The Angel in the Metal Halo: My Daughter's Story

"Guarded but stable..." Those were the first words that I remember hearing and actually understanding when the call from Vanderbilt Medical Center came through. My oldest daughter had spent the better part of early summer working at her then-boyfriend's marina deep in the bowels of Tennessee. She waited tables; she pumped gas at the dock. She and "the boy", as I continue to refer to him through gritted teeth, also developed a mutual interest in riding ATV's, all-terrain vehicles. I thought I knew my daughter pretty well, as well as one could hope to know a 23 year old college student whose life - short, but certainly never dull - had seemed an open book to her mother. I had no idea that the prior evening, she and the boy had gone ATV riding in an unfamiliar area, at dusk, neither wearing helmets. Nor did I know then that it was their first trip in that particular area, and that the boy - that stupid, useless, heartbreaking boy - became flustered, lost his bearings, and flew off of a cliff, carrying my daughter into what became hell on earth for us all.

The boy's brother had stood watching watching them as dusk fell in the sleepy Tennessee town; a merciful God led him to be there that day, I've often thought. He called 911 on his cell phone as he ran to the spot where the ATV had landed - his brother, the driver, thrown away from the wreckage, the bike on top of my 5'2" blond daughter. The brother carried her as fast as he could to the top of the hill as police cars, ambulances and eventually a Medivac helicopter spirited her away. Her C-2 and C-3 vertebrae were fractured, as were most of the small bones in her heart-shaped face. Her left ankle was ripped open, her shoulder separated. Later, the doctors would tell us that had it been the C-1 vertebrae, she would have died instantly.

Her father flew down later that day to be with her; I could not join them, as my own physical disability makes me a liability in certain, far too numerous situations, including this. The chief of staff of plastic surgery at Vanderbilt had already repaired the broken bones in her face and nose by the time he arrived. The boy was in the same hospital, but on a different floor than her ICU unit. He had suffered a broken rib and blackened eye. My daughter was actually surprised to find out where she was when she came to in her hospital bed: she'd also suffered a concussion and had little, if any, recollection of the accident. Her arm was set in a sling, her ankle and leg stitched and repaired, much like that of her favorite Raggedy Ann doll when she was a child. But the worst was yet to come.

The damage to her neck required that she be placed in a halo brace. Because we live on the outskirts of Philadelphia, it was jointly decided that she be flown home - strapped into a wheelchair - and treated at Jefferson Hospital. The spinal team had been briefed by Vanderbilt, and my husband had arrived with a stack of records, notes and x ray and MRI results. Before the end of her first day back home, my daughter was fitted with a metal halo brace that was secured with four screws - two in her forehead, two hidden in the back of her head behind her hair - into her head, resting on a shearling-lined vest that strapped into place. This halo was to be her home for the next eight long weeks.

She had lost so much weight, at least twenty pounds; that was a lot for a young woman who normally weighed 100 pounds in all. Her sister, a human nutrition/dietetics student at a nearby college, came home often, bringing her nutritional supplements in liquid form, many of them flavored with her sister's favorite chocolate taste. My daughter looked like a bird trapped inside an unforgiving cage. It was hard for me to even look at her without crying, but if it looked even slightly that I was giving way, I feared that she would as well. Oddly, and to this day I'm still not sure why, that was the day that I stopped writing professionally. It was as if someone had cut out any passions for anything that I might have selfishly hidden away. I was so distraught over my daughter's situation that I literally and figuratively could not put it - or anything else - into words.

Time passed slowly. Her appetite came and went, as did her cards and visitors. She had to sleep in the metal cage, of course. To this day, I don't know how she did it. I've often thought that the sheer weight of the device wore her out; it was at least eighteen to twenty pounds of metal. She went out a few times, but not many. There were one or two movies, during the day, when the theater would be less crowded, a few trips to the grocery store. Her sister and a former boyfriend were her constant companions. They would often just sit with her as she watched television, or took long walks around the neighborhood - again, at night, in the dark - with her. I would take her to the book store as often as she wanted. She became engrossed in reading, and our trips to Borders and Barnes & Noble became more frequent. She read everything and anything: novels, short stories, magazines, biographies, drama, humor. As four weeks dragged on into six and then on to seven, the written word was literally keeping her going. She found comfort in the works and words of others, while my own words remained frozen somewhere deep in my soul.

She mastered the art of sleeping in a halo brace by letting her body show her how. Exhausted, overwhelmed and tearful, she slept often, always on one side with her head buried deep into a stack of fluffy pillows. Since it was not comfortable, she never got more than five hours of sleep at a time, and took to taking naps during the day. We were blessed that insurance provided both registered and licensed nursing assistance for her. Three days a week, a licensed practical nurse bathed her and washed her hair. It was - as was doing every other damned thing - almost impossible to do with pounds of metal strapped to her head while wearing an increasingly smelly and hot sheepskin vest. The nurse basically 'flossed' our daughter with long, wide strips of towels doused in warm water and household alcohol: it was quite astonishing to see. A length of towel would be worked from the top of the vest gently pulled down through the bottom, and moved up and down to clean that part of her skin. Then, the nurse would move on to the next section of her body, using yet another fresh towel, tucking it in at the top, gently tugging it through the vest, over and over and over again. The sheepskin couldn't be removed, and we swore, as time went on, that one day it would just pick itself up and walk out of our home on its own, so musty it became.

Washing her hair was equally challenging. The vest couldn't get wet because it couldn't be removed. Eventually, between the nurses, my husband and myself, we worked out a system where my daughter would lay flat on the bathroom floor, with her hair in the shower stall. There, the barefoot nurse hand-washed her hair and used a long extension shower head to rinse it clean. Double rolls of towels were placed under my daughter's neck to keep it elevated; laundry became a twice-daily task. Since it felt so good to her to have clean, wet hair, often my girl would let it just air dry, or have the nurse fix it in a pony tail or bun. Nothing in her life was simple. Everything in our lives became complex, as we moved through stages of guilt, depression, anger and even revenge about the accident. My husband and I were so busy getting through each day with as cheerful an attitude for our daughter's sake that we rarely, rarely spoke about our own feelings. Deep emotions, especially anger and revenge, fester best in a dark place.

And then, just as suddenly as the halo had appeared, eight weeks had gone by and it was removed. My angel lost her metal halo, and the little bird set free.

It has been seven months since the accident. My daughter is back in college, having missed a full semester but excited about pursuing her newly-chosen major of media/library science. The scars have faded, at least the external ones, save for the mangled ankle which she's chosen to leave be as a reminder of what was, and what could have been. She is on the road to becoming whole again.

I wish that I could note that I'm upbeat and thrilled with her progress and her success in overcoming the trauma. I am thrilled, I know, with her progress, but haven't been upbeat, however you define the term, for a very long time. That depression, that anger have stayed with me for too long; unlike her sheepskin vest, I haven't been able to shed my own feelings. Perhaps these, the first words I've written since that dark August day, might be the first steps...