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I survived a plane crash
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My body armor for six months.
Twenty-five years ago, after dislocating a knee during a women’s rugby game, my father lectured me about the need to start acting like a girl because “there’s only so many times they can put you back together.” Now, at the age of 45, he’s still putting me back together, although this time, I’m truly grateful that there was a body to work on rather than just bits to collect in a box.
My three children circled overhead in their first small airplane ride as dusk closed in on a crisp December evening. How lucky they were, I thought with a tingle of excitement running down my spine, to be given this chance at such a young age.
A sick thought momentarily turned my stomach. What if something happens? All of my kids are in that plane. I told myself to cut it out and pushed the thought away.
“That was awesome,” exclaimed my oldest, a grin carving his face from ear to ear, as they scrambled out onto the waiting tarmac. “Your turn.”
Al taxied onto the runway and climbed back to the heavens, dipping a wing to wave at the small faces quickly disappearing behind us, as the skies on the horizon began their daily slide to shadows of eggplant, fire and peace.
“They can hear our headset conversation on a radio I gave them,” he explained to me. “I thought it would be fun for them.”
I smiled, and we banked to the left. Gliding above the trees, with the world stretching in all directions, filled me with a natural high I remembered from my last plane ride so many years before.
But my reverence was quickly jolted with Al’s next words, “I think there’s something wrong with the engine. We’re losing power.”
“Don’t say that. You’re making me nervous,” my palms instantly clammy with sweat.
As if on cue, there was pop, and the whir of the engine died. The propeller, just a few feet in front of my shocked and disbelieving eyes, froze in place. Just like that.
An eerie stillness swallowed the plane. The only sound was the whoosh of air rushing past the window and the thunderous pounding of my heart. The plane glided silently for a few painful moments, and then the nose dipped earthward.
Fear flooded every ounce of my body. This just couldn’t be happening.
But there was no doubt as to which way we were heading – we were going down.
Groans eked from my gut as I pressed my body back hard in the seat, desperately clawing for something to hold onto in what I was sure was about to become our coffin.
“No! No! Nooo,” I pleaded, terror sizzling in my veins.
Al, with uncanny control, scoured the ground one thousand feet below us, as I willed myself not to do anything to distract him. No talking, no screaming, no touching anything. He was our only chance.
And then the oddest thing happened. Seeing the red Georgia clay rocketing closer, a peculiar calm swept over me. Almost a resigned acceptance to the inevitable. This was going to be it, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Nothing at all. With almost detached curiosity, I wondered if I’d find out firsthand what God looked like.
An instant later, the sickening scream of twisting metal roiled the plane as we slammed into the ground.
Pain coursed through my body, as I tumbled onto the damp mud and groaned. Every inch from my neck to my hips screamed in protest as I lay on my side gulping air. And yet, another part of me was giddy with the realization that I wasn’t dead.
“I need to buy a lottery ticket. This is the luckiest day of my life,” I mumbled to no one.
In the back of my brain, I heard Al shout, “Call 911.”
A round, worried and earnest face came into focus. Whipping his trucker cap across his overall-clad chest, this man laid his other hand atop my head, announced he was a preacher in his thick Southern accent, and began an emotional discourse, “May the Lord deliver this woman from her pain…”
I think I shut my eyes.
Sirens wailed and the WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP of helicopter blades burped in the background. Faces of young policemen and firemen appeared where the country preacher had just been, snipping off my sweater and fretting about possible gas leakage from the wing that draped over my body.
Slowly, I was rolled onto a backboard and pulled away. Holding pen lights in their mouths, the paramedics tried vainly to start an IV in the veins that had collapsed from shock.
“I hate needles. Stop poking me,” I begged. Maybe I was going to be okay, I thought, if I could argue about needles at this particular moment.
“We have to so we can get you on the helicopter and to a hospital.”
“You’re going to put me on a helicopter after I was just in a plane crash?” I groaned. “Is that what I hear?”
“No, that’s the news helicopter.”
Great. Thought that only happened on LA cop shows.
Seconds after landing, the stretcher was whisked into the trauma unit of a large Atlanta hospital. Faces blurred instantly with the first shot of morphine, but I remember answering questions as braces snapped over my torso and neck, and orders were barked for x-rays.
And then everyone was gone. Just me and my painkillers. Whoo-eeee.
On the other side of a flimsy, blue curtain, medical staff wrestled with a deranged patient as I stared at the arc of blood splatter on the ceiling above me, wondering vaguely where the hell I was.
Rocking in and out of la-la land, I heard conversation drifting past and being repeated like a mantra, “Another gunshot wound…plane crash… fractured back… Did he have a seizure and then hit is head, or did he hit his head and then have seizure? Anyone know?”
A wave of nausea washed over me like a tsunami, and I called vainly for help, only to throw-up on the floor. A woman (or at least I think it was a woman) peeked from behind the curtain, wrinkled her nose in disgust and backed up the way she came. Occasionally, my head wobbled to the side of the stretcher to check and, yep, the vomit was still on the floor, even hours later as I was wheeled to a different room hours later.
The CLUNK, CLUNK of the MRI machine joggled me back to the present, and I wondered how the fuzzy dots of blood inches above my face could possibly get inside an MRI. Thank goodness for strong drugs, or I might have been worried.
I drifted in and out of a fog with my father, an emergency room physician, sitting in a chair next to my bed for the next few days. He waited – and waited - to speak to a doctor on the elusive trauma team assigned to my case. In an almost Kaftka-esque fashion, instructions were mysteriously given to the attending nurses, but never was there a face attached to them. Not that I cared much at the moment (the drugs made sure of that), but the steam building behind my father’s ears was becoming more noticeable, even to me.
At some point, the automatic blood pressure monitor slipped over an IV while I dozed. Awakening, I ripped off the inflating sleeve and pulled the bloody glob of catheter and tape out of my arm. When a nurse finally did arrive, she gave me a look of disdain, took the mangled mess, and without cleaning the blood off my arm, reattached the blood pressure monitor. Even in my haze, this seemed unclean, and I kept staring at the pumping sleeve, curious if someone else’s blood might have been l left on it before I got it.
On the third day, my father asked me to sit. Seeing that I had no pain, he asked me to stand. As I clutched his arm and teetered to my feet, still bound firmly in neck and back braces, a nurse rushed in.
“You can’t do that! You need permission from the doctor,” she said, obviously flustered.
“You go get permission if you want; I’m going to see if she can stand,” my father growled.
Moments later, three people stood at the doorway, their eyebrows raised.
“She’s leaving tomorrow,” he said calmly, but without room for negotiation. “I’ll sign whatever you need.”
Equipped with a prescription for painkillers and an appointment with a neurosurgeon back home, we left the hospital on a quiet New Year’s Eve morning. Although there had been a couple of nurses that truly seemed to care, the hospital had been a nightmare on its own. All four ICU rooms I’d been in had blood on either the walls or ceiling, encrusted remnants of food stuck on table trays, and dirt and grime smeared everywhere.
Since I’ve been home, I’ve heard several alarming stories from friends about their family members who’ve contracted serious, and in one case coma-causing, infections while patients at this particular hospital. I honestly think that if my father had not been there, I probably would have wallowed through the system for weeks.
Several pilot friends offered to fly us home, but low lying cloud cover filled with ice hung along the east coast, eliminating that option for any plane without de-icing capabilities, and the seats on commercial flights couldn’t tilt back enough for me to make trip.
Early the next morning, my father and I began the 15-hour trip home in a large rented SUV with wide reclining seats. Severe weather forecasts both in Atlanta and the New York area gave a window of opportunity of just one day to get home. Needless to say, Percocet was a good friend on that ride.
Up north, we accomplished more with the neurosurgeon and x-ray technicians in 90 minutes than we had over four days in the Atlanta hospital. Even better, I made it home to be with my children on my 45th birthday.
My husband picked up our kids from school without saying a thing. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I have to say that the smiles and tears on their angelic faces when they walked in the door was the best birthday present I’ve ever had. It was as though I was seeing them for the first time – and I hope I never forget that image. If things had turned out differently, my only regret would have been not being a part of my children’s life and watching them grow up.
The braces that wrapped my body for nearly five months brought the predictable slew of questions. Whenever someone asks, “Did you think you were going to die?”, the answer is always, “Yes. There was no doubt in my mind.”
It’s a miracle Al kept his cool and we survived. It’s also a miracle that the engine didn’t fail when my kids were flying, or that the broken bone in my back didn’t puncture my spinal column, or any number of things I don’t like to dwell on. Even my niece turning off the radio at Al’s first words of an emergency saved my children from the trauma of having to listen to their mother crash, thank goodness.
Coming as close as I did to losing everything has shifted my priorities, and still today, just looking at my children warms my heart. I’ve been given a second chance that could have just as easily not happened and must view this episode as another FGE (f----ing growth experience).
It may be hard to believe, but I did heed my father’s words so many years ago to slow down. But life is just full of surprises – both good and bad - if we choose to live it to its fullest. I just hope my guardian angel doesn’t write me off as too high-maintenance and sticks with me a little longer.
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