Miracle Story #12
"It was a Tuesday in June. It was probably ten or eleven years ago, at least. Brian and I were living at Newport Apartments and we weren’t married. We weren’t even engaged yet, just living together. Dating.
I was serving and bartending at On The Border and he was managing Outback. I had the day off, so I was cleaning house and doing laundry. We had just got a brand new washer and dryer and I was so mad because I went to pull clothes out of the dryer, and he had left some sharpies in his apron from work. They were all over the brand new dryer.
I was so mad. So mad. Because you know, we were in our early twenties and to have a brand new washer and dryer, that’s a big deal. (laughs)
And he was at work. So I remember getting online, because I was scrubbing and scrubbing and nothing would get it out. So I got online and googled how to get it out. And it said nail polish remover.
And I didn’t have any.
So I decided to run to Walmart to get some and try to get it out. I was heading to the one at New Market Square, so I was on Ridge, getting ready to turn left onto 21st Street.
I was in the left turn lane, and I know that I was pulled out into the intersection waiting to turn. And then the light turned red and because I was in the intersection, I had to turn because I was blocking traffic.
And a car sped through the intersection and T-boned me.
It was the busiest intersection on the west side at that time. It was in the middle of five o’clock traffic and nobody stopped to file a witness report after this happened.
I ended up turned around on 21st Street, facing east, toward the Zoo. Completely opposite direction.
And I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt.
I drove a stick-shift truck at the time, a little Ford Ranger. And I remember that my right arm hurt super bad. I couldn’t even move it. I had never broken a bone in my body before so I was like, ‘Well, I probably broke my arm.’ And I thought that maybe I hit the stick-shift, you know, the shifter. And then I went to move and my neck hurt so I thought, ‘Okay, I have whiplash.’
So somebody came over and called the cops. He wouldn’t let me get out of the car and he told me to just sit still.
He said, “Just don’t move if you’re in an okay comfortable position. Just don’t move.”
And I was fine. I mean, the front end of my truck was beat up and I was sitting, so I just sat there. And I was talking. You know when you wake up with a kink in your neck, how that feels? It was like that. You don’t want to move.
And he was like, “Is there anybody that you want me to call?”
And I said, “Yeah, call my parents.”
I didn’t know the number to Outback and that was before every single person carried cell phones all the time. And I told my parents to call Brian at Outback because I didn’t know the number.
I was pretty calm. And I remember asking, “Is the other person okay?”
“Yeah but the cars are totaled.”
So then the ambulance came and I told them what was wrong. They put me in a c-collar and got me on a stretcher. So I hadn’t really moved since it happened.
They put me in the ambulance and we were headed to Wesley and I was like, “Yeah, I probably broke my arm huh?”
And looking back, I remember their looks at each other. You know like, ‘Yeah we’ll tell her that.’
And I remember thinking, ‘Oh boy, it’s going to be bad.’
I had looked and to me it looked fine, but it just hurt. It hurt from my shoulder to my fingers and it was starting to get numb. Never having broken anything before, I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like.
And my neck was hurting. It was whiplash hurting.
I remember when we got to Wesley, somehow Brian had beat the ambulance, so he was waiting there for me. And they took me straight in for x-rays and we were waiting.
The doctor came in and he was like, “Okay, do you want the good or the bad news first?”
I was like, “The bad.” I was thinking it was that my arm was broken.
And he goes, “Well I’m going to give you the good news first. The good news is, we hope you’re going to be okay.”
Then he said, “The bad news is, you broke three bones in your neck and you are less than a quarter of an centimeter from being paralyzed. You need to not move at all.”
And I was thinking, ‘How do I not move?’ (laughs)
And I said, “What do you mean I might be paralyzed?”
And again he said, “You’re less than a quarter of a centimeter away from being paralyzed. From the neck down, quadriplegic.”
And then he walked out of the room.
Just like that.
Like he said it ten times a day.
So the nurse came in, and Brian was sitting there being calm and collected. And I was like, “What did he mean? Will somebody talk to me please?”
And she said, “Oh, you broke the same vertebrae as Christopher Reeve, Superman.”
And he had just died like a year before that. And in my head I was like, ‘What?!’
So my first thought was that I was going to be like that. You know what I mean? My first thought was, ‘I’m going to be in a wheelchair blowing in a straw to get myself around and that’s gonna be my life at 23 years old.’
I was super frustrated because nobody would give me answers. And I know they didn’t know anything yet. But it was like a bomb dropped and then everybody left. And I was left thinking, ‘What am I gonna do?’
And you know, instinct is to just do something for yourself. And you can’t. You just have to lay there.
So they sent me off for CT scans and MRIs. This was like five o’clock in the afternoon when it happened and I didn’t talk to anyone else until the next day. Brian stayed up there and other than nurses taking me in and out, that was it.
And the funny thing was, like the whole time I was like, ‘Well what about my arm? Isn’t my arm broken?’ (laughs)
So I found out that my right arm being numb was a direct correlation to my vertebrae being broke. And that’s why the EMTs gave me that crazy look when I told them that my arm was hurting.
Because they knew.
So it turns out that I ended up breaking the C1 and C2 and C5 vertebrae in my neck. The C1 and C2 are the ones that Christopher Reeve broke.
A day or two went by and I really didn’t have any answers. I was just in the hospital, doped up on morphine, and told not to move.
They stabilized my neck, obviously, but they were like, “You can’t move your bed up and down. You can’t do anything. You just need to lay there.”
I’m not someone to drug myself a lot, so I didn’t. I really wasn’t in pain. And that was the craziest thing. My neck felt like whiplash but I really wasn’t in pain. I was just terrified. So I didn’t dope myself up very much with my little clicker.
And finally after three days, the neck specialist came in.
He was like, “Well I don’t think you’re going to have to have surgery. It’s kind of weird.”
They had taken x-rays every day, and an MRI.
He said, “Since you’ve been here, your bones have already started to fuse themselves back together.”
Three days.
He said, “I don’t know why that would happen. That normally doesn’t happen. Usually you’d have to have surgery and be in a halo with screws in your head. We’re going to let you go tomorrow.”
Like, go home.
There was a contraption that I had to wear that was similar to a halo, without all the hardware up here. (motions) It was like a harness that went over my shoulders and kept my neck at a horrible angle.
The specialist told me that I had to wear that contraption every moment of the day and night for the next 8 weeks. He told me that I’d have to have someone help me change clothes and shower and anything that involved several steps. It was a very serious thing.
I was still thinking, ‘What is going on?’ I mean, it happened so quick and I just felt like I was left in this time warp of nothing happening forever, and then it was, “Okay you’re going to go home tomorrow.”
For the last three days all I had thought about was how my life was going to be so different. Brian and I had dated for three or four years at that time. And I was thinking about how I wasn’t going to have him stick around for me to be paralyzed the rest of my life. I didn’t want to do that to him. And I just kept thinking about how my parents were going to have to take me to their house to take care of me and….(crying)…you know.
Not only my life would change, but theirs, because I couldn’t do anything. I thought I was just going to be there. And that’s it, you know?
I was at a point in my life where I was out of college. And I didn’t have a super strong faith.
I had been brought up to have faith. And I had been brought up in the church. But I was kind of at that awkward twenties stage, where I was just kind of invincible and I didn’t need God. It’s not that I didn’t believe in Him, I just didn’t need him. You know what I mean?
So I didn’t have my faith at that point to lean on and get me through that. I was just me. (laughs)
So I went home and I was miserable for probably three weeks. I couldn’t sleep and the neck brace would push up when I would sit down, so I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t do anything. I would literally stay up all night in a chair.
And during the day I would sleep.
Brian took another job because I only had liability on my truck. So my vehicle was gone. And the crazy thing was that I was working at One The Border at the time and they offered health insurance. I got the highest package that I could, which was like $50 a month. (laughs)
I thought I was set.
And about a month after the accident we started getting phone calls from the hospitals and stuff, and the doctor bills started coming in. It was like $100,000 for my three day stay, with no surgery.
In my head I was like, ‘Oh I have insurance, I’m good.’ (laughs)
Come to find out, the “great” insurance I had only covered $3500. It covered that amount, which is pretty much when you walk in the door.
I had been bartending so I didn’t have any income coming in at this time.
I had no car. I had $100,000 in medical bills. I was screwed at 23 years old.
I was done. I didn’t know what I was going to do.
Brian took another job and so he was working like 80-90 hours a week trying to pay bills. He was working like 50 hours a week at Outback, and like 40 hours a week at Emerson Biggins at the time, working at night. He did this for ten weeks.
It was hard.
I’m not somebody that sits on a throne and lets somebody take care of me. (laughs) That’s not me.
I had to have somebody comb my hair for me for eight weeks. And I had to have somebody bathe me. It wasn’t enjoyable at all. It was hard.
But it was cool. At On The Border I guess there was like a “friends and family emergency fund” that nobody knows about. Basically there was always like five or ten dollars that would come out at every paycheck for that fund. They called it the OTB Family Fund.
Now I didn’t care for my boss at the time, we kind of butted heads actually, but he ended up getting me help through that fund. Apparently nationwide out of all of their companies, employees contribute. And it’s for stuff like this, like for people that get cancer or have stuff like I went through. They know you don’t have the ability to work and make a living.
And they also ended up giving me my wages for a month. Tt was like $10,000 between those two things.
It was awesome.
My grandma ended up buying me a car also. So it ended up as good as it could have. But I did end up having to do a bankruptcy because at twenty-three there was just no way I could’ve done that.
I didn’t find out until a year or two ago that the day I got in the wreck, I think it was the night before, Brian had gone and bought an engagement ring. (laughs)
I think that made me feel worse though because he was ready to spend his life with me and in my head, I wasn’t going to have a life. I was glad that I didn’t know about that at the time.
For not being married and not even being engaged, for just being a boyfriend, he took care of me.
For me, the miracle didn’t really come full circle until I was walking again and out of my neck brace. It took eight weeks to get out of it. I had to wear it every moment of the day for eight weeks.
I think when you’re in the moment of having to deal with something like that, all you feel is just pity.
And anger.
I was super mad because I talked to a lawyer because I was like, ‘What about the other chick? She ran the light.’ You know what I mean?
And I found out that she was a server at Applebee’s and she was running late for work that day. So she was going like 60mph down Ridge Rd. And I was at a stand-still. I was just turning. They didn’t have cameras back then at the intersections and nobody made a witness report. Five o’clock traffic.
And then I found out like a month later that one of my co-workers was at the light, knew it was me, and didn’t stop. Didn’t make a witness report. I had a bright blue truck. So I was mad.
And the woman driving the car that hit me walked away with nothing but a totaled car. I got the ticket for failing to yield. I got the hospital bills. I got everything. So I was mad. (laughs)
It took a long time for me to realize what a miracle that was for me to walk out of that, literally walk out of it. Obviously I had some healing time.
I think of what my life should be like right now. And what it’s not.
And that’s pretty cool.
I forget it sometimes for sure, but it’s definitely a miracle to me.
Obviously anybody who goes through something like that kind of gets this surge of not taking stuff for granted, for a while. It’s very temporary. You know, for six months or a year you’re like, ‘Man, I’m gonna cherish everything.’
Like, the day I got out of my neck brace I went and got a haircut. And just her washing my hair was like, ‘Ahhhhhhh this is the life!’ (laughs)
That was a high for me, getting my hair washed. I had a pad at the back of my head while I was wearing that brace, so I had a big square that I could never get to and I had to shower with it on and stuff.
I don’t know. I think I had that for a short time, where I didn’t want to take anything for granted. It didn’t come to me until a couple years later, some years later, before I was like really understanding that God has something in store for me.
Whether I’m in it now. Whether this is it. I think He had something in store for me and it wasn’t going to get done by me being paralyzed. And it wasn’t going to get done by me being in a wheelchair.
And that’s my perspective.
For being my age, I feel like I have this desire to kind of learn and teach biblical stuff. I don’t know. The more I get into it, the more I know that there’s something there for me that hasn’t happened yet.
And I know that there’s something in store for me in my future that He wants me up and walking for.
I haven’t hit it yet, I don’t think.
And if I have, cool.
If I haven’t, that’s fine.
They say that when you’re done doing God’s work then He takes you. So obviously I’m not done.
I’m not done.
I have this desire to keep doing kingdom work and to keep working for Him. And you know, living to spread His glory. I just don’t know if I’m there yet.
But it took me a long time. It took me years to get to that.
And some days I forget about it. It took me almost a year before I could even go to that intersection again. It was a while before I could go there. And when I started driving again, I would do everything I could to not take a left turn. I would go a mile up and make two rights. (laughs)
That lasted like six months. So that took a while. I just had to get over it.”
**Brian and Kendra own http://whenpigsflywichita.com/ in west Wichita. Check it out, it's the best!
© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.
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My name is Kendra, and I live in Wichita, Kansas.
In the midst of being T-boned at an intersection while driving, I AM Miracle Story #12.