June 16-
I am going to try to start journaling more our experiences. I used to hate writing and was the worst at it, but this has been therapeutic for me to express my thoughts and feelings. I just watched a video on facebook from a Spinal cord injury person's mom. He has a large following on facebook and his mom was interviewed about the night her son was hurt. It was scary similar to my reaction. She had gotten a random phonecall one day that she normally wouldn't have answered but somehow she knew she needed to. It was the same for me on August 21st last year. Julian was only a few minutes late, and somehow I knew something was terribly wrong. I couldn't change my mind that things were going to be so bad. I probably waited 7 min from not seeing his GPS signal moving until I was out the door to go to him. In nothing more than pajamas and flip flops, I raced the 1.2 miles down the street. I parked my car and ran down to get past the firetruck that was blocking my view. I was screaming as I was running that my son was on his way home. I rounded the firetruck only to see my son's car facing me on the side of the road against a tree. The front windshield was shattered and that's all I could see. I immediately feel to my knees as a female police officer tried to comfort me. I couldn't bear to ask how he was because I didn't want to hear the worst. She did tell me that he was alert and talking to the fire and parametics that had just arrived. I was a mess, the rain had started back and I had to contact Chris to get him to come up the street. I'm sure that was the worst phone call to get hearing your wife sobbing that our child was in a bad accident. He joined me shortly after and we stood in the rain for what seemed like an eternity as they worked hard to free Julian from the car. As soon as he was brought to the ambulance, my first question was "Can you move anything?", and the answer was No. I went from crying and broken mom to quick mama bear mode. He needed reassurance from me that everything was going to be ok, but in my head knew everything was everything but OK. I was able to sit at his head in the ambulance as we raced to the hospital. I did my best to hold my shit together although, I'm not sure how well I did. The EMT was wonderful. She worked with Julian and talked to us the whole way. We were greeted at Richland by the nicest ER physician. After a quick assessment, he confirmed what I already knew. We had a spinal cord injury and a bad one at that. The neuro NP was less than optimistic about his diagnosis. It's so hard to be a mom and a nurse/nurse practitioner of more than 20 years. Realistically I knew way more than I wanted, but the mom in me was wanting everyone to fight as much for him as I would. I'm not sure why the events happened that night. The sayings "Everything happens for a reason", or "God won't give you more than you can handle", started to really piss me off. I can't imagine why such a cruel injury would happen to a sweet 17 year old that tells him mom he loves me every single time we speak, with an entire life to lead. And the notion that God thinks this is what anyone could handle is mindblowing because this is definately more than any one person should be able to handle, or it insunuates that God gives the strong more than the weak is not fair. But I guess the saying, "Life isn't fair" is true, because this sweet child did nothing to deserve this outcome. He only wanted to come home after a long day at work which he loved. Every single SCI patient has a terrible story that will mirror mine a lot. Most SCI's are described as "freak accidents". Most would never happen a 2nd time if the incident was recreated. It's like a perfect storm of events that would forever change the future. For me, It was so hard to comprehend that my child looked perfect after he was in this terrible accident and his car was destroyed. He had not 1 single bruise, cut or scratch on his body. The only thing from walking away from this unscaved was that he broke C4 and C5 which caused severe compression on his spinal cord. The only thing worse would have been death. I do count my blessings that Julian is still here to continue this life and he is the same Julian mentally as before.
That night, we started to call our family. I would say by the next afternoon, less than 24 hours later, our entire family was at our house to help. We do count our blessings that he is so loved and so many people rallied to be there for us, Julian, and Alex and Lilly. The outreach was nothing short of mind blowing and overwhelming.
I will start to write our story so that hopefully one day he can look back at this and realize how far he's come and how loved he is.
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