Miracle Story #7 (Part 2)
“I was a pole vaulter here at Andale. Pole vaulting was basically the only sport growing up that I ever had a chance at being great at because football, Andale football, it's a huge deal. And I was a small kid. I went in to high school at a hundred pounds.
I took 3rd place at State my senior year in track, got a scholarship at Hutchinson Community College. Went over there. I didn’t really perform as well as I wanted to my freshman year so I asked my dad for some help. He had pole vaulted in college. So we worked and trained all summer.
October 1st was the first day we could vault my sophomore year and I jumped 15’ 7” that day. We had a little competition among the team to see who had bragging rights, just a fun little friendly thing. And I won.
So the next day you know, naturally I’m talking trash. (laughs)
My buddy Ben was like, “You can’t talk trash, you’ve never broken a pole."
And I was like, “Whatever, I’ll break this right now.”
I grabbed a pole that I had used my whole freshman year, that I knew fully well I could break. Breaking a pole is kind of a right of passage among pole vaulters. Once you get to an upper level its kind of like, ‘I kind of wish I’d broken a pole.’ You want that perfect jump that is too much for the pole to handle, you know, a good break so to speak.
So I knew I could break it. I was going to break it. And I jumped off the ground and I put the pole in the plant box and it just rolled right in, just flexed way too easily. Most poles might break to about the two-thirds mark, but my pole was bent fully in half.
When I inverted, my head was a foot and a half off the ground and that puts the pole like this…(demonstrates with hands) And I guess because it flexed so weird it reacted kind of weird and it kept going this way (motioning out) as it was pulling me up.
They said I was anywhere from 12-14 feet in the air. But I was going out and I went over the back side of the pit, and when I turned to land on my back, I hit the pavement butt down and it flipped me back onto my head.
And I cracked my skull from ear to ear across the front. I made a medically impossible recovery.
It's unheard of.
The fact that we’re talking right now, I don’t even have a full brain.
Twenty-five percent of the right front temporal lobe of my brain is gone. It primarily controls short-term memory, color recognition and emotion. Those three.
I should be color-blind, bi-polar and ten seconds off.
But I'm not.
Pole vaulting is a rush, like an addiction. You can control everything, but only up to the point where you leave the ground. Once you’re off the ground, it’s in God’s hands. You have no control. And then you’re just flying, you’re just free. You’ve got no problems, nothing, for about a second and a half. (laughs)
I remember standing on the runway, just beaming, just grinning thinking, ‘This is gonna be awesome. I’m gonna snap this pole and rub it right in his face.’ I was a hot head when it came to pole vaulting. We’re all that way. But I’ve always been kind of a smart ass too. (laughs)
I was standing on the end of the runway thinking, ‘What am I gonna say when I break this pole to make him feel like an idiot?’
So then I powered down the runway and I put the pole in the box and took off from the ground, and as I felt it flex way too easily I was thinking, ‘This is gonna be really good or really bad.’
I was riding it up and I saw the back edge of the pit coming and I had like a split second to decide if I should turn and land on my back, or if I should just land on my butt and hop off.
I turned and landed on my back and I hit my head and saw that white flash that you see when you bump your head and see stars. I felt that and I moved, and I was out.
And then I woke up in a hospital and didn’t know why I was there.
Nine to twelve days in a coma. Nineteen days in the intensive care unit. Two days in a regular room. And a month in rehab.
And that is the really miraculous part, the speed with which I did it. From death bed with a zero percent chance of living, to my front door in a month and nineteen days.
And I walked in to my front door. Walking, talking, everything myself.
Long-term memory is fine. Short-term memory, fine.
I’ve had to come up with ways to help myself basically. Like your name for example, it doesn’t click and stick right away. I have to repeat it over and over and over. And now that I see your face, I’ll connect it. I connect names with faces because I’ll remember a face, easy.
And I’m a talker, that’s what I do. That’s actually what I’m studying up at Fort Hays State, basically public relations. I have a degree through Hutch. I was 19 years old when the accident happened in 2008 and I’ll be twenty-eight in two weeks. I’m almost finished with school.
When I woke up I was like, ‘Okay, weird walls. Big window. Balloon things on my legs.’ I knew I was in a hospital.
And when I saw my dad I looked at him and he said good morning or something. I asked him where I was and he told me I was in a hospital and that this had happened. I wanted to laugh at him but I couldn’t laugh. And then it finally kind of clicked.
I couldn’t really talk. I had to re-learn everything. Plus I had a trach tube in. I pulled it out twice in the same twenty-four hour period. It gets annoying. (laughs)
And then the memories kind of slowly came back. The memories of the day, of everything.
I would remember certain things and then I’d get confirmation from everybody that was there. Steven Fisher was one of the pole vaulters there with me and I told him. He actually lives in Hays now, so I see Steven every now and then.
Pole vaulting is something that never leaves. I pole vaulted again a year and a half and one day after I got hurt. I jumped 10’6” from a three step. That’s literally my left leg hitting the ground three times and jumping on the third. But I didn’t go back to vaulting for the school. I became a coach, actually.
I coached at Hutchinson Community College for two years and then I kind of bounced around high schools and middle schools. I’d go to track meets and I did a lot of scouting for Hutch when I left there and took a break from school.
In the track community, more specifically the pole vaulting community, everybody knows everybody. I know a lot of coaches in the area and if somebody needed me, like coach wasn’t there or couldn’t be there or something, I would go. I'd help them out.
Andale is one of the most respected vault programs in the state and I have a lot of knowledge. Coming out of Andale, I really thank my coach for everything that he taught me. Like I said, I was small. I was a late bloomer I guess we’d say, in a pole vault sense. I guess I do have a very big personality though. (laughs)
You can hear when you’re in a coma, and I remember that.
I realized I was screwed up. I was awake, I was asleep. I thought it was a dream at first, that it was a bad dream. People were bawling their eyes out, crying.
“You’re gonna be alright Chase, keep fighting.”
It felt like just hours and hours of this. And then it would switch to another dream. Then back to that dream. Back to another dream, then back to that one. Then after a while, it started to click like, ‘Something is wrong here.’
I remember my Dad getting down and whispering in my ear and saying, “Chase you’ve got to give us a sign. I know you’re in there. You’ve got to give us a sign or they’re gonna kill you.”
He said that to me because they had talked about pulling the plug.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t see anything and I felt like I was trapped in a box. I don’t know how I did it, but I twitched a finger, a toe, I moved something. And then things started happening faster and faster and faster.
So I woke up and everything had happened and then they were like, ‘Yeah you know, miracle this, miracle that.’
I became very good friends with two of the reporters for the Wichita Eagle, Travis and Roy. I had my first interview when I was in the rehab facility and I still remember a lot of that.
I remember that I was just mad. Mad, mad, mad the whole time.
Why?
Because I was stuck there. Because I knew what to do and I knew how to do it, I just couldn’t do it.
Think of your brain as a series of roads, a whole bunch of roads. From here to here to do that, is a road. An earthquake, tornado, whatever, just came through there and annihilated all those roads. I had to put my road crews on over-time to just rebuild and build detours. And so I had to re-teach myself how to do these things.
I had to re-learn how to walk, to talk, to eat, everything. But I did it. And so quick.
Why do I think it happened so fast? God. Father Kapaun.
And then it gets into the, ‘Why did it happen? Why am I the one up for the miracle?’ I’m miracle status according to the Catholic church.
So, what do I do? What do I do now?
I do a lot of public speaking. I take every interview, spread the story, spread the word.
God is real.
I probably never will know why me. But I know it’s all real. I’ve seen it happen.
Want to hear what it looks like?
I was just floating down this long tunnel. I guess it wasn’t really a tunnel, but it was kind of misty. I guess I would say clouds just parting in front of me. And it wasn’t a focused white light like you’d think, you know how they say light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not focused. The mist was kind of parting in front of me and it was a weird feeling, but a good weird.
You know when something good happens, like really, really good happens to you and you get that feeling in your chest where you’re just about to explode? It’s like that.
But everywhere.
From the tips of your fingers to the tips of your toes, just your whole everything is like, ‘Ahhhh.’ (shakes open hands)
And I felt hands on my back when I was just floating. I felt hands on my back while I was standing up and I walked toward a gate but there was no top, no top to the gate. You know, you think gate and a lot of the time you see a fence and a gate, you see that in the movies, something like that. But there was no top and it was as far as I could see.
And I didn’t see HIM, but I talked to my grandpa who died six months and one day before I got hurt. But there was no sense of time through any of it.
I went to church on Sundays and I fell into what probably most religious people fall into at some point. You know, you just kind of hit the rut.
I’d go to church on Sunday, do this, say those prayers. Then I’d go home and eat breakfast. You know, it’s kind of like that. It becomes this routine and you’re not really ‘in it’ anymore.
I was there but you know, I was also 19 years old.
My message changes all the time depending on the venue, depending on who I’m talking to, depending on what I’m feeling that day. You’ll never, ever, ever, ever, hear me give the same speech twice. I don’t write anything down. It has to come from the heart.
It’s real.
My little brother, he’s twenty-two years old. He had cancer when he was eighteen months old, testicular cancer. I’ve got at least fifty-two first cousins on just one side of my family and when you have a big family like I do, we go through things.
A lot of people think that I should be super religious, super pious. You know, something like that.
But I’m not.
Maybe that’s good. Maybe that’s not. But I think there is a limit too, and once you go over, you’re just elevating yourself.
If you go to one of my talks, I just talk. I don’t tell you that you have to do things this way or that way. I’ll lead you in a direction and leave you with a starting point, that’s all.
This is where I was and now this is where I am. This is where you are, this is where you could be. Or you could go this way or you could go that way. It’s whatever.
Ask anybody who knows me, and they'll tell you that I'm one hundred percent who I was. But I’m a little smarter now. (laughs)
When I was a kid I was pretty crazy.
The summer before I got hurt, my crazy knew no bounds. I was up for anything. If it sounded fun, I did it. I was the guy at the party that partied way too much. That summer before I got hurt, I had just passed my freshman year of college and that was when I really came out of my shell.
I never really had much of a shell and I don’t know what happened then, but that summer, yeah, I was wild.
Well even senior year. I guess my senior year of high school I really started coming out. I partied a lot in Goddard. I had a cousin who was like a brother and we were the same age. We grew up together. We used to run around together all the time. I partied enough in Goddard that by my senior year people were asking me why they never saw me in class. (laughs)
Yeah, I was fairly well known by the Goddard crowd. That was where it all began. I think that’s it, I think that’s why. When I was in Goddard I could do anything I wanted and with no repercussions, because I didn’t have to worry about anybody knowing or saying anything on Monday. So I could do whatever I wanted to do. I could be anybody I wanted to be.
So I was crazy. I just did the things where people would say things like, ‘Wow did he really just do that? That is awesome.’ (laughs)
There were a lot of stories that came out around the time I got hurt.
I still go out and have fun, but I didn’t lose the crazy. I don’t think the crazy part is anything I’ll ever lose, but I’ve learned how to suppress it. I still get ideas and I want to do things like that, but I usually don’t. I try to set a better example. Maybe I’m a little more mature too. (laughs)
A grown man came up to me after a talk in New York City once and shook my hand.
He told me, “Thanks man. I’ve got to tell you, I’m a changed man after hearing that. You changed my life.”
That knocked me to my knees. I was thinking, ‘holy shit.’ And I’m sorry, but I do cuss. I think that’s one of the reasons that people like to listen to what I have to say, because I don’t sugar coat it.
It doesn’t make me non-religious or anything. The way I see it, and I’m not trying to compare myself to this in any way but just, in the terms of listening. If you go to church, there’s a priest saying the same things every week, the same ways. It’s the same routine. It’s routine and it just becomes so regular that it’s just another day.
You quit paying attention. Part of your mind isn’t registering that anymore because it’s already in there. You already know it. You’ve heard the story a thousand times. Things like that, you know, you know these things. And it just becomes so regular. It’s hard to explain it the way I mean it.
And then you get some guy like me who shows up in your church and he’s talking about climbing down the side of a roof, hammered drunk when he was underage. And he’s relating this to this, and that to that, and they’re calling this guy a miracle.
Wow, you know. It’s easier to pay attention to it.
And that’s one of the other reasons I’ll never give the same speech twice. I’m not going to read off a card. You know what reading off a card says to me? It says ‘I wrote this down a few years ago and I’m just too lazy to write anything else.’
And the thing about me, I’m kind of an attention-lover. One on one, I’m good. But you put me in front of six hundred people…. (laughs)
If the accident hadn’t have happened, I think I’d be a fire fighter. I was studying to be a fire fighter. I’m an adrenaline junkie. So yeah, what’s more fun than running into a burning building that is structurally unstable and could collapse at any time? Just going in there, charging in, the smoke, oh boy. I wanted to be a fire fighter as long as I can remember. You have no idea how hard it was to let that dream go.
I think I would’ve had everything that I planned for, but I don’t think I would be as happy as I am now. Because I wouldn’t be doing the things that I do.
I’ve been to the White House. I’ve been on 20/20. And yeah, that doesn’t make me happy. That’s just cool shit.
But you know, what really makes me happy now is this. I definitely don’t get it from school. (laughs)
Whether it’s on TV, whether it’s in a magazine, whether it’s one-on-one, whether it’s just hanging out at a coffee shop or a diner, this is cool.
This is real.
I know that this story, whatever it is, is gonna go somewhere else. It’s gonna travel. Stories travel.
That’s how the word spreads.
I got hurt on October 2nd.
I got out of the hospital on November 21st.
I got a plate put in my head on December 17th.
I started classes again on January 11th.
I took two online classes that semester. So yeah, I didn’t miss a beat. And I passed them both too.
Everything since then has been just surreal. I’ve done things in the past eight years that I never even had the thought of ever doing."
To read Part 1 of this story: http://www.onemillionmiracles.org/single-post/2017/01/01/Miracle-Story-7-Part-1
© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.
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My name is Chase, and I'm from Andale, Kansas.
In the midst of a pole vaulting accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury,
I AM miracle story #7.