Three days later, I awoke to learn that I had been in an accident and that I had suffered a severe concussion. My left ankle had been crushed and all of the ligaments & tendons had been severed. My right arm had been broken. I had surgery to screw and clamp the bones because I was unable to sit up, allowing a cast to be applied. My left hip was broken when the doorknob broke and punctured the hipbone. My pelvis was crushed and there were multiple lacerations, fractures, bruises and nerve damage. I was given a five percent chance of living if I miscarried; zero chance if the pregnancy continued. My body attempted to miscarry four times. Four times I received hormone shots to prevent the natural abortion. I had struggled three months already for our survival, my daughter was already someone dear to me. I wasn’t assured another chance and I wasn’t going to blow the one I had been given.
My hospital stay was one hundred percent pure agony. I was receiving injections for nausea and still could not keep anything down for longer than thirty minutes. I continued to lose weight as I was fed through tubes. Breathing treatments, meant to make me cough and prevent pneumonia, were the worse parts of every day. I would cry as soon as I saw the equipment come into my room. I left the hospital still underweight and bedridden. My mother-in-law, a former CNA, became my caretaker. The months leading up to my delivery were painful, boring, and filled with overwhelming depression. Physical therapy was difficult and painful, with slow results. My baby was taking the nutrients that my body needed to heal.
Slowly, I graduated from the bed to a wheelchair to crutches to walking with extreme pain and a pronounced limp. I gave birth to a child who was impossible to conceive, given no odds of surviving and finally, destined for birth defects due to the medication and treatments I was given during my pregnancy. Brandi was born October 1, 1973; a perfect baby with a superior IQ. There was one small problem — Brandi was ADHD. She slept approximately four hours in any twenty-four hour period. When she was ten months old, the both of us were sitting in her pediatrician’s office with red eyes and fatigue obvious. I told the doctor that one of us needed medication or, as the late Jerry Clower once said, “shoot up amongst us, one of us has got to get some relief.” Brandi took Phenobarbital until the age of five.
