Chapter One: The Day of the Blinding
Loss is permanent, untreatable and unchanging. We can be blind to this. I was, until I was blinded.
The day started out as a good day. In fact, it was one of the first good days in a month of bad days in a whole year of struggling. The theme of that year was loss-- divesting myself of possessions and of people. On that day I felt energized, so I got on my bike, let the sun shine on me and rode hard to think and breathe.
Later that day I had a date to meet a new person. I was in the throes of getting over the loss of someone I loved deeply, and on this day I felt the first blushes of feeling alive.
Just when I thought I was maybe, hopefully, turning the corner on the theme of loss, another loss occurred. On that day I left the world of the sighted and entered the world of shadows, of almost blindness. A healthy, energetic, fiercely independent, positive and confident woman with a mountain of doubts and a need to please became a disabled person who had to rely on others to do the basic acts of daily living. And in a word, it sucked.
I was training for a sprint triathlon. I had decided to attempt this new endeavor to challenge myself and to deal with the pain I was feeling from the loss of a relationship. I turned inward into my body and the self-focus it takes to get ready for an event, needful of the structure it provided that could contain some of my grieving and release some of my pain. I thought that pushing my body and being in physical pain would distract me from emotional pain.
The year had been rough in general. Changing careers as a self-employed person in a failing economy had left me as a single mom at the poverty line. I sold anything and everything I had of value, which I discovered was not much. I sold my car, which was paid off and had held its value, as well as the diamond from my engagement ring, which I no longer wore, in order to keep our house and to keep my child in her private Montessori school.
I had just begun to turn a corner in my new endeavor, had begun to get by financially and gain some momentum in my career. And I had also begun shaking off the sadness and sludge of a two-year relationship that ended amicably, but felt like a crushing blow.
I woke up that day on July 2010 feeling energized and with a plan. And I could accomplish it because my daughter was at her Dad’s for the weekend and I had “me” time. My plan was to train, to push my body, to do some block sets of different types of exercises and then to reward myself by going out that night. First I rode my bike about 15 miles.
I was one of those rare people that had never learned to ride a bike as a child. And they don’t make training wheels for adults. I had made a few bike riding attempts, the last at the age of 40, but I always gave into the fear of feeling really out of control. So on my 42nd birthday, I finally overcame my fear of learning to ride and I did it. I learned to ride with the help and guidance of my recent ex-boyfriend, one of the last acts of consideration, kindness, and support that had been the hallmarks of our relationship. In learning to ride a bike I felt a freedom not only of movement but also of overcoming fear.
And on that bike in the three weeks since the end of that relationship, I had been working out my feelings while riding, sometimes angry, and sometimes crying.
That morning I had a ton of energy, and so after the ride, I decided to keep challenging myself. So I went straight to a P90X intense workout using the DVD and setting up in the den of my house.
One of the segments I had been doing was the chest and back. So, on this day, like on others, I rigged my tube bands with handles to do the back work. The video shows a band that is really long, but I had two that were not so long, but had clips on the ends, so they could be clipped together and affixed to the doorframe to accomplish the back pulls. An ingenious fix to my problems, I thought, as I often rig things to work around a problem. And it had worked in the past.
But on this day as I was doing the last rep and “giving it my all” the door frame came loose and the part where the two bands were clipped together, which were made of plastic, hit me at a speed and force which I later found out was 200 miles per hour.
All I remember is a split second sound like a crack, then intense pain and the recoil of my head hitting the hardwood floor, missing the bricks around the fireplace by less than an inch. This all seemed like it took a second.
Then there was darkness, not a pitch black but a muddy gray of shadow. I was on the floor and then sat up as fluid gushed from my eyes into my mouth, which tasted both of salt and metal. I assumed the saltiness was from my eyes and the metallic taste was obviously blood. But in the mix I had no idea where the blood was coming from, just that the mixture was pouring from the top part of my head and eyes.
I knew immediately that this was bad, really bad. I had the sense of that and I knew I needed to get help. So I crawled on the floor, because for some reason I could not seem to stand up, until I found my house phone.
Then I had to figure out how to feel the keys and determine through a visual map where the 9 and 1 keys were. I made a few attempts and on the second I called 611, which I knew because it reached Time Warner Cable. On the third attempt I managed to call 911 and reported my accident to a dispatcher who stayed on the phone with me until the ambulance arrived.
I was lying on the floor holding the phone talking to the dispatcher, in a pain that I knew was there but did not register with the adrenaline pumping to keep me alert. I do not really remember what I told the dispatcher about the accident, but I remember using words like “hit hard in the eyes,” “cannot see,” “fell backwards” and “hit head.”
My side door, the one closest to me, was open so the emergency personnel would not have to break down the door. I remember being grateful they would be able to get to me.
I asked the dispatcher to call my sister, one of the only numbers I could remember. Thanks to the age of contact lists and saving numbers, I realized I knew only that one number and the number at my mom’s in Tampa by heart, which I remember thinking was pathetic because I used to know tons of numbers and they made them the length they did so you could easily retain them to transfer them from short to long term memory. But the one number was enough and they were able to reach her.
It took about 12 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. I know this not because I could see the time, but because I kept asking the dispatcher how much longer, how much longer, sensing I could pass out or become less able to articulate what happened as the pain became more and more overwhelming.
The ambulance, a neighbor, and my sister arrived around the same time and I knew it was bad based on their reactions. Even though I could not see anything, I could sense it and hear it in the voices of the paramedics and the fact they very gently strapped me on the neck brace and board because they needed to make sure I had not suffered head or neck trauma.
I remember being in the ambulance trying to describe what had happened and being asked questions about loss of consciousness and level of pain, which was the first time I realized that I was in excruciating pain. Sometimes we do not know how much pain we are in until someone asks us.
I was really in my body on that ride to the ER, my thoughts examining and assessing what was I able to see, where was the pain coming from, and what type of pain it was. I was so present, so in the moment, that I did not think of the next steps or the future, or of informing my ex-husband and my daughter. My only thought was that a really bad thing has happened, I caused it, and I am in incredible pain.
I wish I could tell you I was scared, but that was not the case. With the adrenaline pumping, I was in survival mode and there was no time for fear. That did not come until later, at the hospital, when the amount of damage I had done became clearer.
The ER was chaos on a late Saturday afternoon, which is supposedly the worst time to be in an ER. When they wheeled me in, they had no place to put me and initially I was in a hallway, just like you see on TV where there are people with medical emergencies lining the hallways but you are not really sure that actually happens. It does, on a late Saturday afternoon in a public hospital.
The ophthalmology residents saw me quickly. I got the feeling they don’t get a ton of eye injury calls. They were, from what I could tell, a little blown away and somewhat baffled by what they saw, or rather what they could not see.
I recounted my story again and they communicated they had never seen anything like this. A blunt force trauma to both eyes almost never happens and they were trying to figure out what it was that hit me and how it managed to do so much damage. I kept saying the tube bands were the hardest resistance and I was pulling from a distance of about 8 feet. And also I was really strong. I could tell they had this mix of “How cool!” with “We have no clue what to do.” I heard them consulting on the phone with several attending physicians.
At the end of the retelling of the whacking-my-eyes-out story, I added, “I have no insurance.” And for some reason I felt it was important everyone in the ER attending to me knew this. I kept repeating that I was uninsured, thinking that maybe they would give me a colored wristband that signaled, “Don’t give this one any unnecessary tests.” Maybe I was afraid they would not treat me the same or cut corners or stick me in the hall. (But wait, I was already in the hallway).
This was a public hospital, so I figured that they treated many others that were uninsured in that ER, probably also hanging out in the hallways. But what I realized was that as a middle-aged white woman that was brought in as Dr. Medlock, they would not assume I was one of the millions not able to afford health insurance.
I had been dropped from my ex-husband’s insurance as of June 1 of that year because of his remarriage and I could not afford a private policy. I thought I could be eligible for COBRA, but never got a letter or any option to sign up. Later I found the letters had gone to his new house and he failed to forward them to me. I’m not sure, even so, that I could have afforded it.
After the sixth or seventh time I repeated the no-insurance mantra (while visions of hospital bills danced in my head), the residents finally said, “It does not matter, we will do everything we need to do.” They also added, “Most of the people in here are uninsured.”
Later when I saw the billing person, I told her I thought I had a 60-day window for COBRA, and she said that was not true, but I knew better. I got on the phone with someone I knew from Blue Cross Blue Shield, them with the Employee Insurance program through the state.
And guess what? 57 of the 60 days had elapsed and we had three days to get me covered. So, the process of getting coverage began on that day and through the help of many, including someone walking the paperwork through the system on my last day of eligibility, I became an insured American.
If I had listened to the hospital and their incorrect information, I would have been stuck with over $30,000 in medical bills from just the hospital stay. I had tenacity, even in the worst of times. And I won the first in what would be a long series of battles. That was a good sign.
Much of what I remember about the ER was the pain, the neck brace burrowing in deep and the board under me hard and unforgiving, causing me more pain and an inability to move. Even more painful and jarring were the lights they kept shining in my eyes, which I could tell were there along with just shadows, and nothing else.
At some point my sister called my parents and my ex-husband. But the only story she could tell was that there was severe trauma and lots of blood in the eyes, so the doctors could not see anything and have no idea of how much damage was done. At least I thought that is what she was saying. Later I found out she significantly downplayed the accident.
There was also an unknown about whether the recoil where I hit the back of my head or the blow to the front of my head had caused any brain trauma. My brain seemed to be working fine. I was alert, asking tons of questions and making snarky comments. I just needed the pain to stop, which I knew would be a whole other issue.
Pain and managing it is a theme in my life. My body does not respond to opiate painkillers. So for me taking a Vicadin or Oxycodone or anything else is like taking a placebo.
I know this from other hospital stitch ups, like my C-section. Let’s just say that by the time they got my daughter out, the epidural had worn off, so I could feel every stich going in and pulling through in the 45 minutes it took to close up the incision. And afterward they could not control my pain and I shook for 6 hours. There have been other post op and injury related sources of pain where no amount of painkiller seemed to work, or knock me out.
Knowing this about my body I knew two things: it was going to be deep breathing and meditation for my short-term future, and I was going to be asked if I was a drug addict.
So they hung the bag of Percocet and I thought, “Great, this one does not work.” After a while I got the pain level question using the 1-to-10 scale. “My pain is an 11,” I said. And they responded with their first set of hems and haws and “What’s up with that?”
Then they switched to morphine, which I knew had no chance of touching the pain, but I thought, “Hell, I will give it a go.” What I have learned is that you can’t actually say out loud things like “There is no way that crap is going to work,” because then they are assured you have a drug problem.
After the morphine there was another round of “How is your pain?” To which I answered coherently, “An 11.” “Impossible!” said the doctors. “You should be feeling less pain and be a little sedated.” “Do I look sedated?” I asked. “Well, no,” said the resident, who would become my go-to doctor for the rest of the stay.
At this point I decided to recount my numerous other horror stories with the theme of “I am in a boatload of uncontrolled pain.” This, for some odd reason, led them to think I was drug seeking.
I had been through this rodeo before, though, so I answered the “Is she a druggie?” questions convincingly enough to get what I call “the good stuff.” For me the good stuff is really not that good, but it does take the edge off. It is something that used to be an over-the-counter 19th century go-to drug. And it is the drug that most closely mimics heroin. It is called Dilaudin.
After the Dilaudin and some admonishments that this was all I was getting, because they could potentially put me in a coma-like state, the doctors asked the pain level question. So I said, “It’s about an 8 or 9.” They did not like my answer at all because doctors do not like for their patients to be in pain. They tend to want you to be injured in comfort.
“We have given you the maximum dose we can give,” they said. “To a normal human,” I thought.
So my pain containment strategies, which began in the ambulance, continued: not talking, focusing on meditating, and trying to stay in control. And I did this for not only hours, but days.
Finally, after five hours of waiting, I had my CT scan. A lot could have been going really wrong in the five hours I was waiting. I could have had a brain bleed.
Also, the trauma team was supposed to consult with me because I had experienced what they considered to be a trauma, but when the CT came back clean, they bypassed me. That ER sure was crowded, and I guess an eye injury did not seem all that exciting. But hell, I was blinded.
Then something way better happened. They took me off the neck brace and board, and that relief was almost as good as the sense of relief I felt when I defended my dissertation. “Now my pain is a 7, lucky me,” I said to myself.
After 8 hours they moved me into a temporary holding bed. The ER was kind of like hell, so I guess this temporary holding room was like purgatory.
Even stranger was when I realized it was the room I was in when I miscarried 6 years earlier. The wallpaper, a specific picture, where the TV was placed in the room led me to a flood of memories and I knew that was the room.
Word of the freak-accident-girl was spreading like wildfire through the bustling ER, and so, lucky me, I got lots of unexpected pop in visitors to gawk. I was trying to ignore all of this, staying focused on breathing and meditating, but I knew it was happening.
Then suddenly I was just bored, just lying in the hospital bed, wanting to move, and waiting for something to happen. The thing about trauma is that it can actually be pretty boring once the shock wears off. And I felt a mix of anxious waiting for something to happen and boredom for the rest of the hospital stay.
