, and she's broken a couple of ribs. Her jaw is cracked. She's also lost some teeth, and her left leg shows a compound fracture in several places.”

By now it was after midnight, and we were all very tired. I was so cold I was shaking, and I couldn't seem to wrap my mind around his words.

“Both lungs collapsed, so they put chest tubes in before she left Vail,” the doctor added.

His list seemed endless.
Had they told us all this at the Vail ER?
I remembered them saying they couldn't operate on her there—that's why she had to be life-flighted to a larger hospital. Denver was out of the question because of the inclement weather, so they had sent us to St. Mary's in Grand Junction. Todd, the kids, and I had taken a hundred-and-fifty-mile shuttle ride on mountain roads while a winter storm raged around us.

“She has a pelvic fracture and she's fractured at least one clavicle,” the doctor continued.

My head hurt. I tried to blink back the tears pooling in my eyes.

“We're working on her leg right now. It's pretty bad. I had to set it, and we've attached rods to hold it in place.”

The tears started to flow as I thought about Taylor with rods in her legs. Volleyball was Taylor's life. Outside of school, she spent more time on the volleyball court than anywhere else. Her club team had just started playing in out-of-state tournaments. I couldn't imagine anything worse for her than missing a tournament.

“She has a tournament coming up in a few weeks. It's pretty important to her,” Todd said. “Will she be able to play?”

“She's not going to make that tournament,” the doctor said.

As a consultant, Todd was used to quickly assessing situations, identifying problems, and coming up with plans to fix things. But I could see he was uneasy about this.

“When we see her, I know she's going to want to know, so, how long do you think it will take her to be back on the court?” Todd asked.

“I've already done the surgery on her leg and that should heal fine,” the surgeon said. “We can fix the collarbone, broken ribs, and her jaw. Under normal circumstances, if I do everything
I
can, it would take six months to a year, and with rehab, she would be ready to play in eighteen months, but—”

At the time, the words “normal circumstances” just whizzed right past me. “Eighteen months? That's too long!” I said, looking at Todd.

“High school . . .” he said. “She's going to be devastated!”

High school volleyball tryouts were just a few months away, and it was all Taylor and her friends talked about. Making the high school team meant everything to her.

But I couldn't think about it then; the surgeon was still talking.

“. . . that's the least of your worries; broken bones aren't life-threatening. Before we can even begin to worry about that, we need to focus on her
head injuries
. Her C7 is fractured, and her brain is swelling. The neurosurgeon and her team are still in surgery trying to relieve the pressure. That's where our attention needs to be focused right now. Until we get the swelling under control, we can't worry about the rest of her injuries.”

I felt my heart racing as I tried to comprehend his words.
Fractured C7? Was that the spine?
Brain swelling? What did that mean?
The doctor shifted uncomfortably in his seat and then stood to leave. “The neurosurgeon will be out to talk to you as soon as she finishes. Do you have any questions?”

Todd looked at me; his eyes were red-rimmed and watery. After eighteen years of marriage, I knew he had the same question I did. His voice cracked when he asked it. “Are you saying we need to be prepared for a life or death situation?”

The doctor took a deep breath and slowly exhaled before he spoke. “You're going to need to speak to the neurosurgeon, but you need to prepare yourselves for that.”

Somewhere deep inside me a scream bubbled up and exploded into the back of my throat in a burst of bile. I jumped up and ran for the restroom.

Peyton and Ryan had gone with a chaplain to get some food, so they weren't present when the doctor gave us the news. But they heard me retching when they returned. When I came out of the bathroom, I saw them searching my tearstained face for an answer, and I knew that they knew something was terribly wrong.

The kids were exhausted. We'd had two days of travel and a big day on the slopes before the accident. After the doctors at Vail had decided to life-flight Taylor, we'd rushed back to the condo and in just minutes thrown everything we'd brought with us back into our suitcases and piled it all into the Beaver Creek shuttle van that had driven us to St. Mary's. After we arrived, we'd taken up residence in the hospital lobby—our weary bodies, our suitcases, and the kind shuttle driver who just wanted to make sure we were doing okay.
How am I going to take care of these kids and be there for Taylor too? I can barely take care of myself
, I thought, looking into my children's tired and sad little faces.

The elevator door opened. The chaplain and a woman wearing black pants and a khaki overcoat walked toward us.

“They're bringing in a counselor!” I whispered to Todd as I started to panic. But the woman held out her arms to me, and I looked at her face. “Kristin!” I said, jumping off the loveseat in the lobby and running to her.

“I'm here,” she said.

Kristin Balko was a sorority sister of mine from college. We'd lost touch several years earlier when she and her physician husband, Greg, had moved to Colorado. I hadn't seen her in fifteen years. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Greg got a call about the accident. When we heard the name we knew it was you. I figured you didn't have anybody here, so I came to get your kids.”

I burst into fresh tears. I didn't know what to say. It was too much for me, watching this angel from God just swoop in and sweep up my kids. I introduced her to Ryan and Peyton, and I was even more stunned that they were willing to go with her. To me it was just proof of how badly they wanted to escape the nightmare playing out at the hospital.

As I walked the three of them to the elevator, I began crying again. The sobs took every breath I had, and suddenly I began to sway, everything went dark, and then my knees buckled and I fell to the floor.

“Oh, honey,” Kristin said, rushing toward me. She put her arms around me and tried to console me.

Sobbing, I looked up at her and said what so far I'd only been thinking. “We're gonna lose her.”

Todd

After the kids left, Tara and I sat together in a loveseat in the empty lobby and waited for the neurosurgeon to come speak to us. Silently, I prayed for Taylor.
C'mon, God, you've got to heal her
, I begged. Tara was freezing. The staff brought her hot blankets, but even when she was wrapped in their heat, she couldn't stop shaking. We sat there for what seemed like hours, praying and waiting for news. Finally, the surgeon came out and asked us to join her in a small conference room.

“Taylor has a severe brain injury with a lot of swelling,” Dr. Pemblee
*
began. “We operated, trying to do everything we could, but—”

“Oh, God, have we lost our daughter?” Tara said, not wanting her to finish her sentence.

I was on the edge of my seat. My chest burned like an invisible vise was squeezing it, preventing me from breathing.

“In the twenty-two years I've done this surgery, I've never seen anyone survive it,” Dr. Pemblee said. “You need to prepare yourselves for that. That's the reality.”

There was a long pause as I tried to make sense of her words. Taylor was alive? But, for how long?

Tara grabbed the edge of her seat as if to hold herself back, and then she suddenly started screaming. “Get out! Get out! I need you to leave—right now!”

“Tara, wait!” I said, grabbing her wrist.

“She's not going to die! She's not!” Tara screamed. Dr. Pemblee looked down, busying herself with the notes in her lap.

I wrapped my arms around Tara and pulled her toward me. She buried her face into my chest and sobbed.

“Can we see her?” I asked. I glanced down at Tara, “We
need
to see Taylor.”

“Yes, but not yet. She's still in surgery.”

Tara continued to sob into my chest. Dr. Pemblee didn't have a great bedside manner, but she was a neurosurgeon giving us neurological facts about our daughter. Facts we didn't want to believe. Tara was angry and she wanted the bearer of this unfathomably bad news gone, but I wanted to learn as much as I could. To Dr. Pemblee's credit, at least she spoke in a way we could understand. I could see compassion in her eyes even if we didn't hear it in her words. I knew that other than God Himself, she was the only one who could save our daughter.

“Once she is out of surgery, they will take her to ICU to get her stabilized. So it will be a while before you can see her. But in the meantime, I want you to be prepared for what you're going to see—”

Tara didn't want to hear any more. She pulled away from my chest and began to rock back and forth, wailing.

“She's going to have a lot of tubes connected to her. She's on a ventilator, so be aware there is a large tube in her mouth and a
smaller one in her nose. She has an external fixation device—a rod, basically—on her left leg to hold it in place, and she's hooked up to several IVs. You need to know, she won't look like herself. She's got an incision on her head, and she's pretty bruised up.”

It was as if my mind shut down, because I didn't hear a thing she said after that. She finished talking, and I shook her hand. As Dr. Pemblee turned to leave, Tara slipped from my grip and fell on her knees in front of me. From somewhere deep within Tara a primal wail erupted, racking her body with sobs. Once again, I wrapped my arms around her. I pulled her close and buried my face in her hair as I wept too.

“We have to plan a funeral . . . I've never planned a funeral,” she said between gasps of air. I tightened my arms around my wife in an effort to comfort her, but it didn't help. She turned her crying for Taylor into crying out to the only One who could save her. “God, please, You have to do something. You have to save her!” Tara begged over and over again.

Soon, her pain turned to anger, and without realizing it she started to pound her fists into my thighs. “This is not happening; we are not losing Taylor. We're not planning a funeral!”

Tara was quickly falling apart. I grabbed her by the shoulders and gently shook her until she looked up at me. Her dark hair was matted to her tearstained face. “We can do this,” I said, looking into her red, swollen eyes. “I'm here. I've got it. I'm going to be your rock.”

This was the worst thing either of us had been through in our lives, and I was terrified to learn how it would turn out. I already knew I was losing my daughter. Now I feared I was also losing my wife. It broke my heart to see the woman I dearly loved in so much pain. “We're going to get through this,” I repeated again and again, with as much resolve as I could. But I knew it wouldn't be okay. There was nothing I could do to fix it.
Please, God, You've got to heal Taylor
, I prayed.

After Tara quieted down, I helped her walk from the conference room back to our spot on the loveseat in the lobby. She was still
shaking from the icy cold that only she could feel. After she was settled, I walked across the lobby, but I kept my eye on her while I called Matt Sunshine. Matt and Beth were our best friends. For the past thirteen years, we'd taken almost every vacation together—except this one. The Sunshines were vacationing in England and were scheduled to leave for France in a few hours. With the time difference, I knew I would wake Matt up, but I also knew he would want me to.