Skull Fracture - my story

Coming home from the hospital that night on August 8 '93, I knew something was terribly wrong.

It wasn't just the pain or the crushing mental fatigue, not just the room spinning around,  not just the sick feeling in my gut.

It was that I couldn't think straight.

I went to bed but set my alarm twice. I knew I had been unconscious and my mother (a nurse) always said you cannot sleep long after having been unconscious. I had to check in on my daughter, too, so I figured everything would be fine come morning.

At the time, I was a single mother taking care of two very young children, aged 2 and 4. I had been a single mother for more than a year, and was in a good rhythm. I took care of everything, did not miss a beat. 

I was 41 and 117 pounds. After two kids. (See my icon). That is from that era. I love exercise and really put pedal to the medal after two pregnancies.

I was not going to let anything stand in my way. My life motto, actually.

But come morning, everything was NOT alright.

The next morning, I found my hairbrush in the refrigerator. My daughter remembers this, also.  To this day, she remembers this.

On August 10th 1993, I headed to my doctor's office, first thing.

Irony of all ironies, I'd been to the same doctor the previous Friday, dressed in a snappy skirt suit (Petite Size 2), reading him a medical article I'd edited; he was suitably impressed and had noted same in his medical notes.

But on this Monday after the accident, I was sick. His office was a straight shot from my house and I'd been seeing him for years. On this day, I got lost driving 15 miles per hour. I had slept in my clothes. I had not showered, nor brushed my hair. No makeup. Geez.

My scalp was tender, I'd said. He felt around my head and said there was no "egg" bump, that the best thing to do would be to rest.

He asked about the CT-scan. I repeated what they told me in Mt. Auburn's ER: No hematoma. A contusion. You can go home.

In other words, I wasn't bleeding to death; I just had a contusion, a bruise. A bruise of the skull or of the brain?

In the ER, I'd been half asleep. I don't even remember the CT-scan, so I must have slept through it.

My only comment was when they bandaged my leg from where I kicked one leg with the other, breaking the skin on my leg, when I fell to the floor. "Bubbly water." I said, meaning, hydrogen peroxide.

I'd fallen in Star Market, while holding my daughter, aged 2 and 3/4 years. We were walking in the produce area.

She was in the cart, but for some reason, she started to climb out.

As she leaned into my arms, I grabbed her, and as I grabbed her, I felt myself becoming airborne, and realized I had to grab her around the waist and then lock my arms together so she would stay in my arms. I had nothing to break my fall.

Neither she nor I knew why she climbed out of the cart and into my arms, but I think she saw the inches of sloppy water on the shiny linoleum floor. I never saw that water. There were no safety cones to cordon off the area and nothing to forewarn me.

I was airborne, and then I crashed.

Thud, groan.

When I came to, people were all around me.

Someone helped me up. I did not know where I was.

My daughter was crying, but I didn't hear her.

Only as I was getting to my feet, did I hear and see her. She was standing and crying. I didn't know if she fell. I was wet, lying in the water. 

As a mother, the rest my doctor wanted me to have was impossible.

My head throbbed, my neck and back ached and I could not function more than an hour after being awake.

My son was in kindergarten, my daughter in nursery school. By the time I'd gotten everybody dressed and fed, it was time for sleep. I slept the entire day they were in school. For years.

I was freelancing as a computer business journalist and making enough to make ends meet and more. 

I made an appointment at Spaulding Rehabilitation. The appointment was four months away.

Somehow I muddled through those weeks.

The back of my head where I fell was still too tender to be touched.

No doctor touched the area of the impact, nor looked at the CT-scan.

Typing was nearly impossible. I'm a touch typist who typed up to 100 wpm, yet when I pressed the keys with my left hand, it was the fingers on my right hand that did the typing.  Clearly, the wires were crossed.

There was brain damage. I could not type; I could not write.

Words would not push out of my brain, and I could not find words to express my thoughts or my soul. Every area in my brain was affected except music.

I was going to apply to law school. I had taken a sample test 2 weeks before the accident and scored about 90 percent (except for logic games, which I never could do).

There was an MRI of the brain taken at Spaulding just before Christmas. I was coughing a lot during this MRI. I was brought up very stoical about pain - to inure, not feel.

That is the ticket. This has since proved to be my bane.

I decided to drive the kids to Montreal to visit my sister and her kids. Not a problem. I'd driven to Montreal and her house many times.

I was coughing incessantly. My ribs hurt. My head throbbed, my neck and back hurt. Throbbed. The pain was unbearable. I was still 117 pounds or even less. But I had no energy. I was not taking anything for the pain. 

I had to stop writing articles because either I fell asleep during interviews or I could not understand the material.

"Apple Computer Revenues Up." What is revenues up? I wondered.  Or: It is not that we cannot..." My mind could not wrap its way around a double-negative, a peculiar Latin construction often used in English.

My vision was blurry. Wearing contacts would soon prove impossible.

One block from my sister's house in Montreal and I got lost.  I had driven to this house many times.

Called my brother-in-law and he walked me through the directions from catty corner to the front door. Once at my sister's house, I realized the error of my ways.

I was sick and needed to return to Boston. My lungs filled up with fluid as I lay down. I did nothing but sleep while at my sister's house.

In two days, I was back on the road to Boston.

Back at my house, I looked deathly pale.

I called the doctor and said I might have pneumonia. He said to go to the hospital. I drove to the hospital, forgetting my glasses.

Once in the ER, doctors peppered me with questions for six hours, and then admitted me. For two weeks.

Do you have AIDS? Do you smoke? Your white count is abnormally high. You are very low on blood. Your oxygen saturation is low. You have hypoxia. Your O2 SAT rate is 62. You have lost at least 2 points of blood. You need to be in the ICU but we don't have a bed until tomorrow. You have bilateral pneumonia. You have strep, hemophila, legionella bacteria.

I was an inpatient in Mt. Auburn for 2 weeks, then the VNA came for another two weeks. I froze during the winter and cold spring (I am usually HOT in the winter - very fast metabolism), and had difficulty pronouncing words such as 'statistics'

Sherwood Forrest and many others.

In was during this time Ifirst felt the dent in my skull. A depressed skull fracture.  A skull fracture.  My skull had been too tender to the touch to get anywhere near it.

I mentioned it to my sister, who'd heard that that was serious and needed surgery. I mentioned it to my doctor, who said nothing. 

It was around this time that MRI report came back.

It read: A buildup of water pressure on the right ventricle of the brain, blood clots throughout the brain, weakening of the protective nerve shaft and injuries to the vertebrae in the upper neck region. Two of the upper vertebrae were broken.  The pupil of my right eye is still enlarged, to this day, and my once crystal clear eyes are a bit cloudy, to this day.

At least the Spaulding doctor had an appropriate response: My God.  I had driven the horrible Storrow Drive route from my house 12 miles away to Spaulding - but at 10 or 15 miles an hour. I drove 15 miles an hour for about 6 years

Even the police motioned me to go faster. Ha ha. Definitely not my problem now.

At least, the Spaulding Neurologist  was worried.

And not concerned that my medical case was inevitably, unfortunately part of a legal case. Spaulding was a rehab hospital. They specialized in accident cases.

At the first sign of legal trouble, my primary care doctor turned tail and ran.

By refusing to look at the CT-scan, by refusing to properly examine my skull, by refusing to believe that he might be outside his expertise, he damned me to years of chronic, debilitating injury with life-threatening risks.

It is a miracle I am here today, fully recovered, able to run several miles at a time, able to exercise my heart at 90 percent, able to work my mucles hard, able to live like there's no tomorrow.

Appointments were made at Spaulding. Twice a week, I drove to Spaulding from Storrow Drive, at 15 miles per hour.

I slept 16 hours a day. As soon as I got the kids off to school, I went back to sleep until it was time to pick them up at 5 p.m. They hated being in school programs all day, but I could do no more. I gave them dinner, put them to bed, then crashed.

I took prescription Aleve and developed an ulcer. Only sleep temporarily relieved the water pressure on my brain, and only sleep relieved the pain from the broken vertebras.

No one suggested surgery. They said it was risky. Riskier than what? Certainly not riskier than the complications I was developing and would develop for several years more.

By this time, it was getting late. Four months post injury.

The doctors knew they were in hot water, and, instead of trying to fix the vertebras, instead of trying to install a shunt or do surgery to fix the water on the brain, they did nothing, hoping I would not complain. They did not confess their mistakes. They  claimed nothing could be done. Doctors hate lawyers and legal cases so much they will usually try to avoid any confrontation with a lawyer. They were just making matters worse.

Ringo's daughter had water on the brain and was in surgery at Brigham & Women's hospital, I'd read during this time. During the early 1990s, it was common for a person to get a CT-scan at a hospital and be told everything was all right, only to discover months later that everything was all wrong. CT-scans were so imperfect, so poor at pinpointing the true risks from head injury that using them at all is just bad medicine. I hope conditions have improved since then; I'm not hopeful.

You can watch nearly any medical show on TV these days to discover routine brain surgery on cases less serious than mine was.

I had to stay cool. As cold as possible. I took the kids to swimming lessons and spent as much time in the pool as possible. I was still very short of breath from all that pressure.  I tried working when I could but I quit after a few weeks because the effort was too much.

In the summer, I kept the air conditioning at 55 degrees, day and night.  At one point during this period, I crossed over. And came back, obviously. I will tell that story later this week for Halloween.

I drank milkshakes and applied ice packs to my forehead.

The pain was too much for me to be up and about for more than six hours out of 24, and so my discipline, athleticism and daily living skills were shot to hell.  Before the accident, I was 41, 117 pounds and still running an 8-minute mile for 8 miles at a time, just like I did when I was 30.

I finally took the LSAT over a six-hour period. I got  9 percent right. A total reverse of what I had done prior to the injury.

I endured batteries of neuropsychological tests.

On the tests, just as with the MRIs, the results all said the same thing: the injury is more severe than one would normally expect from a fall in a grocery store.

People who fall in a grocery store are not usually holding their baby in their arms as they fall. Doctors ignored this key point. 

Some hapless secretaries made the mistake of writing my report as a motor vehicle accident, instead of a slip and fall, crash and burn.

Legally, my case was called a closed-head trauma, which is difficult to litigate because the problems are invisible.

People suffer with invisible cognitive disabilities, only to add insult to injury because incompetent or negligent doctors refused to get involved, and no one bothered to lead the way for genuine treatment.

I was on disability for a year when I had to stop freelancing as a computer business journalist, because I failed every assignment. I couldn't understand the assignments and couldn't understand what was said to me. My confidence was shaken, and so was my health.

I could not write. I could compose piano pieces and could draw and paint. So this is what I did during this time.

Every single organ system suffered over the 10 years it took to recover.

By 2003, I was fully recovered, able to write and exercise. I went back to full time work in a stupid job  in 2004 but left a few months ago, because I have better choices at my disposal.

Eventually, I climbed out of the morass that brain damage caused.

It was a long, painful journey marked by years of baby-steps and missteps, by worries I'd never have a day where my symptoms wouldn't show, by years of walking around as a sad, little porcelain doll, invisible cracks on the inside, masquerading as whole.

But I'll never say that everything worked out okay, that the doctors tried their best.

They didn't try at all.

They hid behind their mistakes and it is only by a sheer miracle that I'm alive to tell the story. I'll never forgive them their arrogance, their refusal to participate, their hypocrisy and their failure to adhere to the Hippocratic oath.

Everything I am now is because of me. The doctors had nothing to do with it.

And, yes, I still have the dent in my skull.  A reminder that I recovered, all by myself.

My hair is thinner, my vision is much worse but I am almost back to my icon weight and health. 

And thank God or someone for the incredible neuroplasticity of the brain.

I live like there's no tomorrow.

***

Rewritten from when I posted it in 2006.

Copyright © 2008, 2007 2006 Kathryn Esplin-Oleski. All rights reserved.