How to Get Run Over by a Truck Read online

  Trying to find the policemen who had been on the scene was not easy. My mom first called the general police department number in Brooklyn, and when she was asked what my current address was, she realized she didn’t know. She only knew the address of my old apartment. The accident didn’t happen in the precinct I used to live in, so she had to call another department. And when, after all her efforts, she finally got in touch with the right policeman, she was shocked that her personal tragedy was greeted with apathy and boredom on the other end of the line.

  “What’s your daughter’s full name?”

  “Katharine Clark McKenna.”

  “What’s her address?”

  “I don’t know. She just moved.”

  “Are her roommates around so we can get her full address?”

  And that did it. She snapped.

  “I don’t have time to call them—I need to know where my daughter is. I want to know where my daughter is now! WHERE IS SHE????” she screamed into the receiver.

  “Okay, okay. She’s at Elmhurst Hospital.”

  “Which hospital in Elmhurst?”

  “Lady, there is only one in Elmhurst.”

  He asked my very frustrated mother a few more questions until she finally hung up on him. Exasperated and anxious, she dialed 411 and asked the operator for a hospital in Elmhurst, Queens. The operator told her that the only hospital in Elmhurst is a penal hospital.

  “She can’t be there!” she exclaimed.

  “But that’s the only one there is,” the operator insisted.

  She asked for the phone number, called the hospital, and asked the person who picked up the phone if I was there. I was. How I was being treated at a prisoners’ hospital ceased being the most important question. It had been that kind of morning—she would take whatever was offered up. She just needed to get to me.

  My mother drove out to Elmhurst on the Long Island Expressway, all the way remaining rational and responsible. She made sure that everyone was informed of what was going on. She did what all moms are supposed to do: she took care of everyone else.

  When my mother arrived at the emergency room, she wasn’t pushy; she didn’t scream; she didn’t make a scene. She waited patiently at the information desk until it was her turn. Cool, calm, collected, and still under the impression that her daughter had been hit by a car. She held on to the hope that if I was able to recollect her cell phone number and our home number, I couldn’t be that bad off. When it was her turn, she told them she was there to see her daughter—Katharine McKenna. The woman at the front desk’s face fell. She rushed over to the emergency room entry and announced, “The McKenna woman is here.” A security guard came over and took my mom by the arm and ushered her into the ER. The color drained from my mother’s face—something was very wrong.

  A social worker, along with a doctor in his early thirties, with a sweet face, intense blue eyes, and a scruffy beard, came over to greet her.

  “Mrs. McKenna?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your daughter is very, very, very, very sick.”

  The doctor, who my mother later learned was Dr. Khaitov, told her that my body had been crushed by eight truck wheels. They didn’t yet know the full extent of the trauma, but it was substantial.

  “I would recommend you come in and see her right now,” he said. “We don’t know what is going to happen.”

  The doctor led her to the room where I was being operated on; the only part of my body that was exposed was my toes, which were peeking out from the bottom of the sheet that was covering the rest of my body. My toenails were painted brown, in honor of autumn. She couldn’t get close to me because there were ten doctors and nurses hovering over me. My momma approached the end of the hospital bed. She cupped my feet in her hands and kissed my toes, the way she had done when I was a baby. How did this happen? she asked herself. How could this be good-bye?

  Every fear she had been holding at bay came rushing forward. Every hope that this was a minor accident had been decimated. Her daughter was dying. My mom’s knees went out from under her, and she collapsed on the emergency room floor. Dr. Khaitov called the social worker in and asked her to take my mother out into the corridor.

  There is a song by Death Cab for Cutie with the chorus “Love is watching someone die.” That is what my mom did. She went in and watched me die. I have never questioned my mom’s love for me—but I also have never been more aware of it than I was when I heard what she did in the emergency room that day.

  My father was at seven-thirty mass when my mom first called him. He ignored the call—he’d phone her back later. He had just seen her forty-five minutes ago; what could she possibly need? It was probably an inquiry about what he’d like for dinner, or a question about the checking account. She called again, and again (in our family, more than one call in a row equals emergency), so he exited the church on Wall Street and rang her back. She told him I had been in an accident. They didn’t know how severe it was. I was at Elmhurst Hospital, and she was on her way there.

  This was not my dad’s first dance with hospitals and car accidents. About forty years ago, when he was twenty-two, his sister, who was a year younger than him, had been sitting in the passenger seat of one of my dad’s friend’s cars. They were coming back from a party and had been drinking. Back then, drunk driving was viewed as more of a no-no than a reckless, horrible crime. The driver hit another car, and my aunt Marleen, who was not wearing her seat belt, flew forty feet in the air and landed in a ditch on the side of the road.

  Aunt Marleen was in a coma for nine months. While my father was in his early twenties, he watched as his mother and father stopped their own lives and lived by their daughter’s bedside. My nana prayed the rosary, knit afghans, and devoted every part of herself to her daughter. Everyone in his family lost those nine months. Amazingly, my aunt came out of the coma, but she was severely brain damaged, incapable of regular speech, and has been wheelchair-bound ever since.

  My father’s and my uncles’ young adulthoods were spent helping their mother and father take care of their sister. They helped wash her and carry her up the stairs at night and down the stairs in the morning; they wiped her mouth when food fell out of it as she ate. My father is a man of faith, though, so when he spoke to my mother and she told him I had been in an accident, he told himself the accident couldn’t be that bad. God would not let this happen to him again. There was a threshold for sadness and hurt, and he believed that he had already crossed his. He had to have.

  He went into work and told his boss what happened, and they ordered a town car to drive him to Elmhurst. He soothed himself with the idea that all my injuries were fixable. If I was speaking and capable of remembering phone numbers and social security numbers, surely I would be okay. This would not be a life-and-death situation. I was a tough girl. Of course I’d be fine.

  He got to the hospital and went straight to the ER. He found my mother sitting there in the waiting room, dazed but recovered from her fainting spell. They held each other and didn’t speak for a bit. Then my mom told my dad everything the doctors had told her, but he had trouble processing it. It wasn’t actually trouble, so much as straight-up refusal. He had it in his head that I was going to be fine. There was no way that God would take me from this world. It just couldn’t happen. He had done all the right things: he went to church every day, he visited the sick and the old, he helped others when he could, he gave money to charity, and his life had already seen enough hurt. This could not, would not, happen. When a nurse asked him if he would like to see me, to say good-bye, just in case, he firmly told her no. “I’m not doing that. I don’t need to see her. She is not going anywhere. There is no need to say good-bye.”

  I had always known my father was a stubborn man, one who believed what he believed and would not be swayed. He was not a person you wanted to argue with, because there was no debate involved. You would tell my dad that what he thought was wrong, and then he would tell you that you were allowed to have your own opinions, but he wasn’t going to change his mind because of what you said. He said it had taken him a long time to become the man he was, and he wasn’t changing now. But hearing later how he had puffed out his chest and jutted out his chin at the devil and said, “No, she is not going to die—I refuse to accept that,” amazed even me.

  The fact that my parents took exactly the same information and dealt with it in such completely different ways is what makes me love them both so much. My mother would never have forgiven herself if she hadn’t said good-bye. She would have felt like she had let me go without letting me know how loved I was. My dad wouldn’t have forgiven himself if he had gone in, said good-bye, and then I had died. For my father, good-bye was giving in; for my mother, good-bye was showing me that she loved me. And, shockingly, both choices were perfect and beautiful.

  Conor, my older brother, arrived fifteen minutes after my dad. He had just moved back to New York after working for two years in Boston and was in his first month of business school at Columbia. When he told me that he was moving back to New York, I was thrilled to have him so close by. I began lists of all the fun things we would get to do together, tripping over my words in excitement. Conor eventually had to hang up on me because I wouldn’t stop talking. (I have a tendency to overwhelm people with my enthusiasm.)

  Spending time with my big brother had always felt like an escape. I could go out for drinks with him and feel no pressure to look good or to call other people so they weren’t left out. I could get dirty drunk and not feel embarrassed when I accidentally vomited on his shoes. Also, he usually paid for stuff, which I was really into. We had been in the same city for about a month, but we hadn’t done anything together yet. He was still settling into the routine of school, and I had just started a new j
ob. But I wasn’t worried. I figured we had all the time in the world.

  Conor was in class when my mother called that morning. He hadn’t picked up when she called the first time, but after that all-important second call, he stepped out of class. He heard the forced calm in my mother’s voice as she let him know I had been in an accident and it would be a good idea if he came down to the hospital. He got a third call from my mom while he was in the cab. This time there was no forced calm. She told him he should get to the hospital AS SOON AS HE COULD—they didn’t know what was going to happen.

  In the backseat of the yellow cab, his frustration at not being with his family suddenly overcame him. He took all the money out of his wallet and threw it at the cab driver. “Please, get me to the hospital as fast as you can! You can have all this money—just get me there! HURRY!”

  The cab driver said he didn’t need to be paid more; he would drive as fast as he could.

  By the time Conor arrived at the hospital, he was drained of all emotion. We stopped being his family and became small parts of the big picture that had been broken apart and now had to be put back together. He realized there were things he could do and things he couldn’t. My parents were too distressed to handle the little things that needed attention, so that’s where Conor stepped in. He parented my parents. He talked with the doctors. And he filled out paperwork. Conor handled the business of this emergency.

  It probably would have seemed to someone else that he didn’t love me, or that he was uncaring or cold. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. He loved me and my family so much that he gave up his right to grieve, to worry, and to be sad—he denied himself the luxury of showing his feelings so that everyone else could fall apart.

  He had to see my mother in the fetal position on the hospital floor, and he had to watch my father as his body shook with sobs. Conor had to hear the worst of what was happening to me from the doctors and then relay the condensed, softer version to my parents.

  None of the hospital staff would say what was happening exactly, but death was like a fine mist in the room. You couldn’t exactly see it, but you felt it on your skin. It lived in the way the social workers and nurses talked to my family; they were quiet, subdued, and grave.

  After two hours a team of doctors finally came to talk with my parents and Conor; two of them were bladder doctors, and one was a general surgeon. The bladder doctors got straight to the point: there was a large laceration in my bladder, and it was the cause of the internal bleeding. They were calm delivering their diagnosis, because they knew exactly what was wrong with my bladder. There weren’t any questions my parents had about that specific part of my anatomy they couldn’t answer. My parents took comfort in the doctors’ confidence.

  The general surgeon was a different story. Dr. Elizabeth was tough and matter-of-fact. She listed all the things that could potentially be wrong with me: there could be lacerations on my liver, there could be lacerations on my kidneys, and there could be damage to my large intestine. In fact, there were so many things that could be wrong that she scared the ever-living shit out of my parents.

  At eleven a.m. on Tuesday, October 2, 2007, Dr. Khaitov came out to the waiting room and announced, “Mr. and Mrs. McKenna, we can’t stop your daughter from bleeding—she keeps bleeding out.”

  What that meant was that the doctors and nurses were pumping blood into my body, trying to replace what had been leaking into the cavernous parts of my midsection. Later, when this was first explained to me, I imagined them pumping in blood from blood machines—and then all the blood just splashing out onto the floor. That was not exactly what was happening. In fact, the blood was transfused into my veins, but because there were so many wounds inside and outside my body, all the clotting agents had gone to clot other wounds. I stopped clotting, and all this donated blood they were pumping in was bleeding out into all the cavities in my body. They weren’t able to stop the bleeding because, as Dr. Elizabeth had said, they couldn’t tell what else besides my bladder was lacerated. All the blood was obscuring any wounds to my other organs, and I kept bleeding and bleeding. They had already transfused me with eight pints of blood, and the human body only holds sixteen pints. They continued to pump in the transfused blood and then, because I wasn’t clotting, they would have to pump it back out again.

  “Just keep giving her transfusions,” my father, suddenly a professional medical expert, ordered. He now says, in hindsight, that he still hadn’t realized the gravity of my injuries. I was broken. They would fix it. The idea of this being an unresolvable problem hadn’t registered with him yet.

  “No, if we can’t stop the bleeding that’s a big problem,” Dr. Khaitov explained.

  “What does that mean?” he asked, a little less sure of his medical prowess.

  “If she doesn’t start clotting in one hour, she is going to pass.”

  “What?”

  The doctor looked to my mother and my brother for help. He didn’t want to have to spell it out for my father.

  My brother turned to my dad and said, “It means that Katie will die, Dad.”

  The three of them sat in the corner of the waiting room and cried. My father recommended they pray the rosary, but my mother protested. “I don’t know how to pray the rosary. I’m not even Catholic—isn’t that against the rules?”

  “Margo, I think that today of all days we can be whatever we want.”

  They started to pray the rosary.

  1) Sign of the Cross and say the Apostle’s Creed,

  2) Say the Our Father,

  3) Say three Hail Marys,

  4) Say the Glory Be to the Father,

  5) Announce the First Mystery; then say the Our Father,

  6) Say ten Hail Marys,

  7) Say the Glory Be to the Father, and

  8) Say the Our Father.

  That’s a lot of steps for one prayer. My brother and father, both veterans of the rosary, started speeding through each step. They were saying their Hail Marys as if the quicker they said them, the more effective they would be. My mom looked at my dad and my brother in disbelief—she said that all she heard coming out of their mouths was, “Blah blah blah Mary, blah blah blah Jesus, blah blah blah sins, blah blah blah God.”

  “Can you please slow down?!” she implored.

  They slowed down for my mom, the newbie. The rosary done, they stared at the clock, counting down the minutes until the doctors would stop transfusing me—until the moment I would die.

  At 11:45, fifteen minutes before they would know if I was going to live or die, my mom, always the planner, retreated into a corner and started to plan my funeral. What songs would be played (aside from “Solsbury Hill,” of course)? What would I wear? Where would the service be? What readings would they do?

  My older brother watched the door for my younger brother, James, and my sister, Callie. They were coming in from their respective colleges in Connecticut and upstate New York—if something bad was going to happen, he hoped they would get there in time.

  My dad was in the hallway, on his knees praying—he says that he was begging God not to let me die—when he was suddenly struck with a feeling of total calm. It started at the top of his head and ended at his belly button. And at that moment he knew I would live. The worry just stopped.

  At 11:50, Dr. Khaitov came in, and with an incredulous look on his face he announced, “She’s clotting. She started to clot. She isn’t bleeding out anymore.”

  I had clawed my way out of my first the shit’s going down situation. I had a punctured lung and had broken all my ribs. The truck had ripped a hole in my bladder (that was the organ that was causing all the bleeding), and there was another gaping hole on my right side where the ten-speed lever had lodged itself into me as the truck had run me over. My pelvis was fractured in five places. The pelvic fracturing was the worst because I would be unable to walk until it healed, and there is no cast you can put around your middle. Instead of wraparound plaster, I was outfitted with a metal plate in my back to hold together the broken pieces of my pelvic bones.

  Later that day, as the sun was setting and I had been moved to the ICU, my parents saw Dr. Khaitov as he was finishing up his shift. They went up to him and thanked him for saving me.