Smash Hit

Since I have retired and am on a trip, I don't have a sermon to post for the next few weeks. But here is the first chapter of one of the books I've been writing. Hope you like it.

I was sick as a dog, as my grandmother would say. The previous week I was so sick I couldn't enjoy the time my wife Julie and I had with my last patient while in Orlando. We called Nicholas, the tow-headed little boy I had taken care of as a home health nurse for the first couple of years of his life, our “practice grandchild.” He is and always has been a sweet and happy child despite the challenges he's had to face. He bonded with us and we with him. Until our granddaughter Zoe was born, we spoiled Nicholas. Now we spoil both.

He and his adoptive mother had moved away from the Florida Keys where we live. So after Christmas we went upstate to spend time with him. As it was, he spent most of the time with Julie while I lay in bed, sneezing and coughing. None of my drainage was purulent so I thought it was just a bad allergy attack. When I got back home the buckets of stuff I was bringing up got colorful, a sign of infection. I went to the doctor and got a diagnosis and a prescription. I even skipped going to the jail where I was the chaplain that Friday night, because I felt like crap, I didn't want to introduce the germ into that closed environment and I wanted to get to bed early. It was all for naught. I was up all night, sneezing and coughing up enough phlegm to float the QE 2. When the alarm went off at 5 am, January 9, 2016, I felt as if I hadn't slept at all. I should have canceled my plans.

But my bishop, the Right Reverend Leo Frade, the man who ordained me, was retiring. He was the senior bishop in the Episcopal church, having served as bishop of Honduras for 17 years before serving as bishop of southeast Florida for 15 years. That Saturday we were celebrating his ministry with a huge worship service. As Dean of the Florida Keys, the elected representative of our Deanery, I was supposed to be there. And personally I wanted to say goodbye. I like Leo. So I got up, took my meds, got cleaned up, got dressed, and went over to St. Francis in the Keys Episcopal Church, one of the 2 churches I pastor (the other being Lord of the Seas Lutheran Church), to get my vestments. I drank my energy drink and tuned my radio to NPR and drove the 135 miles to Miami. No problem.

The Eucharist was beautiful. The cathedral choir outdid itself. The Gospel was read, as usual, in Spanish, Creole and English, befitting our multilingual, multicultural diocese. The preacher was a friend of Leo's who had many insightful, funny and embarrassing stories about him to share. At the passing of the peace I had to fist bump and elbow bump others rather than shake hands or hug or kiss them to prevent spreading my contagion. I attended the reception afterward, chatted with the bishop and his wife, and then left. I hung my vestments in the back seat of my car and took off for home, sipping another energy drink and listening to mentally stimulating NPR podcasts.

As I passed through the city of Marathon, in the Middle Keys, I realized that I could stop at the Keys Celtic Festival that our sister church St. Columba was holding. My wife was there, manning the St. Francis booth. But I missed the left turn to the parking and decided to power through the 20 miles to home. I just wanted to get to my bed.

I don't remember the accident. According to the official report, coming off the bridge to Big Pine Key I crossed over into the oncoming lane and hit head-on a mini-van of German tourists. They were all treated and released the same day, thank God! I, however, in the space of seconds, managed to break both legs, both wrists, 6 ribs, and my sternum. I also bruised my pericardium (the sack enclosing the heart), shredded my diaphragm, skewered my pancreas, tore my sigmoid colon and bruised a lung. The front end of my Nissan Altima was accordioned up to the dashboard, leaving barely a foot of space for my damaged legs. I was going 45 miles an hour, the legal speed limit. I was also a mere 2 miles from home.

I do remember awakening to loud voices. The EMTs and sheriff's deputies were asking me my name and if I knew the month, year and president. I was just taking in the cracked windshield and deployed airbag and figuring out that I must have been in an accident, when the nursing part of my brain realized they were establishing my orientation to person and time. My legs, compressed by the engine against the firewall, felt as if they were dangling by strings. Later someone would send my wife a picture of the officers and paramedics working on me in the car. A deputy is holding my neck from behind with his blue-gloved hands. I actually remember that moment because, again the nursing part of my brain realized that he was doing this preparatory to putting a cervical collar on me. I also remember them cutting me out of the car, which is about the time the pain kicked in. They pulled me out, which was excruciating, and put me on a back board and carried me to an ambulance. Pain shot through me with every step and jolt. I kept saying, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” The ambulance took me to a space on a nearby bridge where a medical helicopter had landed. The Keys has 3 hospitals but none can handle major trauma. I remember being loaded into the copter but I don't remember the flight because at that moment my right lung collapsed and I passed out. They had to deal with my pneumothorax and worked for 2 ½ hours to stabilize me before they could take off and fly me to Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.

My wife, ironically enough, works for 911. Captain Hiller of the Sheriff's Department called her boss, Laura White, at home, because he vaguely remembered that my wife worked for her. Laura got from her home in Marathon to the Festival in about 3 minutes. She told Julie what Hiller had told her: that I had been in a car accident and was being flown to the trauma center. My son James and his family were at the Festival as well and they drove Julie up to the mainland.

I have one other memory of that day. I was by now sedated and intubated so I couldn't open my eyes or speak. I was in the ER, apparently, and I heard Julie speaking. My wife is quite the baker and she knew all the EMTs and first responders at my accident. I heard her say she would have to make a lot of cookies to thank them. Then I heard a distinctive, soft British voice say, “You don't happen to have any in the car, do you?” It was our new bishop, the Rt. Rev. Peter Eaton, trying to keep the mood light. I was his first pastoral visit on his first day on the job.

I remember nothing more. My wife says I went into surgery about 9 pm. I came out about 3 in the morning. It was the first of 6 surgeries. Altogether I had a rod inserted into my left thigh and external fixators on my shattered lower right leg; my stomach was pushed back through my diaphragm, my colon was repaired and a drain was put in my pancreas. I had 2 chest tubes. I was put in a medical coma for 5 days. (Julie swears it was longer but I've seen the Facebook posts she and I put up less than a week after my accident.) She was in the ICU with me for as many hours a day as they would permit. Our daughter Beth flew down from St. Louis. Our son James, his wife and our granddaughter Zoe came up from the Keys every weekend.

Droves of people were praying for me: my family in St. Louis, my two churches, people at the jail, both staff and inmates, my colleagues in both denominations and others who either knew me or knew of me. The best way to understand the Keys is as if it were one small town stretched out for more than 100 miles along highway US-1. People live on one island but often work or shop on others. There are way less degrees of separation between 2 Keys residents than between any movie star and Kevin Bacon. So lots of people knew of my accident and were at least sending positive thoughts. I was oblivious.

At any of these points—the crash itself, the collapse of my lung in the helicopter, or the long hours of surgery—I could have died. My story would have ended. Or I could have simply not awakened from my coma. I have seen that happen in too many patients when I worked on neurosurgery. And often I knew little or nothing about those unconscious people whose lives and health were in my hands back back then. So what brought me to this point? How did I, a nurse for 35 years and a pastor for 15, end up like this, pieced and stitched together and lying unconscious like Frankenstein's creature, waiting to be brought back to the land of the living?