The blinking red light on the answering machine demanded attention when I opened the door that Tuesday afternoon after Labor Day. I pushed the recall button to hear one, two and then a third phone call from my son’s family in Pennsylvania. They needed me to call right now. To pick up the phone, to answer. There had been an accident.
It was the phone call that no one wants. My son, the father of four school-aged children and a husband with a wife in college, had been in a serious accident.
“He cracked his skull. He is in a coma. He not breathing on his own.” The staccato of information overwhelmed me. I promised we would be there as soon as possible with a rented car to assist as best we could.
I had no patience for surfing the Internet for the least expensive flight. I called the airline, “We have a family emergency. My son was in a bad accident, how soon can we get to Philadelphia?”
I called my daughter and sat down gasping, “I cannot do this,” before I could tell her the news. She volunteered to call the rest of the family. We stuffed suitcases, contacted neighbors and put things away for the duration. We had no idea when we would return.
The next afternoon we pulled up to the house in our rented car ready to help with the daily routines between visits to the hospital. The children kept up with their school work, helped with the house and told me where to find things. My daughter-in-love escorted me to my son’s room in the trauma intensive care unit. The Labor Day weekend had filled the beds with the injured from car accidents, mishaps during the weekend’s fun and a shooting victim.
I stood quietly at the foot of the bed studying my usually hyperactive son now tethered to equipment that breathed for him, provided him with sustenance, measured his vital signs, watched for brain swelling and stabilized his neck.
In time we learned that a hidden car came into his view as it rounded a sharp corner on a very narrow road. He had braked so hard he flew over the bike’s handle bars.
My daughter-in-love pulled his bicycle helmet off the shelf in his hospital room. “This is where his head hit the ground,” she pointed to fissures in the back of the helmet which had absorbed the brunt of the impact. Yes, his skull sustained a crack but the helmet split, not his head.
That colorful piece of plastic and dense styrofoam called a helmet saved him.
We spent the next several days watching as his body slowly worked through the shock of the trauma. Highly skilled nurses, breathing therapists and technicians flowed through the room. And slowly, the support systems were removed as they determined: he did not have a broken neck; he could breathe on his own; his digestive system worked; he could slowly wake up from his induced coma.
Although he had been moved to the rehabilitation unit by the time I left, he does not remember my being there. A setback returned him to the intensive care unit for a couple days, but with such a difference. He sat up in bed to address the doctor himself, “How long will I be in here? I have a lot of people depending on me for my work. I am supposed to be at a meeting in California the end of October,” he said.
The doctor acknowledged his concern, but advised him, “Let’s wait and see.”
Fortunately, through prayers from around the country and thanks to his wisdom in wearing a bicycle helmet, he returned to his long-distance computer job while still at the rehab hospital and was released in plenty of time to make his California business trip.
A year later, with medical approval, he began driving again. Nearly two years later he overcame his own fears of the bike and his wife’s fears for his safety, he began biking again.
I wrote and asked him if he would be wearing a motorcycle helmet.
“No, that would be overkill,” he responded.
“Not from a mother’s point of view … I would have you in kevlar, leather sleeves and slacks and steel-toed boots. Boy! I’ll bet you’re glad I’m not choosing your riding outfit.”
He assured me that his wife “wraps me in bubble wrap before each trip.”
He stuck with a new bicycle helmet.
Today, two-and-a-half years after the accident, he say he has “some loss in coordination” but that is all the residual damage he sees thanks to having wisely chosen to wear a bicycle helmet.