Girl Survives Being Hit By A Truck, Run Over By A Mini-Van

When Kathy McFarlane calls her daughter's recovery a miracle, she isn't using the word flippantly. When she adds that there is no logical explanation why her daughter survived what she survived, she speaks truthfully. Doctors, who treated Candice after her accident, call her recovery a miracle.

"Doctors don't use that term lightly," Kathy, an RN, says.

The off-duty EMS, the first arrive at the scene of the accident, says he'd never seen anything like Candice's recovery in all of his 23 years of rescue work.

"He would come and visit her all of the time. All the EMS workers, the first responders couldn't believe it," Kathy said. "They would just come and sit there and stare at her, amazed that she was even alive."

Now in her living room, Candice, a ninth grader, waxes philosophical.

"I think what will be, will be," she says. "Sometimes, you can't go back and fix it, so you just have to settle for things, rather than make a big deal about it."

The big deal is an accident that occurred in December of 2006 that nearly took her life. She was coming home from getting pizza at a neighborhood store when she was hit by a truck, then run over by a car.

"There was no stoplight, no crosswalk, just a flashing yellow light, so there is no safe place to cross," Kathy said. "And everybody's going 60 miles an hour. She wasn't accustomed to the kind of traffic. She'd really never been on that kind of road before."

Her guardian angel was working full-time that day. An off-duty EMS worker was at the scene first. He revived Candice, who was in respiratory arrest when he arrived, and brought her into the Air Life helicopter.

"I got the phone call that she'd been in a car accident, but I didn't know how seriously injured she was," Kathy said.

She was already in the medical center district when she received the phone call.

"I decided to stay down there because the EMS worker told me they were going to Air Life her to University Hospital. That's when I realized she was critical," she said. "We were driving to the hospital and I wasn't exactly sure where University Hospital was. I was sort of afraid I'd be driving around and not know where to go. Then, I spotted the helicopter and followed it to the hospital."

Kathy was pulling into the parking lot just as they were wheeling Candace out from the helicopter into one of the emergency rooms.

"That's when I knew because she was on life support - that she was not breathing on her own - that she was really critically ill," Kathy said. "The doctors and the EMS workers - everybody - they weren't very hopeful for her. They didn't say that. They said, 'we're so sorry for what has happened, we're doing everything we can,' but nobody really said, 'don't worry, everything is going to be okay."

Because she was a nurse who had worked in an emergency room before, she knew what it meant when they said, 'we're doing everything we can.' "That means they didn't really think that she was going to make it, but she did," Kathy said.

Candice had multiple injuries, both internal and external. She had a lot of broken bones. She had a broken ankle, right hip, fractured pelvis and right humerus, fractured left clavicle and humerus. Internally, she had a lacerated liver, a ruptured spleen, bilateral renal contusions and her right lung was perforated. She had brain injuries including a frontal lobe concussion as well as a fractured skull and cerebral hemorrhaging.

"The thing of it was she had so many obstacles to overcome that I'd think, 'if she lives through this, then we'll have to go through the next thing," Kathy said.

All of her internal organs were bleeding. She'd lost so much blood, she needed 22-units of blood products just in the first 24-hour period just to live. It took a medical team 24 hours to get into her femoral arteries and cauterize all the bleeding arteries that they could find, but it was a long time before they could actually make sure that she had no more internal bleeding. The medical team actually cut her belly open and took her insides out. They had to leave her like until the swelling went down and they could put everything back in.

"Multi-miracles occurred for her to be alive today, but it was giving blood is the greatest thing a person can do," Kathy said. "You really are saving someone else's life when you give blood. At least one person - maybe three.

There's no replacement with for blood. If there isn't enough hemoglobin, there isn't enough oxygen and tissues begin to die. If she didn't have the blood, she wouldn't have survived because she lost so much blood."

Candice doesn't have permanent brain damage today because she received the blood she needed.

"The brain is very sensitive to the lack of oxygen. If she didn't have that blood circulating, she'd be permanently brain damaged," Kathy said.

It took the doctors a long time to determine how much brain damage Candice had.

"She had to be left in a drug-induced coma because of all the other injuries, so they didn't even know what her brain function was going to be, if she was going to have any brain function," Kathy said.

Kathy says in some ways, it was harder being a nurse watching her daughter go through what she went through. But, in other instances, her RN degree helped her understand better what needed to be done so that her daughter would survive.

"Whenever they came to me to explain what they were going to do to her, I understood. Whereas, if you had no medical knowledge, you'd be overwhelmed with all of this medical information because they're talking about all of these medical things, body parts, and if you had no knowledge of it, you'd be overwhelmed," Kathy said. "You know, when they told me they had to do an angiogram to her arteries and cauterize all of the hemorrhaging, since I was a nurse, I had a sense of what they were doing."

Being a nurse made it easier for her to explain to Candice what was happening and why. Being a nurse also gave her hope.

"It did help me a lot to have that knowledge and also, because I saw people recover when I was working in intensive care," she said. "I saw people who were banged up that did get better. She was on a ventilator and she looked really bad. She had road rash and tire marks. I mean, you could really see where the tires ran over her. She was all swollen up. She was three times her normal size because she gotten hit by a truck and run over by a minivan."

The good news is Candice doesn't require many medications.

"We just came back from the neurologist, who prescribed something. She had a frontal lobe injury and that has to do with short term memory and language processing. She's getting A's and B's in school in her regular classes. She didn't have to get left behind. She's been getting A's and B's without anything."

The friend who was with her that day had a hard time adjusting to what she witnessed. Her family eventually moved back to California.

It does bother Candice that the two drivers never sent a card or letter.

"I've always been kind of angry at them for hitting me," she said. "To this day, I feel like they should have attempted to contact my family to see how I was doing. Apologize. Even though it wasn't any body's fault, it would have been an act of kindness on their part. I'm sure it was pretty traumatic for them, but they still shouldn't have forgotten about it."

Candice is in training with her Maltese, Coco, a gift from her mother. The duo is joining Delta Dogs, an organization that visits individuals who are hospitalized.