Disclaimer:

As has always been the case with this blog, I keep up with it more for myself than the folks who read it, simply because I'm the type of person who always needs a project. In the case of the blog, I use it as an extra layer of processing capacity through which I can channel the sights, sounds and experiences of my journey, allowing me to sometimes shake loose little bits of meaning or significance I might otherwise glaze over.

This post, though, is going to be different. I've scrabbled it together bit by bit over the course of a month, as my strength and mental fortitude have allowed, so it's rough around the edges. I want it to be rough and loose and unrefined because that style seems to paint a more accurate picture of my recovery during my time in this hospital. That being said, the content of this post might be difficult for many of you to read – I know, because it was difficult for me to write and ever more difficult to experience. Reader discretion is advised.

Like so many days during the past three months, I'm muttering swear words at a public wifi network connection that's taking too long to connect. Usually I'm having this problem at a McDonalds - a place I rarely visited before setting out on this trip but where I now find myself just about every other day. That's because a solid internet connection is surprisingly difficult to track down in public, especially one with enough upload speed for me to work on my blog. I've come to appreciate McDonalds for their uniformity and mass-produced nostalgia - in the constantly changing landscape of a cross-country road trip, I find comfort in the chain's consistency. The cold plastic chairs, 1950s decor (especially in the small town locations) and coffee for a dollar is simple and accessible. I pay for my drink, spread out my laptop and notebooks in a corner booth and go to town, usually spending a disproportionate amount of my time just trying to maintain my wifi connection.

But this time is different. This time, instead of McDonalds, I'm blogging with the wifi signal I've secured from a tri-fold hospital bed in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Like presumably many of the other folks here with whom I'm sharing bandwidth, I'm trying to establish a connection with my friends and loved ones beyond the walls of the hospital. I'm trying to secure some sense or normalcy.

The prepackaged '50s nostalgia that McDonalds offers always comes complete with at least one gaudy neon clock. Though I couldn't see the source of the ticking, I pictured one of those clocks in my mind - again, McDonalds is a comforting thought to me now. But concealed just outside of my still-blurry periphery, the slightly arrhythmic tick wasn't coming from a faux vintage clock, or any clock for that matter– it's from the steady drip of an IV bag, connected to one of only four remaining tubes still snaking out from my body through clumps of blood-crusted gauze. So while I sit here attempting to make some headway with my blog, I'm inevitably reminded of all those visits to McDonalds and its comforting feeling of artificial nostalgia. For me, though, it's not the 1950s that I'm reminiscing about. No, it's a more recent time. The good old days of, I don't know, let's say early February. The days when I could walk. When I could bathe without it being a team effort. The days when my body wasn't busy cannibalizing itself into an overzealously-dedicated monument of scar tissue.

I'm reminiscing about life before The Accident.

It caught me off guard the first time a complete stranger (a medical professional but a stranger nonetheless) said to me: “I'm really glad to see you're still here.”

I probably said thanks and chuckled awkwardly, still disoriented and not fully grasping the magnitude of his words. But I would hear them spoken again and again by a dozen people – surgeons, nurses, lawyers - many of whom make their living by keeping people “here." As it turns out, many of these people had already made my acquaintance, though I'd been too heavily sedated at the time to remember them. That's because, from what's been relayed to me since, there had been a very real possibility that I might not have made it though those first couple of nights (and that's only because I'd already achieved the near-miraculous statistical-anomaly of surviving The Accident in the first place).

I thought at first that they were just trying to lighten the mood with my own brand of dark humor. But then I started to hear the stories – stories about myself. Stories from the surgeons who fixed me. Stories from the lawyer who went back to the highway to examine the crumpled pile of a vehicle. Stories from bystanders (according to the police report) about blood and gasoline and screaming.

For an approximately 72 hour period, from about midday Februrary 25 until the late morning of February 28, I have exactly zero memories. Not a one. But from the things I've been told, I thank God for that.

Through the herculean efforts of a few longtime friends who have the knowledge and ability to reach through the internet to most of my contacts, I'd say about 75% of my close relations knew what was happening back when I was still trying desperately to remember who the president was - yes, they really do ask you that and no, I genuinely couldn't remember (what's funny, though, is that I could still rely enough on all those dangling, post-concussion synapses to know that I didn't want to know who the president was, though I couldn't have begun to tell you why).

By now, three weeks after The Accident, most people have heard some version of what happened. As the pieces of information have trickled in and the love and support of my friends, family and complete strangers continues to overwhelm my heart, I wanted to try and put together some semblance of a "complete story" while it's still semi-fresh in my mind.

It had already been a while since my last blog post. A lack of free time and reliable wifi access on the east coast had pushed me behind. As we speak, several partially-completed posts sit in my Squarespace draft folder, waiting for either photos or text or the friendly nudge of a travel muse (I assume there's more than one). I knew there had to be a solid story in there somewhere but I was having trouble shaking it out.

By the evening of Friday, February 23, I'd made it down to West Texas - another first in my life. Though I'm well-familiar with the cities along the I-35 corridor from the time I spent living in Austin, I'd never explored much of Texas beyond the famed Hill Country to the west of Travis County. To remedy that, Gabby and I spent a couple of days bumming around Big Bend National Park and the surrounding dusty tourist towns - Marfa, Terlingua, etc. We bounced around treacherous winding back roads, hunted for fossils in the cactus-dotted cliff faces and shared a sleeping bag under a sky awash with stars while the curious hoots of javelinas echoed in the distance. Gabby even made a brief foray into Mexico, putting her in the lead for number of countries visited during our trip.

Clockwise from left: United States, Gabby, Mexico(Source: The author's own) — Clockwise from left: United States, Gabby, Mexico
(Source: The author's own)

From Big Bend, we continued west to El Paso, where my friend Chris had invited me to spend a few days with him and his family near Fort Bliss. I know Chris from my Memphis days, when I used to sideline my respectable day job to run around abandoned buildings in the middle of the night with a bunch of hooligans I met on the internet. I can't even blame that on youth – of our group of five friends, the age range spanned some fifteen years, with me being right smack in the middle at twenty-three. At the time we met, Chris was only nineteen but I quickly learned to trust his judgement. The things we were doing were, in many cases, dangerous - if you can't count on someone in that type of setting, you don't keep them around.

For the better part of a year, it was the five us - Melinda, Kyle, Clint, Chris and me. Melinda lives in Baltimore now, so I saw her most recently when I passed through New England back in early January; Kyle, you may remember, joined me for the New York City segment of my trip. Then there's Clint. The last time we'd all been in the same room was at his funeral last February, so I felt like it was especially important for me to see Chris – because he'd joined the Army several years back, he's the hardest to catch up with. He and I hadn't seen each other since Clint's funeral.

Chris lives in El Paso now with his wife Adri and her mother, in a low-slung 60s style ranch house with a lava rock mulched yard, the kind so common in older Southwestern neighborhoods. Like me, Chris is an unabashed science nerd. Our plan for the weekend would be to drop off my truck at his place, load up his '95 Ford Bronco with camping supplies and then cruise out to the absolute middle of nowhere in central New Mexico.

Taken two days before the accident.(Source: The author's own) — Taken two days before the accident.
(Source: The author's own)

Why? Because sprawled out there in the middle of the high New Mexico desert are twenty-seven massive radio telescopes known as the “Very Large Array." With an orientation that can be rearranged via specialized locomotives and railroad tracks, these state-of-the-art structures work in tandem to form one of the largest radio observatories in the world, with a "dish" over thirteen miles in diameter.

Nerd mode: engaged(Source: The author's own) — Nerd mode: engaged
(Source: The author's own)

Along the way, we planned on stopping by White Sands National Park for some otherworldly scenery and a chance for Gabby to get a little exercise out on the gypsum dunes. Needless to say, Chris and I were pumped; Gabby was just happy to be along for the ride.

Gabby Puppenstuff, Queen of the Desert(Source: The author's own) — Gabby Puppenstuff, Queen of the Desert
(Source: The author's own)

It was a great weekend, to be sure - we nerded out, we camped, and we reconnected, giving each other crap about our respective life choices as often as we could sneak a jab in. Despite our roaring campfire, Chris grumbled about being cold and turned in early – he's much less acclimated to cold weather than I am at this point, so I understood. We'd tracked down a strong supply of firewood, so I stayed up for a while longer, stoking the flames and listening to the dueling hoots of owls perched in the cedars throughout the campsite and Gabby snoring loudly at my feet. When we eventually turned in, she and I slept in the Bronco because I'm a notoriously light sleeper and Chris snores. I remember now, lying there askew in the bed of his truck, looking up at the stars through the rear windows and thinking about how I could get used to a life in the Southwest – you know, if push ever came to shove. Maybe one day I'll get to spend some extended quality time here. With my toes tucked under Gabby for warmth, we drifted to off to sleep.

We weren't out in the isolated backcountry when it happened, nor were we anywhere we shouldn't have been. It was around noon on Sunday, February 25; we were on our way back to Chris's house and we'd decided to stop for lunch – for pie, specifically - in the curiously named town of Truth-or-Consequences. From what I've pieced together, The Accident occurred about eighteen miles north of a town called Las Cruces.

At this point, my narrative stops for a while. Within seconds of the rollover, I suffered a concussion that wiped out all off my memories from the time of the crash until I woke up in the ICU three days later. As the story continues, the exact events and order during which they took place have been explained to me after the fact, with details supplied by doctors, lawyers, paramedics, and a second-hand summary of the police report. It should be noted that this narrative will likely continue to change as more information about what happened comes to light.

We were about twenty minutes north of Las Cruces when it happened. The rear passenger-side tire experienced a “structural failure." It wasn't a true blowout because, instead of the tire rupturing from the impact of some foreign object like a nail, the layers of the tire itself suddenly separated from one another due to a fault in the tire's construction. Because we were traveling so fast on the freeway, the tire disintegrated without allowing the vehicle to slow down, as would be the case with a normal blowout. So instead, the shredded tire destabilized the vehicle, causing it to suddenly careen left across the median and into the opposite lane toward oncoming traffic. Despite Chris' best efforts to regain control over the listing truck, the Bronco's forward momentum forced it over onto its leftside where it began to roll, bouncing side-over-side. The truck rolled completely at least once before coming to rest upside down in the opposite lanes.

Left: What's left of the Bronco, shown here at a holding facility. It had come to rest upside down after rolling multiple times.

Right: The crumpled passenger side door, pried open so that I could be pulled from the vehicle.

(Source: Adri Kretzschmar)

Fortunately for Chris (but less so for me), physics was working in his favor during the rollover – each time the vehicle bounced, it hit the ground on the passenger side (i.e. my side). How I managed to survive this repeated pummeling in a vehicle without airbags, I will never understand. Counter-intuitively, having my side absorb the brunt of the accident's force might actually have been a stroke of good luck. Chris is several inches taller than me and, on more than one occasion, a doctor commented that my shorter stature may have contributed to saving my life (especially when you consider how little is left of the windshield). So if it meant keeping him safe, I'd gladly take a little extra thumping.

Severely disoriented, Chris managed to unclip himself from the seatbelt and climbed out of the flipped vehicle. Several bystanders had stopped to help after witnessing the accident, so they were already pulling me out of the wreckage. Though they surely knew it was unwise to move me, the interior of the vehicle reeked of leaking gasoline, so whoever pulled me out made the right decision.

I don't know at what point during the chaos they pulled her out but Gabby was already gone by the time the vehicle had tumbled to a stop. Being an older dog, that much trauma in such a brief, violent period of time likely didn't leave much chance for her to suffer. In her mind, she probably never even had a chance to register what was happening.

As someone pulled me away from the vehicle, I must've looked rough - gasoline mud and road grime streaked my face; I was decussated with lacerations both big and small across my chest, waist, groin, back, face and head. Bruises were already starting to streak across my arms and my right eye (the side where I'd received the concussion) had started to turn ruby red due to an internally ruptured blood vessel. Though I have no memory of it now, the police report explains that I was conscious but in shock – I kept screaming Chris's name until someone took my hand and told me he was safe. As soon as I knew, I fainted.

The paramedics transported us to the MountainView Regional Medical Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico, about forty-five minutes south of Truth-or-Consequences. Chris was also covered in lacerations and bruises. Being a taller guy, he'd required a few skin grafts be stapled to the top of his head and was wearing a neck brace collar to support a fractured C2 vertebrae at the base of his skull. The hospital held him overnight for observation and then turned him loose the next day. I'm told that I was awake and responsive when we arrived at the hospital, or at least aware that I'd been involved in a car accident but, again, I have no memory of any of this now.

During the two days I was unconscious, doctors performed several surgeries on me in order to correct the trauma to my GI tract sustained from the seat belt lacerations. Many of my ribs on each side were broken and my lower intestine, which had been ruptured by the seat belt, was bleeding into my abdominal cavity (they said I lost about a liter and a half of blood from the accident and subsequent surgeries). Assisted by at least three blood transfusions, a team of surgeons removed a foot-and-a-half long section of my small intestine (a section known as the jejunum).

In this analogy, I am the bag and the sad kitten is my small intestines (click the image if you want to see the real thing).(Source: Pexels.com) — In this analogy, I am the bag and the sad kitten is my small intestines (click the image if you want to see the real thing).
(Source: Pexels.com)

After the surgeons sealed me back up, I was left with a gnarly scar that snakes its way up from my groin, curves around my belly button and stops about mid-chest (it took thirty-eight staples to close). My belly looks like a kindergartner's desperate attempt to sew a teddy bear back together.

While all of this was happening to me, around me, and inside of me, my mind was elsewhere. I remember having this recurring dream where I was lying on my back, looking up into what was presumably a hospital room. There were no faces and no voices, just images that faded in and out, unprocessed by any part of my conscious brain. I don't know if these images came to me over the course of two hours or two days but for some reason, I had it in my mind that I was still camping. I was just asleep in the woods, occasionally dreaming about a hospital room for some reason. It was only after maybe the third dream (and the first in which I could hear distinct voices), that it occurred to me that I might actually be in a hospital, though my nether brain didn't lend much processing ability to why that might be. It was sometime around the fourth hospital dream when I regained consciousness and figured out which reality was the real one.

By that point, I'd been more or less unconscious for about seventy-two hours. I remember a woman's voice gently saying to me “There's been an accident, just stay still and try to relax." Somewhere in the cloud of activity around me, I could make out the sound of my mom and other familiar voices crying at some indeterminate distance. I had a tube in my throat, so there wasn't much else I could do even if I'd wanted to. So I my put my trust in these mysterious doctor-like figures and allowed myself to fall asleep once again, confident that I'd soon have all the answers I now so desperately needed.

My mom had arrived in Las Cruces from Chattanooga the day after the accident. She notified a few of my friends, who, in turn, spread the word through Facebook, text messages, etc. Three of them, Jake, Jennifer and Samantha, grabbed the first opportunity they could to get down to New Mexico and, along with my Mom, it was their faces I saw when I finally awoke enough to register what was happening on Wednesday morning, February 28.

They explained to me that there'd been an accident and that I needed to relax. I was intubated and my hands were wrapped in surgical mittens, like the world's weakest boxing champ, to keep me from pulling out the various wires and tubes from my body – a nasogastric tube for suctioning out my stomach contents, an endotracheal tube for breathing assistance, a femoral venous central line, an arterial line and, of course, ye olde urinary catheter. And that's not to mention the assorted leads, IVs, and various medical dodads haphazardly taped to my body. I looked a bit like Keanu Reeves when he wakes up in The Matrix.

Is it too late to take the blue pill?(Source: Samantha Eschborn) — Is it too late to take the blue pill?
(Source: Samantha Eschborn)

Undoubtedly, I would've put up a fight about the breathing tube if I'd had the energy to do so but given the hunch punch of opioids that was flowing directly into my femoral artery, I wasn't much in the mood to complain about anything. Once the ICU nurse felt I'd been conscious long enough to likely stay that way, I do remember her removing the breathing tube (that's one of those feelings no amount of drugs will wipe from your memory). She warned me that I should try not to speak for at least an hour after the tube came out – I could damage my vocal cords if I overused them. So, with only the faintest raspy whisper available on my part, I let Jake, Jennifer and my Mom do the talking.

A concussion combined with "enough painkillers to knock out Ozzy" does strange things to a man's ability to communicate. Jake carries a pocket-sized notebook with him when he travels, so we tried using it as a way for me to ask questions. Relearning how to hold a pen took some serious concentration but letters? Forget it. I could see in my head what they were supposed to look like but forms and shapes simply refused to march out onto the page. I mean, just look at this nonsense.

Ernest Hemingway once said “Write drunk, edit sober.” That advice does not apply to fentanyl.(Source: Jake Daniels) — Ernest Hemingway once said “Write drunk, edit sober.” That advice does not apply to fentanyl.
(Source: Jake Daniels)

By noon, I'd managed to work out the basics, including what had happened, who knew about it, what the doctors had taken out of me and what had been put back in. They told me about Chris, how he was doing and how he'd managed to escape the same pummeling that I had. What we didn't talk about, though, was Gabby. I know they didn't want to add the extra emotional burden to my list of ails but, even though we hadn't yet broached the subject, in my heart I already knew. It would be another three or four days before the subject came up – I didn't feel like I was well enough for the truth. That said, there were a few long nights of wondering all the same.

In the following days, my memory is a haze of half-sleep, painkillers and reintroductions to doctors I didn't recall meeting in the first place but who'd apparently had a hand in saving my life. Several friends came out to the hospital in the coming weeks, some of whom flew well across the country to see me, often having to spend hours in the waiting room when I was undergoing another surgery or feeling too sick to visit. Just knowing they were somewhere nearby did me more good than all the painkillers in the world could have. People sent care packages filled with all manner of odds and ends, both heartwarming and confusing. Letters arrived that I would stack on my bedside table; during the night, when I'd be awake for one reason or another, I'd re-read them over and over again to try and remember that former life that seemed increasingly foreign with each passing day.

The surgeries continued to stack up. Following the three different procedures required to remove and reconnect the damaged length of my bowel, I also had to have a team of orthopedic surgeons go in and repair my right ankle (specifically a snapped tibia) with the addition of four titanium screws. Then, about a week later, a last-minute x-ray revealed a previously overlooked fracture in my left knee, resulting in a fifth and final surgery to install a titanium plate and seven more screws. When it rains, it pours.

Left: Screws in ankle; Center: Front view of screws and plate in knee; Right: Side view of screws and plate in knee

(Source: MountainView Regional Medical Center)

My experiences in the hospital have varied tremendously - from boring at best to waking nightmares at their worst. There are moments that will haunt me long after I've started down the road to recovery: the disembodied moans of pain drifting into my room from an ICU patient down the hallway, then hearing those same uncontrollable moans coming from my own lungs; the jarring alarm from my IV stand late at night, its saline bags in need of replacement; nurses and doctors with the bed-side manner of assembly-line workers; the over-production of black bile draining through a tube in my nose, as my GI-tract comes back to life, one piece at a time; vomiting that same bile down the front of my gown and feeling my chest staples strain under the pressure of dry-heaves.

Even as I write this, I will sometimes catch a glimpse of myself in the darkened screen of my laptop and I hardly recognize the face that stares back at me. He's gaunt, with a faded cloth medical gown hanging off of one emaciated shoulder. His collarbone juts out, casting deep shadows down his haphazardly shaved chest, still patchy with adhesive from the recently removed heart monitoring leads. His hollow cheeks are hidden behind three weeks of scraggly, unkempt beard and his receding hairline still shows the faint lines of lacerations from the accident. His right eye was blood-red but now takes on a more jaundiced yellow tint, most of the blood having pooled at the base, visible only when he looks up at the nurse as she brings him his painkillers, blood thinners, and anti-nausea medications.

This is a version of myself I've never seen before and I hope to never see again. But, at the same time, there's a beauty and grace about this place that I never could've imagined without being dropped unceremoniously into the center of it. The kindness and selflessness of the people in this hospital is evident everywhere you look.

It's the experience of being cleaned by a team of nurses in the middle of the night because I'm too weak to move - they nonchalantly chat with me like a friendly passerby on the street, despite how humiliating the task might seem to someone like me who is completely unaccustomed to it. They understood my desire to maintain my dignity and they helped me to do it whenever possible.

It's the anesthesiologist tech who told me I reminded her of her son, another only child. As the anesthesia started to take hold with each deep breath, she held my hand for no other reason than to comfort a human being to whom she felt a connection.

When I was on a strict “clear liquid only” diet, it was the young nurse who warned me to steer clear of the beef broth. “Tastes like caca,” she said with a face of disgust (most of the nurses here are hispanic, so I'm also getting to brush up on my limited Spanish).

It's my mother, staying at my side for the better part of a month now, helping me with favors great and small without the slightest hesitation. She cracks her "mama bear" whip at the nurses when they aren't giving me the care I need and she tends to my well-being in ways she probably thought she'd never have to once I moved out of diapers as a child. In response to my concerns of mother/son propriety, she responds by simply saying "It's in the contract. It's my job."

And finally, it's every time a doctor, nurse or staff member has approached me and said some combination of these words: “I was there the night they brought you in – it took a lot of us to stabilize you and we weren't sure even then if you were going to make it. But here you are! I prayed that you would be safe and I'm so glad that you are.”

One doctor said I reminded her of her son, himself an only child. A nurse said I reminded him of his brother. I think it was the indiscriminate nature of Chris's and my situation that rattled folks – our accident could've happened to anyone, anywhere. There were no drugs or alcohol involved, no ineptitude on the part of the driver, just a freak accident. Chris or I could easily have been that doctor's son, or that nurse's brother and I think that scares people. I feel like that's why everyone cared so much about these two boys who came into the ER one Sunday afternoon. If there could be hope for us, there can be hope for anyone.

Chris is continuing to recover well. He'll have some rad new scars on top of his head but since he keeps it shaved, I feel like they'll work to his advantage. His neck brace is off and, for the most part, he's back to his old self. It warms my heart to hear his always inappropriately-loud voice echoing down the hallway when he stops by my room for a visit.

The plan is for me to stay with him, his wife and her mother in El Paso when I'm finally discharged from the hospital; they have a guest room for me that's wheelchair accessible, so I can crash there until my ankle and knee braces come off. Then, following a week or two of physical therapy to relearn how to walk, it'll be time to hit the road again. What, you didn't think my trip was over, did you? Nonsense. This was just a teensy-weensy setback.

CWO

Note: A couple of my friends set up a GoFundMe right after I was admitted to the hospital; amazingly, it reached its goal before I knew I was even in the hospital, which is a testament to just how generous people can be. Many of the folks who donated have never even met me, so I only hope I can pay forward their kindness somehow. I'm including a link to the GoFundMe (which you can view by clicking here) because, frankly, I can still use all the help I can get when it comes to covering the cost of the medical bills. While I do have insurance, it's not very inclusive - I am between jobs, after all. If you've donated already, thank you. If not, I hope you'll consider making even a small donation. Every little bit helps.