Miracle Story #7 (Part 1)
- Jan 1, 2017
- 22 min read
(Paula)
“October 2nd, 2008 I had gotten home from work around 4:30pm and I was getting ready for our son’s freshman football game. I was just heading into the other room to change my clothes and the phone rang. I answered it and it was Pat Becker from Hutchinson Community College, our son Chase’s track coach.
He first asked for Paul and I said, “No, he’s not here. He’s at work.”
And then he said, “Well this is Coach Becker and Chase had an accident.”
The first thing that popped into my head was, a car wreck.
And I wondered why coach was calling me to tell me that Chase was in a car wreck, but I figured that maybe he had an accident in the parking lot going to practice. But then he told me that it was at practice itself and then he said he missed the mat. I thought, ‘Okay, so he’s got a broken arm. Maybe he broke his leg or something.’
Chase was kind of flighty at that time and I remember asking coach, “Do you need us to meet you at the hospital in Hutch or can you handle it?”
And that’s when he said that they were going to be airlifting Chase to a hospital in Wichita.
He said, “It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.”
And those words, I’ve said it over and over again, those six words are seared into my brain. It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.
I could hear the helicopter landing in the background on the football field as he talked. He told me what hospital they were going to be taking him to and then our phone call was over. So I called Paul and told him, “You have to get home right now. Chase had an accident and we have to go to the hospital. They’re airlifting him.”
And at that time, I didn’t realize just how serious it was. I knew it was more than a broken leg or a broken arm and that this wasn’t normal but I still didn’t realize. Paul got home and on the way in to Wichita I called my sister Linda and I called my sister Rita.
Rita’s boys were playing football too so I told her, “We’re not gonna make it to the football game. We’re on our way to the hospital because Chase had an accident. Take care of Cole and Clay (our other two boys) and let them know what’s going on and we’ll keep you posted.”
And then I called Linda for some reason. I don’t know why, God, it was God that made me do it. I firmly believe it was God. I called Linda and I can tell you the exact point in the road where we were when I called her and she said, “I’ll meet you at the hospital. I’m turning around right now and I’ll meet you at the hospital.”
And I said, “No, you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to do that.”
And she said, “Please, please let me come.”
So I said, “Okay.”
And because of her being there, she set things into motion. And I truly believe that it was God that made me call Linda.
So we were on the way. We were on the bypass in Wichita on K-96 and we looked out to the west and Paul said, “There he is.”
And we could see the helicopter flying in with Chase.
(Paul)
Linda met us at the door and she was like, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up.”
They didn’t take us to the normal waiting room. They took us to the back to a different room, and then the flight people came in. When the helicopter crew came in, we could tell they were shook up. They were just really shook up.
With three boys, we’d been to the emergency room quite a bit and when we got in there we knew this was not normal. They took us back to this little room. It had a couch and some chairs and the door shut.
So finally the doctor came and they took us to another waiting room deeper into the hospital. And that’s when they told us that Chase had fractured his skull and that they were putting a probe in to monitor the brain pressure.
They put him in ICU and told us that we would be able to see him in a couple of hours. That was at five or six o'clock and at 9:00pm we finally got in to go see him, but he was just out.
(Paula)
Linda had more presence of mind at the time than we did.
I think Linda was getting a little bit more of the messages from the doctor than we were that this was really, really serious. I think she was reading more of the messages that they were giving than we were reading because she was the one, she asked, “Do you want us to put him on the parish prayer line?”
And that’s where the Father Kapaun prayer started.
She also had the presence of mind to ask the priest to give him last rites, or ‘anointing of the sick', because we hadn’t. We weren’t thinking that yet. And thankfully she was.
(Linda)
I asked him.
I said, “Don’t tell Paul and Paula, because they’re just too upset.”
But he had you guys say the prayers, which was great.
(Paula)
Throughout the whole first night, well before they even took him to surgery the next day, they were letting anybody go in to see him. And we found out later that it was because they knew he was going to die.
They were letting people in to say their goodbyes.
They hadn’t said those words to us but they did say that he was minute by minute, literally, his survival. They never said to us that they thought he wasn’t going to make it, but that it was minute by minute. You know, at any time.
That still didn’t sink in a ton to me.
(Linda)
Our daughter, Michelle, was a physician's assistant at that hospital at the time of the accident, so she was able to access the scans after Paul and Paula had given her permission to do so.
She told me, “Mom, pray that he dies. It’s that bad.”
I said, “Nope, not doing that!”
(Paul)
All the scans kept coming back that he was brain-dead, that his brain had already quit. And his brain was swelling very rapidly.
(Paula)
I remember the first morning, when the shift change happened. The one nurse that had been with him through the night knew some of our nieces and nephews. So when she was getting off duty, she came into the waiting room and she told us that she was leaving and that the others nurse was on duty.
She said, “He did make it through the night.”
And I remember at that time thinking, ‘Well I didn’t think he wasn’t supposed to make it through the night.’ But they didn’t expect him to. When they said, “minute by minute”, they actually meant that he could die at any minute. Instead of, he could take a turn for the worst, they really meant he could die any minute.
(Paul)
We were allowed to go see him around nine in the morning and they seemed a little more positive, but the pressure in Chase’s brain was still rising. They told us that they had already pushed his blood pressure as high as they could push it. They can do three stages of ‘pushers,’ as they call them.
Apparently with certain brain injuries they have to push the blood pressure because as the brain swells, it cuts off the circulation and they have to push the blood through the system. So they kept pushing. They were also doing saline washes to try and draw moisture out of his brain, so they put saline solution in his veins but that burns up the veins.
And then they told us, “We can’t do any more of that. We can’t do any more pushers and so now we’re kind of waiting.”
At that time Dr. Grundmeyer, the neurosurgeon, told us that they could do a craniectomy, which is removing part of the skull. He said that this would relieve the pressure and that if it continued to rise, that it would be the only thing left to try.
(Paula)
We had gone to noon mass and at about 12:30p we came back and they had good news. They said that Chase’s brain pressure was kind of stabilizing. It was still really high but it hadn’t gone up for an hour or two, and so they were kind of positive.
But then at 3:00 they called us back and doctor told us they needed to take him to surgery right then or Chase would die for sure. Paul asked if we could wait a little longer, but he said we couldn’t.
Dr. Grundmeyer said, “We have to take him to surgery right now or he will die for sure. If you wait, he will die. Chances are, he is going to die on the table anyway. He has a better chance of dying than living.”
And then he said, “If he doesn’t die on the table, infection will probably take him. It’s very likely that your son is not going to survive this but this is the only thing we have left to do. This is our last-ditch effort.”
(Paul)
So they did the surgery and then we met with Dr. Grundmeyer and he said that he was ‘cautiously optimistic.’ He had to remove part of Chase’s brain, about twenty-five percent of his frontal lobe, because it was like pudding. It was just mushed. Above his ear and at the front of his head, the brain tissue was just totally smooshed.
He removed a lot of the brain and relieved a lot of the pressure, and his brain was no longer bleeding anywhere, so it was a good sign.
(Paula)
And then it was just a waiting game to see what would come back and how much of him would come back.
(Paul)
So then his brain just swelled clear out of his head and they kept watching him. He had the tubes down his throat and everything because they had intubated him at the scene. After about five days, they wanted to take those out because they start to scar your throat.
They indicated to me that they could take them out and that we could just let him die because he was still on life support because he wasn’t breathing on his own. But I was like, “Hmmm, no.”
I didn’t like that.
I remember telling his buddy in the waiting room that I didn’t know how to handle that. Poor Jason Robben, he just happened to be there that day when I got that news from the doctor. I didn’t talk to Paula about it, I talked to Jason Robben about it, which is kind of weird.
And then weird coincidences would happen when we would go in to visit Chase.
At one point we had just talked to the doctor, and when we went in to his room, the machine was making this strange ‘whoo whoo’ noise and I asked, “What is that?” I had never heard that sound before.
They told me it was him trying to take a breath.
We started hearing that more and more and within twelve hours probably, they cut off the ventilator. Chase was breathing on his own.
So then they were like, “Well now we will need to do the procedure to put in a PICC line, we can’t unplug him now.” The doctor told me that at that point they couldn’t unplug him because Chase was going to live and that we needed to start dealing with what was left of him.
We were like, “He’s coming back.”
(Paula)
We were ecstatic.
It did enter my mind, but I kept pushing it farther down, that my son was going to be a vegetable. I did think about what holidays were going to be like. You know, making a special trip to the care home to see Chase on Christmas because he couldn’t be with us. I did think about those things. (crying)
I pushed them back. And I only allowed myself to think of the positive, that we weren’t going to have to do that and that he would come back to us. That he wasn’t going to be a vegetable. But they did tell us we needed to start looking for homes for him.
We had all of our computers and laptops up there and everything. While we were making posts on the support sites, we were also researching the best facilities to put him in if we needed to.
But that didn’t last very long, thankfully, because we started seeing little things. The doctors kept telling us they were just reflexes. I can remember when he squeezed my hand and I told the doctor and he was like, “It’s just reflexes. It’s just the body. It wasn’t because you were talking to him or anything. You stimulated his hand.”
We were noticing little things like that.
I knew it was Chase. I knew it wasn’t just reflexes. We never let ourselves believe that that’s what it was and just little by little, tiny little things started happening. But we started noticing.
A finger would move. A finger would move and that was like Christmas day, you know. It was just literally, he would move a finger and we would be so excited. And then he would move his toes or something and we knew he wasn’t paralyzed.
(Paul)
Yeah, because we didn’t know at that time if anything was going to work at all.
(Paula)
But you know, after they told us to start looking for homes, it was maybe another day I guess. And at that time at the hospital, it’s not like it is now. At that time we could only go see him four times a day for like fifteen minutes. So we were living at the hospital in the waiting room.
There was a phone in there and any time that phone rang, somebody would answer it. And they would call out, “It’s for the family of so and so.” And it was usually a call to go back and most of the time when you got that call, um, the family didn’t come back. (crying)
Or if they did, they’d come back to get their stuff and they were in a state and they left and we never saw them again. You never wanted to get that phone call to go back.
But then one day, we did get that call.
They told us we needed to get back there right then. And when we got there, the nurses were crying. They were crying but they were keeping themselves from jumping up and down with joy. They were crying because they were so happy. (crying)
They told us that they were getting ready to put in the PICC line, a central line, because they were getting ready to move him to a facility. They were going to put the line in and they had his whole left side sterilized and the nurse was going to do the mini surgery and all of a sudden, his hand.
He was so weak he couldn’t really move his hand, but his hand came up and it started to go toward her area and it broke her sterile plane and she started yelling for another nurse because his hand wasn’t stopping. So the other nurse came running and as she walked in, Chase tracked her and followed her across the room. He hadn’t done that yet. And so she grabbed his hand and got it out of the sterile area and he kept watching her.
They hollered for somebody else and another nurse came running in and Chase watched that nurse walk clear across the room. One of the nurses asked him something and Chase turned his head and looked at her. So he was tracking and he was hearing people.
So they called us and they were so happy and so excited. When we walked into the room and turned the corner, he looked right at us and watched us the whole time. His eyes were open and he wasn’t all there, but he was there. He recognized us as we walked up. And he would look at each one of us when we talked to him. He would turn his head in the bed from side to side and look at us.
We knew he was waking up. His eyes were still really, really glazed over. They were not Chase’s happy glowing eyes, but they looked at us when we talked to him.
And that’s when we knew that he was coming back.
And just little by little, little things started to happen.
His brother touched his feet and he went crazy. (laughs) He couldn’t talk but he growled really angrily because he thought Clay was going to tickle his feet, and Clay just happened to touch his feet. So just little things like that.
(Paul)
The night before that all happened, I remember going to see Chase. We were spending more time with him. Paula had left and I was there and I remember telling God.
I said, “I don’t care what you give me, just give me some of Chase back.”
And I whispered in Chase’s ear, “Chase, I know you’re in there. You’ve just got to show us.” I knew we were going to have to move him.
And the next day, that’s what happened.
(Paula)
And the next day he woke up.
On one of those first visits, I reached down and kissed him. I always kissed him. And I kissed him and I said, “You know, you can kiss me back.” And he looked at me and he puckered his lips. (cries)
And I’ll just never forget that.
And I remember early on, when they thought he was going to die and they let everybody see him. We could touch him all we wanted, we could kiss him. We could do everything but crawl in bed with him. And then about a day or two later, they told us we had to stop. We couldn’t touch him. No stimulation. He needed to stay calm so there was no stimulation. And that was so hard.
I remember asking the nurse one day, “Can I please just hold his hand for a little bit?”
And she said, “Yeah, but not for very long.”
So there was a time where we couldn’t even touch him. Even though he could die any minute, we weren’t able to touch him. So when he puckered and gave me that kiss, I think that’s when I knew Chase was going to be okay, that he was going to come back to us.
(Paul)
Every day things started to change and he started being more alert and moving more.
(Paula)
And that’s what surprised the doctors so much, that he was doing things so quickly. They just couldn’t keep up with everything that he was doing. And it wasn’t normal for him to be doing those things as quickly as he was doing them.
So then we got to the point where they needed beds at the hospital and in the ICU. Chase was the best one and so they had to move him out of ICU and they put him up on the next level of care, on that floor. They did that at like midnight and then the next morning, therapy started coming in already. And by that time they were talking about a rehab center instead of a care home. We were trying to figure out which rehab center we were going to take him to.
I remember once when they had rehab therapy come in, they had him sitting on the side of the bed and they had to hold him up because he was too weak. They had tried to get him to write and he wrote his name. Now I’m a teacher and so I can decipher stuff, and I knew that it was his name.
So they had him sitting up on the side of the bed and they were going to try to get him to stand up. They were holding on to him, of course, because he was so weak, but he stood up. We had stepped out of the room and I could see him through the door and they stood him up and he started slobbering out the side of his mouth and it was just slobbering down and dripping and I remember thinking, (starts to cry) this is what’s left of my son.
But I was happy I had him.
And then all of a sudden, Chase reached over and grabbed a Kleenex out of the box and he wiped his chin. And I remember thinking, ‘No, that’s my son. That’s our son.’ And I just remember it just made me feel so good that he wiped his own chin because he was like, ‘I’m slobbering and I can’t stop myself but I can at least keep myself clean.’
And then the next day they moved him to rehab and that’s when things went into high gear.
(Paula)
This is something really funny that happened after he had woken up. They had been so excited that he had woken up and one day they had the TV on. The nurse was going to test him, so she put the controller next to his bed after showing him how to work it, and then she just went out to her little desk to watch him without him knowing.
She said he laid there for a while and the channel was on like WSU bowling, on purpose. So she just kept watching him and watching him and she said he reached over and he took the controller and he looked at it for the longest time. Then he pushed the button and looked at the TV. Then he would push the button and then look at the TV again. She said finally, he just looked at it for a while and then he just fell asleep.
She told us what he did and she said, “I guess he didn’t find what he wanted because he just quit and then fell asleep.”
And when I walked into his room and looked at the television I said, “Is this what was on?”
And she goes, “Yeah.”
And I said, “No, he found what he wanted.”
It was Tomb Raider, with Angelina Jolie. He found exactly what he wanted so that’s why he stopped. (laughs)
The nurse told me that another day she was sitting at the desk and she looked up at him and he was looking at her and he just did this. He gave her a thumbs up and she gave a thumbs up back at him.
Those people don’t get to see those types of outcomes, so they were just so ecstatic about Chase too. Most of the time they don’t get to see that good stuff. We were there for nineteen days in ICU, so they got to know us and we got to know them. They were very, very happy when they started seeing this stuff too.
A reward.
Little things, just those little things.
(Paul)
Nurse Jack was an older guy and after about four or five days of being at the hospital 24 hours a day and not sleeping, I remember he told us this.
He said, “You guys need to go home.”
I said, “Well we can’t go home because you’re telling us that he’s probably going to die and I want to be here if he dies.”
And he goes, “We have machines. He’s on a machine that is breathing for him now. If he dies we’ll keep him on the machines until you get back here. Go home.”
And that one finally set in to me and I went home. And that was a good thing because I was able to get the other two boys home, and me home, and we got some sleep.
I went back to work and we’d go there in the morning and at noon and in the evening. We would stay there until ten o’clock at night. But at least I got back to some normal and got the boys back to some normal.
Clay was a Freshman and Cole would’ve been a Junior.
(Paula)
That night at the football game, when we didn’t make it, Clay said he looked up in the stands and he knew that we weren’t there because we always sat in the same place. So he knew something happened but he thought it was my mom that probably died. He figured that something happened with my mom.
Cole had just finished with football practice before the game started and as he was going out to watch the game after getting cleaned up in the locker room, he saw the flight. He saw the helicopter fly over. He remembered seeing it go over, he just didn’t realize it was his brother that was in it.
So they had to grow up real fast, unfortunately. And they had to deal with things that a 17 year old and a 14 year old shouldn’t have to deal with. But they handled it wonderfully.
And that just became our life.
They would come up after school. They would come up and they would bring their homework with them. There were so many people up at the hospital that if Paul or I couldn’t help them, somebody would help them with their homework. They would usually go home around nine or ten, and that just became the new normal. They would get up, go to work, go to school. Paul would come at noon. The high school let the kids carry a cell phone and we were in constant contact with them. Then they would get out of school and go to football practice, then come up to the hospital and we would be a family.
Chase went into rehab on October 21st and he came home one month later, a week before thanksgiving. He was in there for a month.
(Paul)
Dr. Veenis had done brain injuries for 15 years and when we went to the rehab facility, he said it would be six months to a year probably for Chase to work through rehabilitation.
He was in shock every time he would come in to check on Chase because he would be doing stuff that was two or three months ahead of what he was supposed to be doing.
I remember saying, “Didn’t you say this was going to take like a long time?”
And he would say, “Yes, this is not normal. This isn’t what normally happens.”
(Paula)
Dr. Veenis and Dr. Grundmeyer both went on national television and said that they did everything medically that they could do, but they cannot explain why Chase is the way he is today.
And they both said it is a miracle.
There is no medical explanation.
(Paul)
They can’t explain it.
They have never seen anybody heal that fast with that type of traumatic brain injury.
They put a plate in Chase’s head on December 17th to reconstruct his skull.
In early January, he started online classes. He took two classes and passed them both.
We took him to Dr. Beatty, who is a neuropsychologist for KU Med Center, and he did a lot of tests on him and stuff afterwards, trying to test his mental abilities and everything. He was in shock at how Chase was, and that he didn’t have a lot of the residuals that most individuals with traumatic brain injuries have, like the personality loss and vision changes.
Chase is a case study for Dr. Beatty because Chase is an artist and should not be able to visually manipulate things in his mind to produce art. His artwork has even gotten better than before his injury.
(Paula)
But no. Personality-wise no, not really. Sometimes Chase can be forgetful, but he was before.
(Paul)
Yeah we struggle with that. Is he being forgetful because he was always forgetful, or is he being forgetful because of his brain injury?
(Paula)
Like I said, he was always flighty before and so it’s like, is it because of the brain injury or is that the way he was? Just small little things he would forget. He was always book smart but he would forget stuff all the time, common sense type stuff and he’s still like that. So really, there may be little things but we can’t even pinpoint them because they are so small and minute. But anyone else that didn’t know him really personally, no. They wouldn’t know.
They had told us at the beginning that after five years the brain is healed, that what you’ve got at that point, is what you’re going to get. But they’ve also come to realize now that that is not true. And I would say even in the last year and a half, I’ve seen changes in him. And maybe it’s just more maturity. They didn’t have to train him a lot. His brain started finding its own pathways.
I remember the time that he couldn’t have anything to drink and he was so thirsty. He had to learn everything. He had to learn how to take a drink.
You don’t think about it but there are so many things that happen with your body to even take a drink. Your brain has to tell your throat to do this, and to do this and to do this. It has to tell it how to swallow and what to do so that when you swallow so you don’t choke. He had to learn all of that. And so for the longest time, he wasn’t allowed to even take a drink of anything.
Just a few days into rehab, he was able to start walking, which they were amazed at. He would do laps in their rehab gym. Basically it was just a great big huge room, and he would do laps around it.
He was doing a lap by himself one day, and all of a sudden he just started to veer off and we were like, ‘oh no, oh no’ and we waited a minute. He was veering to the water fountain because that’s where he wanted to go. So just little things like that. He knew he wanted a drink and so he went and got a drink.
Dr. Beatty uses Chase as a case study because he’s not supposed to have the ability that he does with his art today. Because that part of his brain is gone.
(Paul)
He lost that part of his frontal lobe when he had surgery, the part that should have eliminated his cognitive ability to visually see things and put them on paper.
(Paula)
He shouldn’t be able to do that. He’s not supposed to have the memories he has either. He’s not supposed to be able to remember the things that he does now, and he’s not supposed to remember the things he has done in the past.
He remembers all kinds of stuff from when he was a little kid.
And then short term memory, he’s not supposed to have it the way that he does. He is not even supposed to be able to know how to walk, how to feed himself.
(Paula)
My faith is a lot stronger since the accident happened.
I mean, I know personally I couldn’t have gotten through it without my faith in God, the faith that my parents brought me up with. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it.
It’s obvious to me that there is a God and that he will do anything for us. Because he did it.
Some prayers don’t get answered and we don’t know why, but we shouldn’t judge that or question that. Just never give up.
(Paul)
Sometimes we feel guilty because we have our miracle and we didn’t get a miracle with our nephew, and with other people that we know. We prayed for them and they didn’t have as good a turnout.
(Paula)
We do feel guilty every now and then but we’ll take the guilt because we have our son.
But we do feel guilty sometimes because there are other people who we know, that didn’t have the outcome that we did.
Why were we the lucky ones?
(Paul)
We saw a lot of people in that ICU waiting room that didn’t have any faith, and it just made us stronger even then.
(Paula)
They didn’t know what to do, they didn’t have anything. The first thing you do is you turn to God. If you don’t have that, what do you turn to, you know?
(Paul)
One of my friends told me that he came up to tell Chase good-bye because he had been told that Chase wasn’t going to make it. He came up and he went and saw Chase and then he went and saw us and he sat with us. I talked to him for maybe fifteen minutes, maybe not even that long.
And I remember him telling me just a couple of years ago that he came there to tell Chase goodbye, and that he came to console us. He said he left believing that Chase was going to be normal.
He said, “Sitting and talking to you, it just took away all of that thinking that he was going to die. You were so positive and so believing in God that God was going to take care of him and that all of those doctors were wrong.”
I told him that I don’t even remember what our conversation was, but I know whatever I told him, it convinced him. He said when he left he was just fired up and he went home and told his wife that Chase was going to be alright.
(Paula)
I knew that God performed miracles before all of this.
I never doubted it, but I never thought that we would ever experience anything like this. Every baby is a miracle in my eyes, how that happens, but I never thought I would actually see something like this, you know. To be a witness to something like this.
It kind of comes in waves. It will level off for a while and we don’t hear anything and then all of a sudden there’s just a lot. Yeah, we’ve spoken a lot about our experience.
(Paul)
We just did one a couple of months ago at a Christian church up by Abilene, not even a catholic church.
We spoke at a conference and one of the guys there was so moved by it he said, ”I want you to come tell that to our church. We’re not a catholic church though.”
It doesn’t matter.
We prayed to Father Kapaun and Father Kapaun didn’t see catholics and non-catholics. He saw people.
And that’s how we see it.
All you have to do is believe in God.
You don’t have to believe in saints but we do. And he’s going to be a saint someday.”
(To be continued....January 2nd, 2017)
© 2017 by One Million Miracles. All Rights Reserved.
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Our names are Paul and Paula, and we live in Andale, Kansas.
In the midst of our son's traumatic brain injury, WE ARE miracle story #7.
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