Still Lolo

by Lauren Scruggs

  Still, the helicopter sat, its blades circling.

  The first paramedic came into the open hangar and looked underneath something. He was at least forty feet from the crash site. He glanced toward Mike.

  “Can I help you?” Mike called out. His voice rose at the end, clearly perturbed.

  The paramedic put his one finger to his mouth for Mike to be silent and looked at me, almost like a nudge. I took the cue and looked away. The paramedic didn’t want me to see.

  He had found her hand.

  CHAPTER 3

  Racing to the Hospital

  Jeff (Lauren’s dad)

  One moment I was sitting in my easy chair at home watching TV.

  The next moment I was on my knees.

  In between the two moments, the call came from Mike’s wife, Shannon. Her voice sounded garbled, erratic. I couldn’t make out details, although I grasped enough. My daughter had been seriously injured in an accident with a plane’s propeller, and they were racing her to Baylor Medical Center. Whether she would live or die was unknown.

  Maybe it was the cold medicine I’d taken half an hour earlier. I don’t know. But when I hung up the phone, I heard a sharp wailing sound in the house. It ricocheted off walls and pierced my heart like a lance. Who’s wailing? I thought. Then I realized—it was me.

  In the next moment I was standing in the kitchen. A minute later I was in the bathroom, my face perched over the toilet. I was walking down the hallway. I was walking out to the garage. Pacing. Pacing. Trying to figure out what to do next. Crying. Praying. Pacing. Pacing. Calling out to God, “Oh Lord, save my daughter!” Slow down, Jeff, I thought. Get a grip. Call someone. You don’t want to be alone right now. You’re in no shape to drive.

  I called my good friend Chris Crawford. He’s a dermatologist, and he and his wife, Dana, are like a brother and sister to Cheryl and me. Chris and Dana were out at a restaurant in North Dallas along with their daughter, Candice, who’s just a bit older than Lauren. I found out later that they thought I was calling to invite them over to our house after dinner, like we often do. They had just ordered appetizers and blackened fish, one of our favorite meals. “Heeeey! What’s going on?” Chris answered the phone in his usual friendly voice.

  There was a pause.

  Again came that strange, horrible sound. Where was it coming from? Bouncing off my walls like that. Again, I realized the wail came from me.

  “Jeff? Where are you! What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

  I managed to choke out a single word, “No.” But I couldn’t get any further. I tried to say, “Lauren’s been in an accident” and “propeller” and “please come over right now,” but I don’t know what actually jumbled out of my mouth. All I heard was Chris saying, “Don’t move, Jeff. I’ll be right there.”

  I kept pacing, praying, wailing. I called another close friend, Chris Wilson. He’s one of my workout partners and strong as an ox, exactly the kind of friend you need in times of crisis. His phone went straight to voice mail. When it beeped, I yelled, “Where are you?! Why aren’t you answering? Lauren’s been in an accident. It’s bad. Really, really bad.”

  I hung up and paced some more. Chris Wilson called me straight back. “It ain’t like you to yell, brother. I’ll be right over.”

  I called my other daughter, Brittany. She and her husband, Shaun, were downtown enjoying a performance of The Nutcracker, and I knew their phones wouldn’t be turned on in the auditorium.

  “Dad, is that you?” Shaun said. The dull roar of a crowd could be heard. “It’s intermission. I just this moment switched on my phone. Why are you yelling?”

  Dead air. The call dropped. I dialed again. This time Brittany answered. “Dad, slow down. You’re not making any sense. Here—I’m going to hand the phone back to Shaun.”

  I said something about an airplane and a propeller and that they’d taken Lauren to the hospital.

  “We’ll meet you there right away,” Shaun said.

  Chris Crawford and Chris Wilson both pulled into my driveway at the same time. I had no idea how Chris Crawford had made it from downtown Dallas to Plano that quickly. Doors slammed. Both men ran up the front steps and burst inside. There was no need to knock.

  “They’re taking her to Baylor,” I said. I already had my coat on. “Let’s go.”

  “Dude, you look pale,” Chris Wilson said. “You go with the doctor. I’ll follow in my car.”

  Chris Crawford loaded me in his sedan and turned the key. The engine started with a deep growl. He screeched the tires and accelerated like a dragster. Everything became a blur. We raced along side streets and merged on the Dallas North Tollway, heading for downtown. Traffic was light, and I saw the speedometer inch past 110 mph.

  Reality came and went. Sometimes I was wailing. Sometimes I was silent. Chris was praying out loud. Sometimes I was praying at the same time, all in a rush. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, how could this have happened?” Then I was in and out some more. Rocking in my seat. Back and forth. Back and forth. Waves of nausea. Maybe I was back at home again, watching TV with a bad head cold. No, this was real. I was in the front seat of Chris’s car, and we were speeding down the toll road to the hospital. I lost sight of Chris Wilson’s car behind us. I think he was keeping his speed down to a cool 85.

  “Jeff, talk to me here.” Chris’s voice shifted to a doctor’s clinical tone. “Did Shannon give any details? Do you have any indication of how serious the accident was?”

  “No, not really.” I was still trying to piece everything together in my head. “Shannon just said something about her hand.”

  “Did the propeller hit Lauren in the head or face too?”

  “The propeller hit her head. That’s all she said that I can remember—and that it was bad.”

  I knew what Chris was thinking. Doctors always imagine the worst. They’re around death and dying too much. Even dermatologists. His mind was churning. He was calculating a hit to the head by an airplane propeller, and he was doing the math. Start with a powerful engine. Factor in a couple thousand rpms. Apply to soft tissue, brain material, bone, skin. He was picturing textbook images of trauma injuries he had seen. A hand sliced off by a lawn mower blade. An arm caught in a farm cultivator. Chris sensed the gravity of the situation. He just wasn’t articulating it to me. Lauren wasn’t going to survive an accident like this. We were going to screech to a stop at the hospital, and the surgeons were going to come out and say, “Sorry, she didn’t make it. There wasn’t anything we could do.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I said and slid down in my seat.

  Chris checked the rearview mirror and veered to a side lane. “Okay, we can stop.”

  “No!” I righted myself. “We’ve got to get to the hospital!”

  Chris began to pray out loud again, slipping on his doctor’s hat, even in prayer. “Jesus, Lord God. You gotta help them stabilize her, get her blood pressure up. It can’t be the carotid artery, Lord. You gotta pull her through.”

  I was navigating mental and emotional waves. It almost became a pattern. I was okay for a while and then not. I wailed for a while and then was silent. I talked, spilling in a rush whatever came to mind—“I knew something bad was going to happen with that flying. I never did feel comfortable with that. Why wasn’t I there? I could have done something.” And then I was crying out to the Lord, “God, please save my daughter’s life.”

  Another call came through. The helicopter’s flight had been diverted. They were taking Lauren to Parkland Memorial Hospital, not Baylor. Chris changed lanes again, and for the first time that evening I saw him smile faintly. “Thank goodness it’s Parkland,” he said. “That’s an awesome place to be in this town if you get a serious injury. She’ll stand the best chance there.”

  We cut off the toll road, rounded the corner onto Harry Hines Boulevard, and screeched into the hospital’s parking lot. As we jumped out, we heard the helicopter flying in and landing. Identical timing. God must have orchestrated that event p
erfectly. It felt good that we were there. At least now Lauren would have family in the same building with her.

  Outside Parkland it was crowded, as it always is, and a policeman stood at the front door, ushering people in and out. Chris and I walked through the glass doors and told the guy at the counter who we were. He pointed us to the ER’s waiting room. Parkland is the county hospital; everyone goes there. A sign near the entrance reads, “Founded in 1894.”

  The chairs in the waiting room were cold and cushionless, made out of hard meshed metal. They’d been all red once, but the paint was flaking. Sitting on one of those chairs in the ER felt like sitting on a tombstone. People were all around me, but I couldn’t hear what anybody was saying. Chris stuck to my side.

  For a while we were by ourselves. A chaplain came by and introduced herself. “I’m going to be your facilitator,” she said. “I know Lauren’s here. And I know she’s alive.” Then we prayed together.

  It might have been only ten minutes later when Cheryl arrived along with Shannon. They had farther to come than we did. My wife and I hadn’t talked yet. Shannon had relayed all the information to me over the phone. As soon as Cheryl saw us, she started crying. We ran to each other and wrapped our arms around each other, both sobbing. “We were there,” she said. “I saw it.” Cheryl’s shirt was covered in blood.

  I tried to pull myself together for my wife’s sake. I gathered some composure. People began to show up. Friends of ours. People we knew from church. Steve and Mary Farrar. Matt Chandler, our pastor. Chris’s wife, Dana, and their daughter, Candice. The chaplain showed us to a smaller, more private waiting area. More friends showed up. Still more. Shaun and Brittany arrived along with Chris Wilson—they’d all pulled into the parking lot at the same time and came in together. We were jammed into the tiny room. Hospital personnel showed us to a windowless conference room down the hallway. It had some tables in it. We were thankful for the space. More friends showed up. Still more. The room loaded up. Seventy-five, eighty people, maybe closer to a hundred.

  “People, the magic word is stabilized,” Chris Crawford said. “Pray we’ll hear that—and hear it soon. That’s the news that will change everything. Let’s pray we hear this word before the night is over.” The room filled with prayer.

  As the clock ticked, no magic word came. It felt like a nightmare. This can’t be happening, I thought. I was sitting, sometimes lying, on the floor, rocking back and forth, back and forth. We had lost all composure again. Cheryl, who was sobbing, was sitting in a chair but kept throwing her back up, lurching erratically. Dana was with her, rubbing her back, keeping her close.

  Just before midnight a doctor came in and cleared his throat. “I need to speak to the parents.” His face was tense.

  Instantly the room quieted down.

  “Whatever needs to be said, you can say it to everybody here,” I said. “We’re all family.”

  “All eighty of you?” He raised an eyebrow.

  I nodded.

  “Lauren’s condition has stabilized,” he said. The magic word. Eighty people breathed a collective sigh of relief. The tension scaled back instantly. I thought I even heard a cheer. “Heart rate’s good. Blood pressure’s good. Breathing’s good. She’s not going to die,” the doctor added. “But there’s still a lot of work to be done. She’ll be in surgery most of the night. Before she goes under, the immediate family can have five minutes with her.”

  Cheryl caught my eye, and I nodded. We got up and followed the doctor down the hallway to a small trauma room off the ER. Brittany, Shaun, and Chris Crawford came with us. The walls in the hallway were scuffed from endless bumps with metal carts and gurneys. We walked into the room.

  I noticed Lauren’s lips first.

  Her face was swollen; they’d pumped so many fluids into her. Underneath her chin was a white, plastic neck collar that framed the underside of her face in a V. It looked like a picture frame highlighting the bottom of her mouth. Her lips were closed, and the left side of her mouth was pulled back slightly. Lauren was neither smiling nor frowning. She was just there. Yet her lips were perfect. Untouched. The same as ever. That’s what I noticed.

  A pile of gray, red, and green cords and tubes cascaded around her. Half of her head was shaved, and one eye was covered. A thick white bandage was wrapped around her left shoulder. Over the sheet, I could just see her right hand. It had cuts and bruises on it from where she’d hit the pavement. Her left arm was completely covered. Heart monitors and machines I didn’t recognize ringed the bed. A red light to one side blinked on and off, on and off.

  “All things considered, she looks great,” Chris said. He was trying to give us a medical perspective. We knew things could have been a lot worse. Lauren still had a face. She could have been missing huge chunks of skin or scalp, like divots that get ripped up at a golf course.

  I didn’t touch her for fear of passing on the germs from my cold. But I wanted to hold her. To tell her everything was going to be all right. To whisper into her ear the songs I used to sing when she was a little girl.

  Cheryl bent down and kissed the side of Lauren’s face. “It’s Mom,” Cheryl whispered. “I’m here, and it’s going to be okay.” Cheryl had grown completely calm. I knew she was speaking for both of us with a strength that came from far above.

  Everything was completely quiet in the room. There was no response from Lauren. Whatever battle we were fighting had just begun.

  CHAPTER 4

  Life Unexpected

  Cheryl

  As we walked back through the hallway from Lauren’s trauma room to our group’s waiting area, I noticed something different. The walls of Parkland were still the same dingy white, with an occasional block painted a flat green. The same smell of hospital disinfectant saturated the air. The floor still looked both polished and scuffed at the same time. What was different now was that, for the first time in hours, I was breathing normally.

  My watch read just after midnight, Sunday, December 4, 2011. These were the first minutes of the first full day after Lauren’s accident. Jeff took my hand in his and pulled me close as we walked so our shoulders touched. We were going to make it through this. All of us—Lauren especially, as well as everybody who loved her so deeply. That’s what felt different. Somehow we were all going to be all right. And that undergirding of friendship was what kept me going. We. We were all in this together. We weren’t alone.

  Back in the waiting area, Chris Crawford filled in the larger group of people on how Lauren looked and what he thought the possible prognoses for recovery would be. Multiple teams of surgeons would be operating on Lauren throughout the night. One team for the brain. Another for the eye. Hand. Face. Shoulder. We weren’t sure yet of all the operations scheduled. Each time another surgery was begun, a new team would take over.

  A hospital administrator came in with a clipboard and asked Jeff and me to fill out some paperwork, forms, waivers—I wasn’t quite sure what. We scribbled our signatures and sat awhile. Then another administrator came in with more paperwork. Again we scribbled on page after page, barely conscious of what we were signing. We sat some more. Paced some more. Then another administrator came in, and we signed another notebook full of paperwork. It felt like we were buying a house.

  The clock ticked to 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m. A few people left to go home and catch some sleep, but most stayed. Pockets of friends gathered in small groups and kept praying. Waiting. Our church’s music pastor, Michael Bleecker, quietly sang some worship songs. More praying. More waiting.

  Poor Jeff. He had been feeling miserable with his cold even before the accident. As the night wore on, I seemed to be gaining strength, gaining confidence, thinking with a clearer head. But Jeff was going the other direction. For a while he tried to sleep, curled up on a coat on the floor. Then he paced. Then he sat with his head in his hands. Then he cried.

  Hour after hour Chris Crawford and Chris Wilson sat next to my husband. They talked with him. Prayed with him. Let him cough on t
hem. I knew that as much as Jeff needed me as his wife right now, he needed his buddies just as much, maybe even more. For years they had honed their friendship like iron sharpens iron. Now they were slashing through the anguish of this night together. Brothers in battle. Soldiers at war.

  My mind drifted. Waiting rooms can prompt that response in a person. I prayed. I waited. I talked with people in the room. But I also had large moments of empty space when my mind ran free. Maybe time sped up in my head, because flashes of Lauren’s life came to me. Snippets of conversation. Images of years past. Funny memories of things she’d said or done.

  I thought about how miraculous it was that Lauren had ever been born in the first place. God had a purpose for her life; I’d known it even before she was born. And now as a young adult, Lauren had only begun to step into that purpose. God knew every move my daughter made, and he had set into motion every one of her days. He would keep her alive until the purpose for her life was accomplished. Lauren would heal. I knew it for a fact. I knew it by faith.

  How strange were the circumstances that led up to Lauren being conceived. Years ago the odds had been stacked against her birth. I was all set to marry someone else. Back in 1981, I was in my early twenties, finishing up college at Memphis State and seriously dating a guy named Bill. Evenings, I worked at an upscale restaurant to put myself through school. One night a tall, hunky stranger came in and sat in my section. After ordering, he asked me out on a date. There was no way I would say yes. Bill worked in the same restaurant, just a few bus stations away. I smiled and declined the offer, but inside I was definitely intrigued.

  I had no idea if I’d ever see the tall stranger again, but the ball was already set in motion. My boyfriend and I broke up. Then, fortunately, a few weeks later Jeff walked back into the restaurant. My heart fluttered in my chest. The offer was still good, he said. Had I changed my mind yet?