I am alive

At 11:30 pm, AirMed landed with me at the University of Utah.  I was rushed to surgery immediately for a subdural hematoma, an epidural hematoma, and lots of bleeding from my head. The head of the neurology unit, Dr. Caldwell, performed the surgery. He called my dad after the surgery was done, and told him what had happened. There is a scale used for head trauma patients, called the Glasgow coma scale. It measures the eye movements, verbal sounds, and motor movements. The scale goes from three to eighteen, with eighteen meaning that you are a regular person. When I reached the University of Utah, I was a three, meaning that I was dead according to anyone who saw me at that point. Three is the lowest number of points available. Dr. Caldwell did not offer a lot of hope for my situation, and merely stated that miracles happen, and the only reason he operated on me was because I was of the age when it would happen. He said that the first 12 hours would be very critical, and made it sound like the next 24-48 hours were pretty serious as well.

            My family got to the University of Utah and pushed their way up to the Neuro ICU. The escort met them at the ICU and took them to the surgery recovery room, where I was located. The only thing that was recognizable to my mom was that my toenails had been painted pink. She remembered from the weekend at the cabin that they were the same. Other than that, I was very swollen and hooked up to a lot of tubes, and even a breathing machine because I was being heavily sedated. My mom and Colby were able to get somewhat of a response from kissing me and talking to me. However, my mom soon learned that with head trauma, the thing to first do when the brain is as swollen as mine was is to keep my surroundings as quiet as possible, to make sure that my brain did not swell any more. I was given a blessing from my dad and uncle, and at 6 a.m., my family was asked to leave until 8 a.m. for rounds.

            The first day in the ICU, I got a lot of visitors, flowers, and cards. There were many people who were praying for me and sending their love. Sometime during the day, the nurses did the major task of transporting me to the scanner. They said that the scan was better than could be expected. They were encouraged but guarded.

            Around dinnertime, my parents decided to break the fast that they had been doing since they heard about the accident. A lot of my family gathered to help break the fast, and my uncle that my parents hadn’t talked to for several years because of an argument that they had over money was asked to offer the prayer. The prayer was very nice, and there was not a dry eye in the group.

            My parents talked to their stake president about whether or not to tell Taylor about what was going on while he was serving his mission in Armenia. He called around 8:00 at night, and the family gathered in the car to talk to him, because in the hurry to pack, a cell phone charger had been left at home.  Taylor and Dad decided that if I died, he would not return home for the funeral, and made arrangements to keep in contact. It was understood that I needed his prayers too, along with everyone else.

A visit with me at this time usually made people feel better about the situation. Being a doctor for ten years, my dad had seen many people who, by the books, should not have pulled through alive, but somehow they did. Of course, the opposite is also true. But my parents were feeling that somehow, I was going to make it through alive, because of promises that had been made to me in previous blessings, and because of inspiration and feelings that they were having at the time.

            My parents were very nervous to leave me unattended, but were also tired from being awake for so long at the beginning of everything going on. They wanted to find somewhere super close to the hospital, so they could be available if necessary. Fortunately, there is a hotel on University Hospital grounds that even offers a discount for people who are there for a medical reason. University Guest House became a home away from home for my family.

            However, my brothers took a shift in the waiting room for the night that my parents went to the Guest House at first. They were still nervous to leave me alone, and the nurse said that they don’t like to have people in the patient rooms for the night, so they settled on the waiting room. For a while, my family was watching the numbers that measured my Inter-Cranial Pressure like hawks. 

The fact that I was able to survive this accident is truly a miracle. For years after I left the Neuro ICU, the nurses there would have days of discouragement, and they would always use my story as a reminder that miracles happen on occasion. At the beginning, Dr. Caldwell's prognosis was pretty grim. But every time that he saw me, he would just shake his head and say that it was a miracle that I survived. I can definitely say that because of fasting and priesthood blessings, I was able to survive the accident.

Cabin in Island Park

The year that my mom had my smallest brother, Casey, my family had just moved to Idaho Falls a couple of years before. With my dad owning his own practice in town, my mom saw that my dad's practice was very time-consuming, and impeded heavily on our family time. At first, she tried to find new destinations that we could go to as a family for vacations and "family time". After a little while, she got tired of planning so many vacations at a time, and decided that what we needed was a cabin. We found some land in Island Park, located on Island Park Reservoir, which was only an hour and a half drive from our home. It was perfect.
The cabin became a wonderful retreat for my family, and we always looked forward to spending time there. While I was in college, it became a meeting place for us with my cousins who lived in Washington during President's Day weekend. It was tradition to go to the cabin with my cousins during President's Day and we always looked forward to it. Princess loved the cabin, and was able to roam free through the woods that surrounded it. This particular President's Day was when we realized that we needed to put Princess down, and it was a blessing that I was there to see her deteriorate.

Multiple Sclerosis

My dad was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2002.  Before the year of my internship, I had taken up a job with a flower shop in Provo delivering flowers to people. It was a great job for a college student, and very flexible, and helped me to earn a little spending money. One night, I was talking to my roommate late in our room, and we were both lying on my bed. I started to move my legs because they were starting to go numb, and then I realized that I did that way more than what I considered to be normal. My dad's diagnosis had ended his medical practice that he had for ten years. The next day, while I was delivering flowers, I called my mom on my cell phone and asked if MS was hereditary. Her heart sank. She had noticed a lot of things that I had done over the years that seemed to be a lot like my dad’s symptoms, and had wondered if I had a disposition towards it. She tried to tell me to ignore the symptoms for insurance reasons, but after a while, I was having constant headaches that could not be ignored. My dad talked to one of his friends who was practicing medicine in Provo to find out about a good neurologist in the area. Dr. Altamirano was mentioned for me to go see. She was new in town, so getting into see her was not a problem.

            Dr. Altamirano became my mother figure in Provo. We got very close very fast. She was from Chile, and was a stake young women’s president in her stake at the time. I became like one of her “young women” and she treated me just like family. I told her about my father, and about my symptoms. She was concerned, and ordered me to have a lot of tests done. My first MRI showed up clear. She also ordered a spinal tap to be done, and my dad was able to come to Provo and be with me through the procedure. After the spinal tap, I felt like my headaches were getting worse. She said that it could be from the procedure itself, and asked for another MRI to be done. I took Taylor with me to get the MRI done. On the way home, after dropping him off at his dorm, she called me and said that I needed to have ANOTHER MRI done, because she had seen signs of cancer in the first (second?) one. I tried to find Taylor to go back with me, but could not locate him, so I took one of my roommates, Melissa, with me. I was very worried, as was the rest of my family and friends who knew what I was going through. Taylor was about to leave on his mission, and his farewell talk in Idaho Falls was soon. Dr. Altamirano called me later that night, and told me that she collaborated with other doctors, they had looked at my scans and my medical history, along with my dad’s, and decided that I indeed had MS. The good news was that I did not have cancer. The other good news was that I could go home with Taylor and Katie for Taylor’s farewell. The bad news was that I would most likely be battling with MS for the rest of my life. My mom said that she was more devastated about me having MS than she was with dad being diagnosed. When dad was diagnosed, it was very sad, because his career as a doctor was over, but when I was diagnosed, it seemed that everything was over. How would I find a husband? Have children? Get medical insurance?

Katie

Taylor started dating a girl, Katie Cash, who was an artist during his freshman year at BYU. She was very sweet, and we fell in love with her when we met her. I was actually the first in the family to meet her, because on their first date, Taylor talked her into riding her bike to my apartment and meeting my roommates and I. During their ride to my place, Taylor told Katie that I was very wonderful and such a good sister that he loved so much. She now says that by the time they got to my apartment, she was scared to meet me, because she liked Taylor a lot and wanted to make a good impression on his family. I seemed really frightening for her to begin with. She and I got to be really good friends, and spent a lot of time together, especially since Taylor had left to Armenia on his mission. She helped me put together my classroom during the summer before my internship, and did some really cool art for my walls. She took butcher paper and made a copy of “delicate arch” for my classroom. It looked really cool, and I was sure that all of the other teachers would be jealous of her creations.

Friends

I had a lot of friends in Idaho Falls and Provo. When I was in Junior High School, I was enrolled in a sewing class as an elective in 7^th grade. There were five people in that class, so we became a really tight group. One of those girls was my friend Angela, and we were friends all through Junior High, High School, and College. In high school, I really had friends from two high schools across town from each other, because of the situation with my junior high splitting between the two schools. When I moved to Provo freshman year, I was roommates with my cousin, AnnaMarie, but I also made a lot of other friends on my floor. One of those friends was Melissa, who I lived with during the rest of my college career. She left to enter the MTC in February, right before the accident. I lived in some apartments a few blocks away from BYU campus for two years after my freshman year, and then moved to an apartment right by campus in the spring of 2003. After Melissa left, I was living with one of her friends from high school, and my friend from home, Angela. In Summer of 2002, I went on Study Abroad to the London Center, run by BYU. There were 40 students there at the time, and 34 of them were girls. We had so much fun exploring London together, and got to be the best of friends. After the Study Abroad was over, we hung out all the time.

College life

I went to college during the fall of 2000, and knew that I was going to be a teacher of some kind. Before I went to college, I thought I would be a choir teacher, so I ordered the materials from the School of Fine Arts about music education. However, when I got the information, I had a sick feeling inside. I told my dad about the feeling, and he said that maybe I should just declare an open major, and figure out as I was attending college what I would like to be. That felt like a really good idea to me. When I was in high school, I took AP U.S. History, so I enrolled in some general classes to get those generals out of the way. I loved all my history classes, and decided that I needed to be a History Teaching major. I had some friends during my freshman year who were taking a U.S. History class that I didn’t need to take. They were required to attend some films, and I went with them because I liked history so much. I also decided that my minor would be English Teaching. It didn’t take me long to decide, and I was glad that I loved what I was studying. I took the introduction class to teaching, and was required to attend some preschool, elementary, junior high, high school, and special needs classes. After attending all of those classes with teachers, I decided that I did not want to do the usual “student teaching” method that was normally required for graduation. Instead, I decided that it would be better to get an internship, so that I could be in charge of my own classroom right from the beginning. I was also excited that I could get paid half salary to do it. At the time, that seemed like a lot of money to me. I interviewed for a few internship positions, and was able to get an internship at Lehi Junior High in Lehi, Utah. I was teaching mostly U.S. History, and a couple of classes of Utah History. I was very excited about this, and excited that I could start the internship in August of 2003. When I had taken the introduction to teaching class, it was only a block class that was offered during the beginning of the semester at BYU. I had 17 credits during that semester, and thought that I would take two more two-credit classes during the 2^nd block, because they were offered. Looking back on it, that was not the smartest idea, but it helped me be able to do my internship in the fall, instead of having lingering classes that needed to be finished.

Grandparents

When I was in Elementary School, my mom realized that her parents were aging, and needed to live close to one of their children so that they could be taken care of in their older years. My dad's parents lived in Idaho Falls at the time, so we were already in close proximity to them. An empty lot was found just around the corner from where we lived, and my grandparents were able to purchase it and build a home on the lot. My maternal grandfather died in August of 2000, right before I went to college at BYU. My maternal grandmother had stayed in the house for a little while after her husband had died, but then decided that she would rather be closer to some other family. She moved to a retirement home in Sandy, Utah and my mom was working on getting her house sold. I have lots of good memories of having both of my sets of grandparents living in Idaho Falls when I was growing up.