This letter was intended for Daves family, but I talked him into letting me post it.
The Crash From My Perspective
I would like to thank all of you who have expressed your concern in many wonderful ways regarding my recent spinal injury. I was injured while leading a motocross race inside Arco Arena, the indoor stadium where the Sacramento Kings basketball team plays. I crashed and landed on the back of my head, which severely broke the T-4 vertebrae in my spine. I went over the bars, hit the dirt, and was loaded onto a backboard in, what seemed, one fluid moment in time.
As I lay there with my head taped to the board looking straight up at the ceiling, I had my good friend Lance Beauchamp and three or four EMT’s standing over me. They all wanted me to be transported right away. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was severely injured, and argued for several minutes with everyone, telling them that I just wanted to be cut from the board and let go so that I could load up my bike and go home. The EMT’s argued their case very strongly to go to the hospital, saying I was already “packaged,” had a visible mark on my spine, difficulty breathing, and several possible broken fingers. Still, I told them I wanted to be left alone to collect my thoughts to make my own decision. Lance stayed with me and told me I should go to the hospital. His remarks persuaded me to stay on the board and be transported immediately. (I hate to think what would have happened if I was cut loose from the board and took one step with a shattered T-4 in my spine.)
The EMT’s brought in their stretcher and loaded me onto it. They tried to shield the rain coming down as I went out of the stadium to the waiting ambulance. As the rain hit my face, I thought “how appropriate to be showered with tears.” And I thought, “Great! I get Tom into racing and now I’m going down.” The EMT called in his imminent transport to a downtown hospital and was quickly declined. I heard talk about where to go next. I told them I wanted to go to Sutter Roseville, closest to my house. They told me it would be a 20-mile freeway ride. I told them I didn’t care. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that my head was taped to a piece of wood and that the highways aren’t smooth. I was mentally counting every bump and joint in the freeway. If you ever want to know what it feels like to “ride the board,” have someone hit you on the back of the head with a 2x4 repeatedly sometime. You’ll see stars like I did.
You know, the world looks funny to you when you can only look straight up. I remember the roof of the ambulance. I remember the white stucco of the ER overhang. I remember the harsh lights glaring down at me. I heard what seemed like dozens of male and female voices talking “hospital” talk. My first stop was for x-rays. My head hurt from still being taped to the board. It almost overpowered the pain that was developing in my spine, not to mention the deep burn in several of my fingers. After what seemed like 20 x-rays, I was wheeled back to my ER room. I thought I must have looked pretty funny in my flashy race gear and boots.
Now that the hospital knew what my injuries were, they started an IV, and mercifully, gave me some pain medication. It must have been close to two hours since my initial crash. Lance, my wife Tamara and daughter Chloe, my sister Tricia and my niece Hannah, and my mom Pat eventually appeared in my vision of the ceiling. Tamara brought me a change of clothes so that I could change in the ER and go home after the “precautionary” hospital visit. We waited for the x-rays to be read. Some in the room heard hospital personnel looking at the x-rays. Their tone and hushed whispering didn’t seem promising. I heard someone say that the trauma surgeon was on his way to discuss the x-rays. Dr. Chehrazi soon comes in and announces that I have a severe injury to my spine at T-4 and is surprised I’m not paralyzed. “Great,” I thought. “I guess I’m not going home tonight.” “So much for Tamara bringing me some fresh clothes to go home in.”
It’s odd how strong I was until I had most of my family staring down at me. I fought to hold back my tears, but as hard as I tried, the tears quietly streamed down my cheeks.
I was quickly admitted to the neuro-trauma intensive care unit and hooked up to a continuous supply of IV Dilaudid (a drug 10 times as potent as Morphine, so I’m told.) I endured three days and two nights of non-stop, around the clock attention until my surgery day on Wednesday March 1st. I had EKG patches on me to monitor my heart activity. I had oxygen tubes in my nose to help me breathe. At one point, I think I had 6 IV needles in my left arm. I had a blood pressure cuff on my arm during my entire stay, and it automatically checked my pressure every 15 minutes. I got chest X-rays every morning around 6 am. After the first night, my brother Tom and father in law
appeared in my vision. They had flown in for the big party.
I had respiratory therapy treat me with their breathing machine 4 times a day. My legs had an air bag system hooked up to them so that the blood would not pool at the bottom of my legs. Every other day I had a nice man ultrasound every inch of both of my legs, looking for blood clots. In the ICU, two RN’s watched me like hawks all day and night.
At night, I often tried to roll over on my opposite side, only to find myself hopelessly tangled in what seemed like a dozen different tubes attached to me. I would spend several minutes locating the “call” button and then be reprimanded for “not asking for help.” I lost track of how many time I was scolded with that remark.
During the daytime, I fought other battles. The nurses wanted to put a catheter in me. I told them “hell would freeze over before you put that thing in my thing.” Well, by the second day, I lost the battle. In walked an attractive RN, probably no older than 27. The tube she carried in her hand looked like a clear garden hose. I absolutely cringed. As she pulled away my gown, I hoped she wouldn’t find what she was looking for. When she did, I tried a little humor and said, “it usually is a bit bigger than this.” She thought that was funny. And this is how the next the next three nights would go.
At 7 a.m. Wednesday morning, I was wheeled out of ICU into another holding area, just outside the surgery rooms. I was surrounded by men and women in blue scrubs. They were waiting for Dr. B. Barry Chehrazi to screw me back together. The anesthesiologist showed up and stuck a needle in me just as I was wheeled into the surgery room. Since my spine was so unstable, they apparently had some type of bed that flipped over, so that I would be face down. Unbeknownst to me, eight hours went by before it was all over. I don’t remember much back in ICU, but several family members got to watch me see and do things that normal people don’t do. I was so drugged, I was seeing machinery and cryptic messages in exquisite detail. My family members must have thought I had brain damage.
Three days after the surgery, I was stable enough to be transferred to the med-surg floor. On my last night there, I awoke in the middle of the night in a strange room (after 7 days, I was quite familiar with my ICU room.) Alarms on some of my equipment were going off, and I didn’t know who I was, where I was at, or whether this was just a dream. I pondered my fate for probably 20 minutes. I wondered if I needed tokens to make the alarms stop. I wondered if I needed to be put back on the cradle, like a portable phone. Finally, I determined that I must be in the hospital and I found the nurse’s call button. Of course, I was tangled in my tubes again and I received the wrath that only a nurse could give at 2 a.m.
The next morning, I was fitted for a special back/neck brace. By that afternoon I was out of bed and took my first steps in over a week. It felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. The metal in my back was very obvious to me, and it hurt in a way I can’t even describe. It felt like plates of steel stacked on my spine. I decided at that moment that my life would probably never be the same. But I was walking, and that’s what mattered most.
Finally, eight days of hell was coming to an end and I was going home. But my new orders were to remain in the brace, except while sleeping, for the next three months. No driving privileges. And no riding my motorcycle for a year. Holy cow! That’s next to impossible orders.
It is now three-plus weeks since my surgery. I sit at home and watch the grass grow. Sometimes I wish I was back in the hospital. At least I had some interaction and something interesting happening. But I sit here and know that if I do everything right, I will be back to my normal crazy self in a year. And my Yamaha YZ450F waits there patiently in the garage for me.
I have so many people to thank (many to whom words can’t do justice:
Tom, Susan, Tamara, Tricia, Hannah, Chloe, Pat Harvey, and
Watkins (and all of family who couldn’t be there)
Lance Beauchamp and the Beauchamp family
Mark Hilton
Heidi Winn
Suzanne Daly
Rodney Butzer
Joey Washburn
Ron Kelly
Ric Novotny
Bob Messer and the Dirt Diggers North MC
John and Tonya Moore and Jay Vice
Walt Dobbs
William Klatt Jr.
Peter Brown of RosevilleYamaha
Shawn Kemp
Cody Landers
Peter Crowell
Denise Daubney Lamp
(And my sincere apologies if I missed anyone.)
The only thing I can say is “thank you from the bottom of my heart.” And I’m thankful that God gave me one “get out of jail free” card. I will try to be more careful next time.
David Harvey, (injured on 2/26/06, operated on 3/1/06 at Sutter Roseville)
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