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SURVIVOR STORY - Brian Regalot
This story unites the accounts of others that have been shared with me -- shared by family, friends, helping-hands and professional life-savers -- with my own indistinct, uncharted reflections. This journey I crossed forms a heartening keystone in my transformed life. Pay a visit and I suspect you will offer a receptive nod toward the influences that plotted to reward me, and give life back to me, and then carry me forward at a friendly pace. February 1st, 2003: the same grey Saturday when the astronauts and Space Shuttle Columbia go to pieces in their return back to earth. Midday, I’m westbound on the I-80, five miles out of Reno, headed for Truckee, California: my home for the last three years. It’s a cold, rainy weekend in Reno and Lake Tahoe, raining after a freeze. The Highway I drive begins to climb the Sierra’s. The section I wind through bends slightly to the left, neighboring a steep hill on the right. In an instant, a twenty pound catastrophe-sized rock assails out of the western sky -- never granting the awkward plight of its origin -- and angrily crashes through the passenger side of the windshield of my car, delivering a forceful blow to my head and face; knocking me into the sidelines of unconsciousness. After impact, the car forcefully commits itself to the right and makes a hard one-eighty whirl into the shoulder, ending with a fierce halting impact, facing downhill towards Reno. The matter-of-life minute is soon seized by Maureen – the new managing director of my beating heart, and working, ministering, emergency-room nurse/angel at Washoe Medical Center in Reno. Maureen stumbles into this adventure from a few cars behind mine, like a treasure from another shore. Through her, life was now rearranging itself and coming to my aid. On that day, at that time, Maureen is returning home with a collection of things for her daughter’s birthday party. Passing Floriston, Maureen sees my car spun-out in the ditch. It doesn’t look to bad to her, but she pulls over to offer help. When she gets to the car, there are people at the scene trying to help me, trying to prevent me from swallowing my blood, pushing me forward, which occludes my airway endangering me more. The others there are frightened and don’t know what to do, but they are doing the best they can. My eyes are open; I’m thrashing and unresponsive. The only way for Maureen to control my airway – most urgent –is to climb into the car and post herself on the steering wheel; then facing me, she controls the bleeding from the face -- torn open -- while maintaining my airway. Maureen is talking to me, trying to calm me, but I’m not unresponsive. When the paramedics arrive, they hand Maureen a portable suction device, and she suctions the blood from my throat and mouth preventing me swallowing it and choking. The paramedics then get me out of the car, stabilize me on a backboard and take me away. Maureen gets home covered in blood. She has ten girls coming over for her daughter’s birthday party, so she quickly takes a shower to get herself ready. The EMT’s quickly deliver me to flat landscape near Prosser Dam, where a Careflight helicopter can land and take me away. Careflight is a life saving trucker by air, chartered that day to export me from the scene and deliver another dodge from death. They retrieve, quickly carry away, and then offload an inhibited transport to Washoe Medical in eight minutes. The hospital welcomes me to its cradling homeland. ICU (Intensive Care Unit) is my village. My life governed and under repair by a professional kinship of doctors: Trimmer, Watson, Khosla. Those doctors, and others, apply the kind heal of a hand to restore my head, and help me slowly step towards repairing my mind. But my mind staggers around in the dark if me, lsot in a forbidding countryside I don’t know. No means of connection, no trace, no trail. Don’t know Brian; don’ know where he is. Everything let go of me. “Time will tell us,” Doctor Watson tells my family. My first encounter with a memory in all of this comes to me as an enchanted, blurry frame in my mind’s eye: Maureen touring along with her appeal, visits me at my temporary home in Washoe. I respond to a gentle on the door, she offers a warm hello and then an easy chat to see how I’m doing. This is the first recall I have in my recovering, altered mind. I perceive more with feeling, and rely more on the determination of my sentiments. My heart – a voice, a gleam – is better equipped to perform than the impaired controller of my mind: feeling what is real. After almost six weeks, Dr. Watson releases me from Washoe. My mother Frances delivers me back to Truckee, where I can’t identify or recognize the life living me before the accident. I don’t reclaim a thing. A forgettable illusion, but a place called home. I forget everything about me except myself, nothing to remind me I was. I just was. Weeks after I get back home, I’m sitting on my back deck one day, facing the open landscape -- no highway, no fence; an idle attendee and beholder of the natural life and panorama swirling around me. Like the dizzying press of a whirlwind, nature comes to me on this day: clouds mingle and sigh, echoes of wind, tall steady message from the pines, barks of blue-jays. Nature is talking to me, telling something by projecting her splendor to me; a personal dispatch, a personal treat for my eyes and ears. For hours, I’m having a glorious, unspoken conversation with nature, and gathering faith in its presence. I am in it, and it is in me. Sometimes now, sometimes when I’m quiet and still, I consider with increasing wonder what fateful force, what favor, sought me out in this conspiracy to keep me alive. This adventure showed me a way into an internal and external other world. |
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Another Shore