Hurricanes and Halos

Note: This post contains content that may be emotionally disturbing to sensitive readers. Proceed with caution and plenty of Kleenex.

Hurricane Alicia was the first hurricane I’d ever experienced. It forever altered the path of my life, broke my heart and blew my future onto a completely uncharted path.

Here’s how it happened.

THE BEST LAID PLANS . . .

It was mid August, 1983 in Houston, Texas.

My husband, two year old daughter and I had just moved from the home of a quadriplegic man for whom we had been providing caregiving services over the previous year and a half.

He was about to get married, so we taught his new bride how to take care of him and made plans to move into a home of our own.

A month before we moved, we found a suitable home and made a down payment to hold it. The home was being renovated and would not be ready for us to move into it until Labor Day weekend, which was still three weeks away.

In the interim, my husband’s parents invited us to stay on the campus of a small bible college where they served as superintendants. School was out for the summer and only a small group of students and faculty still remained on campus.

We moved in to a small dorm room, put all of our possessions in storage, and settled in for was supposed to be a short and sweet visit.

During that same time period, we were also on a short list of families who were preparing to work in Saudi Arabia for a couple of years.

My husband was a talented draftsman and was invited by my uncle (who managed an international engineering design team), to move to Saudi to help his team design a city on the Persian Gulf.

We were in the final stages of the approval process and had begun receiving phone calls in the middle of the night (day time in Saudi), reviewing last minute preparations.

We were told we would be living in the family compound where the families of all American employees lived. We would be assigned a fully furnished rent free home near the worksite.

We were excited.

Plan “A” was that we would move into our new home in Houston, continue our careers, raise our children and settle down to build a successful life.

Plan “B” was that we would move to Saudi, work for a couple of years, save lots of tax free income and return to the U.S. to buy a home and settle down.

Life was good. Doors of opportunity were opening for us daily. 

We had no idea that Plan “C” was about to rock our world forever.

Hurricane Alicia

Per Wikipedia, “Hurricane Alicia was the first named storm and first hurricane of the 1983 Atlantic hurricane season. Alicia was the season’s strongest and deadliest storm. It killed a total of 21 people and caused $2.6 billion (1983 dollars) in damage.”

We moved to the Bible college campus just as Hurricane Alicia was threatening to hit land.

The small but powerful Category 3 storm roared onto shore from the Gulf Coast and slowly cut a direct path, straight through the city of Houston, leaving a wake of devastation across the entire city and surrounding areas. 

Alicia not only killed many people, but also caused catastrophic injury and permanent damage in the lives of many families, including my own.

The bible college was located on the north side of the city, but was certainly not spared the fury of the slow moving storm.  Trees and power lines were down everywhere and roads were blocked. 

Everyone on the bible campus—in total, approximately two dozen people—had been hunkered down, sheltering in place for three days in the only brick portion of the building at the college—the administrative offices. 

There was no electricity, no way to get news updates on the storm other than battery operated transistor radios and food and water supplies were rapidly dwindling.

I recall sitting on a bench positioned against the brick wall in the outdoor corridor of the administrative building with my father-in-law.

We watched in awe as the fury of the wind bent and blew the tallest trees on the campus until the trunks were almost parallel with the ground.

It was a scary sight, and one I hoped the wind would not blow the school away by the time it was over. I had never experienced such a frightening storm in my entire life.

We were captives of Mother Nature until the slow moving storm finally blew over the area. Flash thunderstorms following for a full day or two after the main storm passed.  

It had only been four days since our move from the townhouse to the bible college. The events of that week happened rapid fire, leaving us no chance to recover in between.

Sadly, the week culminated in a freak accident that occurred on August 18, 1983.  That was the day my 27-year old healthy husband of nearly five years broke his neck and became paralyzed from the shoulders down, confined to a wheelchair for life.

Here’s how it happened:

The sprawling front lawn in front of the school looked like a lake. About four or five inches of standing water covered it. All the surrounding ditches were overflowing. Flooding was widespread across the campus, which was built in a low lying residential area.

This standing water proved to be too tempting for a group of about six or eight young men (mostly students) ranging in age from their late twenties to mid thirties.

After being cooped up indoors in small quarters for three days and nights, they decided as a group that they needed to “let off a little steam.”

So, they proceeded to take some large plywood boards and used them to “surf” across the front lawn of the school.

They all donned swim trunks and tank tops and took turns running, jumping and belly flopping on the boards, coasting until they came to a stop.

They were having a blast, and quickly drew a small crowd of onlookers from the school and the surrounding residential neighborhood.

My husband didn’t decide to join the group until after he saw how much fun they were having.

Meanwhile, the group became bored with surfing across the grass. Then someone got a bright idea.

“Hey, why don’t we go to the dorm building, climb to the second story landing, step in front of the safety railing and jump over the sidewalk and into the ditch? You know, we can do the ‘Nestea plunge’ (a term made popular by a TV commercial at the time). OR. . . we can do belly flops into the ditch!”

So, while my husband was changing into his swim clothes, the activities moved down to the end of the campus where the main three-story dormitory building stood.

A concrete external stair case with landings at each level wound up the face of the building.

The ditch that ran in front of the dorm building looked like it had three to four feet of water in it. We later learned that it only had about a foot and a half of standing water in it.

A concrete sidewalk separated the dorm building from the ditch. The ditch ran along the edge of the front lawn at the school. 

Someone ran to get a camera to capture the action shots.

I had been watching the antics up to this point, with mixed emotions. It was entertaining, but also a bit nerve wracking to see grown men acting like little boys.

While waiting for the second act to begin, I decided to walk back down the long outdoor corridor that ran in front of the main administrative building to check on our daughter, who had been napping.

As I walked in that direction, my husband, who had just put on his swim trunks, passed me in the hallway on his way to the opposite end of the campus to join the fun.

A strange feeling came over me as we passed each other and I instinctively looked back over my shoulder and called out to him, “Be careful!” I had a fleeting feeling that someone was going to get hurt, but quickly dismissed the thought.

My husband was a well built, muscular man who had been a star athlete in high school.

Once on a high school field trip to a track meet in a college campus in Louisiana, an Olympic team spotter saw his stellar performance and tried to recruit him to train for the Olympics. He played just about every sport you can imagine in high school and won numerous awards.

Even after we got married, I used to tease him all the time about his addiction to playing sports. The trunk of our car looked like a sporting goods store because he insisted on carting all of his sports gear around with him everywhere he went.

In all that time, he had never been injured because he was also very safety minded and took pre-cautions to prevent injuries every time he played sports.

Knowing all of that, I had never worried about his safety when it came to any of his sporting activities.

But this time, something felt “off.” Something was not quite right.

A few minutes later, just as I was about to carry our daughter down to the dorm building to watch the festivities again, my mother-in-law came racing up to me, her face as white as a sheet and tears flowing.

“Melody, you’d better let me take the baby—you need to get back down to the dorm building NOW… something terrible has happened. I’m going to call an ambulance.”

My heart sunk to my toes as she informed me that my husband had injured himself badly and it didn’t look good. She had been just seconds away from telling the men they needed to stop the shenanigans, which were against campus rules.

As she approached the scene, yelling for them to stop, she saw my husband push off the landing, jump over the sidewalk and attempt to do a belly flop into the ditch.

It was like watching a slow motion train wreck that couldn’t be stopped before a horrific crash.

Later we learned that because his shoes had slick red mud on them, the moment he pushed off the edge of the landing, he lost his momentum.

Instead of landing on his belly, one of his shoulders plowed into the saturated soil on the far side of the ditch, which held it in place, while his 200 pound body continued to flip at a 90 degree angle.

The moment of impact was caught on camera.

He was now lying face down in the water and was not moving.

At first, the small crowd of onlookers thought he was playing a practical joke on them. He was known to pull pranks like that, so no one on the scene who knew him well believed he was really hurt.

But he wasn’t moving at all. Seconds ticked by.

Finally, he managed to turn his head sideways out of the water just far enough to say to the other guys, “I’ve hurt my neck. I’m serious, guys. I can’t move the rest of my body. Go get one of the longer plywood boards, turn me over in the water and gently slip it under me.”

Always good in an emergency, true to form, he was the calmest person on the scene.

By then, I had just arrived, panting from running and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like a waking nightmare. It seemed that my earlier premonition had come true.

I began to panic. It didn’t help matters any that a passing thunderstorm with accompanying lightening strikes started to drop rain again. My main concern was that the men get him inside before lightening could strike him.

I was crying and calling to the guys, “Please hurry! Get him inside the dorm building and out of the rain.”

All of us were in shock. Many of the guys were crying. We all knew it was a very serious situation.

After what seemed like an eternity, the men finally got the board under him and carefully carried him inside the dorm building. They placed him and the board upon which he was lying on top of a picnic table inside a common area.

Then, the long and highly stressful wait for an ambulance to arrive began.

Although his mother had called an ambulance as soon as the accident happened, the hospital staff informed her that due to the hazardous road conditions and debris, it might take them an hour or more before they could get to the school location.

Under normal circumstances, the drive would have been a short 15-20 minutes. But not today. Fallen power lines and trees blocked almost every road between the hospital and our location.

While we waited, we gathered around him in a circle and cried, held hands, prayed and did what we could to make him as comfortable as possible.

Knowing that it is not advisable to move a person after a serious injury, there wasn’t much more any of us could do.

I cushioned his head in my hands like a pillow, tears running down my face. I kissed his forehead and tried to comfort him as best I could, but I felt helpless.

My mind was racing and my imagination was running wild.

He was conscious, calm and talking. We were all very grateful for that. He didn’t seem to have any brain damage, but he could not move anything but his head and told us he could not feel the rest of his body at all.

The ambulance arrived about an hour after the accident.

After asking a series of questions to ascertain what had happened, one of the first responders removed my husband’s wet shoes and socks, took a sharp edged object out of his pocket and began to poke my husband with it, starting at his feet.

“Can you feel this?”

“No sir.”

He then moved the sharp object up to his calves, then his thighs, then his stomach and chest.

The same question was asked and each time, the answer was the same.

“No sir.”

Finally, when the first responder poked him on the top of one of his shoulders, he replied, “OUCH! Yes, I felt that!”

That is when I completely fell apart. I began to weep and wail uncontrollably, as if he had just been pronounced dead.

I KNEW he had broken his neck. Due to the fact that we had just been living with a man who was a quadriplegic, I knew intuitively that my husband was now paralyzed too.

I could tell from the glum looks on the ambulance crew’s faces that it was the worst possible outcome.

The rest of that day and into the night became a blur of flashing snapshots with swirling emotions attached to each one in my mind.

First, there was the harrowing ride to the hospital in the back of the ambulance, bouncing, bumping, swerving to miss trees, power lines and abandoned cars in the road.

My husband was in extreme pain and cried out every time the ambulance pitched and bounced. I was grateful that they did not turn on the sirens, which would have caused me to go into sensory overload.

It was twilight. The fact that there were no street lights working along the roads felt eerie to me.

When we arrived at the hospital, we were told they were running on auxiliary power only. That scared me, and I wondered if they would even be able to help him at all.

After they wheeled my husband into an area of the emergency room where I was not allowed to go, I stepped to the nearest pay phone to call our disabled friend whose home we had just moved out of, to tell him the shocking news.

When I heard his familiar soft spoken voice answer the phone, I began to cry so hard, I could barely speak. After explaining what had happened, there was a long pause while he gathered his thoughts.

He tried to reassure me that we wouldn’t know for certain if the injury was permanent until all the medical test results were in and evaluations completed. He told me that sometimes, depending on which cervical bones and parts of the spine are damaged, some people do go on to recover from injuries like this one.

I knew he was trying not to upset me any more than I already was at that moment, but I was inconsolable. I hung up the phone and sobbed. I felt like I was living in an episode of the old TV series known as The Twilight Zone.

Finally, I collapsed in a heap in a chair in the emergency waiting room. A nurse kept me informed of my husband’s status about every half hour. They wouldn’t let me see him yet, which only added to my high anxiety.

After a couple of hours of conducting medical tests, finally a doctor came out to speak to me. I didn’t want to believe what I was knew I was about to hear him say.

It was as if I went into a slow motion zone in my mind. Even my hearing became distorted. I wanted to cover my ears and run screaming for the door.

The doctor’s facial expression was worn and tired. I knew he did not want to be the one to who had to tell me the bad news.

The results of the initial x-rays revealed our worst fears: my husband had broken his 4th, 5th and 6th cervical vertebrae. Although his spinal cord was not severed, it was badly bruised and swollen, which I was told often has the same outcome: permanent paralysis.

I was told he was now considered to be a “C-5” quadriplegic, which meant he would likely never walk again; he would probably be paralyzed for life and confined to a wheelchair.

I suddenly felt dizzy. The waiting room began to swim around me. I was also extremely nauseated. My worst fears were coming true.

To complicate matters, the small regional hospital where we were that night did not have the medical specialists on staff or the resources to properly and fully evaluate his condition, nor did they have the equipment to stabilize him.

Time is of the essence to stabilize patients in critical injuries like this one. Under normal circumstances, they would have transported him by Life Flight helicopter.

However, because of the ongoing hurricane conditions that night, that option was off the table due to safety concerns.

So, a decision was made to transport him to a major hospital located in the Houston Medical Center. That meant another harrowing two hour drive by ambulance, given weather, road conditions and flooding.

My stress levels went through the roof during that wild ambulance ride through the blackest night of my life. My husband continued to writhe in pain at every motion of the ambulance.

I begged the ambulance crew to give him something for the pain, but they refused saying that until he was stabilized, that would not be possible.

By the time we finally arrived at the second hospital around 1:30 or 2 A.M., I was totally exhausted and numb. It was hard to believe that the accident had happened almost twelve hours earlier the day before.

Time was a total blur at this point.

They explained to me in advance about the medical procedure that had to be done. It involved installing what they called a “halo” into my husband’s skull. They had to drill four holes in his head and insert four thick metal rods called “pins”, one in each hole .

The rods were linked together in a circular shape with another piece of metal that wrapped around his head, thus the name of the ghastly device—“halo”. It seemed to me to be more like a crown of thorns.

Two additional metal bars ran parallel to the sides of his neck and were attached to a sheepskin-lined hard plastic vest that would keep him stabilized, unable to move his head for several months until the swelling in his spinal cord went down.

Again, they told me they could not give him anything for pain until the procedure was over.

As an Empath (natural healer and highly sensitive person, especially when it comes to dealing with the pain of others), I was horrified by that thought.

While the medical staff worked on him, I was slumped on the floor, leaning against the wall, waiting anxiously for it all to be over with.

I was within hearing distance of the surgery room where they were working on him, and I could hear him screaming at the top of his lungs as if he were being tortured. 

I covered my ears with my hands, put my head between my knees, prayed and cried. I was surrounded by a few family members who had followed the ambulance to the second hospital, but on the inside, I felt alone and lost.

At that point, I wanted more than anything to be by his side and comfort my husband, but I wasn’t allowed to do so.

So I begged God to send His angels and the Holy Spirit to guide the doctor’s hands and comfort my husband in my stead.

It was the first of hundreds of times that I would spend over the next fourteen years in a hospital setting: exhausted, waiting, praying and asking God to intervene during critical times of his recovery, rehab and ongoing medical treatments.

And that is how, in the blink of an eye, all our plans and dreams came crashing down.

Suddenly, the bright future I had envisioned for myself and my family became a giant, angry red question mark, scrawled hastily against a backdrop of dark storm clouds that threatened to destroy life as we had always known it.

Our life would never be the same.

LIFE LESSON: TRUST GOD IN THE MIDST OF THE STORM

I believe that all of us are on a specific life destiny path.

Often, the plans we make for ourselves may not be aligned with our life’s destiny path.

The storms of life can appear out of nowhere and toss us around like match sticks in a whirlwind.

As much as we would like to think that we are in control of our life circumstances, at some point we are forced to admit that we most certainly are not in control of anything that happens to us in life on this earth.

I also believe there is a benevolent higher authority in charge of the entire universe. I call Him my Heavenly Father. I have known and trusted Him since I was a small child.

He loves each of us as His creations with a supernatural love.

Like any good father, ultimately, He knows what is best for each of us.

Imagine a wise and loving earthly father who is teaching his infant child to walk. He sometimes allows that child lose its balance and fall to the floor in order to teach the child that it needs the father’s guidance, direction and support when walking across the room.

In this same way, starting with my husband’s injury thirty-six years ago, I’ve learned to rely on my Heavenly Father for guidance, direction and support, every time I make a decision or a mistake that causes me to fall or stumble.

Like that toddler, I reach out to Him, arms raised, crying out for His help. He gently picks me up, heals my wounds, and puts me back on the right path every time.

If we learn to yield our lives and our futures to Him completely in this way, He faithfully leads us through even the darkest storms of life and teaches us to trust Him with the final outcome in any situation.

In the story above, you read that I had created Plan A and Plan B for myself. Both plans looked good to me at the time.

But who’s to say that either of those plans would have turned out the way I planned them?

Would I have learned the life lessons intended for me?

Would I have ended up following the path I was destined to follow?

I seriously doubt it.

I was a hard headed, stubborn “wild child” who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s and I had a lot of pride and selfishness to overcome. Had I not been stopped in my tracks by my husband’s accident, I may have never grown into the person I am today.

Not that I have arrived, by any means. I have learned that I am a perfectly imperfect person. But I have also learned that personal development is an ongoing process, from cradle to grave for each of us.

Some of us stubborn ones just have to learn the hard way. Don’t ask me why that is, but I know it to be true for myself, anyway.

Just as wild horses must be “broken” before they can be useful, so must some of us.

Perhaps if we follow the path we are meant to walk, even if it is the hardest thing we’ve ever done in our lives, it all comes full circle in the end.

A life or heart once broken and then restored, is better able to serve others well.

As Kintsugi teaches us, broken vessels (or humans), once repaired become stronger in all the places where they were once weak and shattered.

I think about it like this: if I hadn’t walked this difficult path and learned its related life lessons, The Beauty of Imperfection would not exist to help other caregivers today.

It is my hope and prayer that each person who reads these words will learn as I did to trust God in the midst of each storm of life.

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