They told me the stories of what happened, and I saw the tape once — it was all I could handle. The play ended, and everyone stood, except me. I lay sprawled out on the grass, body still. Too still. I knew watching it that I wasn’t breathing. I don’t think many people in the stadium were either.
A hush fell over the crowd, an eerie impossibility to have thousands of people nearly silent as medics ran onto the field. My helmet was removed carefully, gingerly — being paralyzed wouldn’t matter if they didn’t because I would have died right then, right there if they hadn’t.
Watching someone perform CPR on my lifeless body was one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced. They pumped my chest, breathed for me until my lungs began to work again, both teams circling my body in silence.
I stopped breathing for over a minute before they resuscitated me. And then they moved me onto a board and I left the field in an ambulance.
A little more pressure would have snapped my neck. A slight shift in the angle would have ended my life.
My first sense of awareness was only sounds and blurred shapes in flashes and bursts, and when I finally woke, it was coughing against the hard tube in my throat. I tried to fight it, tried to pull it out, but I couldn’t. Not my hands, my arms, legs — my entire body lay useless on the hospital bed.
Terror. That was all I felt — pure terror pressing me from all directions. I was locked in my body like a prison cell. My mom called for the nurse, crying, my dad on the other side of me, telling me to stay calm, that it would be okay. But my eyes darted around the room in panic, blurring from shock and the pain of knowing that he was wrong. Nothing would ever be okay again.
Once they’d removed my breathing tube and I’d calmed down, they told me that I’d suffered a spinal injury to my top two vertebrae, said that the next seventy-two hours would tell us how much damage had been done, how much of it was permanent. They said I was young and strong, that the odds were in my favor. They said we just had to wait and see.
It was the longest three days of my life.
All that I wanted, aside from to go back and do it all differently, was to be alone. I wanted to think. I wanted to cry. I wanted to try to claw my way out of the avalanche, but it seemed like miles before I could reach the air. Before I could breathe. But I looked into the eyes of my mother and father, and that’s where I found strength.
It was weak at first, a glimmering thread of hope that forced me to smile, to tell them I was okay, that I’d be all right, even if I didn’t believe it. But at the end of that first day, as I lay in the bed I couldn’t feel underneath me, I quietly begged my fingers to move, sent the command down my arms as I had thousands of times that day, a mantra repeated over and over, until finally, they did.
There have been few times in my life that I’ve felt so elated, so emotional, so much. As if every fiber of me vibrated with hope, possibility, and determination.
The hope sprang from there. By the next morning — I didn’t sleep, just lay awake, willing my body to listen, to come back to life — I could lift my arms and bend my fingers, nothing close to full movement, but the joy in my parents’ faces filled me with even more resolve.
On the third day, I took my first steps, and it was then that the doctors believed it was possible that I’d make a full recovery. But I’d never play again.
I could never play again, but I would live.
Those first days were filled with that affirmation. Because without it, I don’t know what would have happened to me. The darkness of the knowledge of what it could have been was ever present — I could feel it at the edge of everything, and in the center of that was hope. At first, that glimmer of hope was small, the darkness heavy. But my family was there. My team was there. Kyle was there. And with every day, the hope grew, pushing the boundaries of the dark further away.
They put me in a halo and kept me in the hospital for two weeks, every day full of daily physical therapy as I regained use of my fine motor skills, starting with feeding myself. The frustration of not being able to eat pudding on my own was so high, I swore I’d never eat it again as long as I lived, and it was a promise I’d kept.
In those two weeks, my girlfriend Gretchen didn’t come to see me once. It was days before I could use my phone, and when I checked it, she hadn’t sent anything, so neither did I. What could I even say? She knew where I was, and she didn’t want to see me. I couldn’t even pretend to know why, and I couldn’t fathom how to compartmentalize that, not with everything else.
But Kyle came every day. He spent hours sitting with me, bringing me news, movies, and when I could use my hands well enough, he brought a PlayStation. The best therapy I had for my mind or body was sitting and playing Call of Duty with him, like everything was normal in those moments. Like my universe hadn’t imploded and turned into a massive black hole.
He kept coming when I made it home, every day, without fail. He saved me from myself in those days.
Gretchen came to my parents’ house a week after I was released, looking awkward and ashamed. She couldn’t do it, she’d said. She hadn’t signed up for this, for the stress of it all. At the time, I was crushed, the salt in the gaping wound, an underscore of all I’d lost. Looking back, I wasn’t surprised. Deep down I’d known that Gretchen wasn’t in it for me. She was in it for her, and when I didn’t suit her anymore, she left. If she’d loved me, she would have stayed. It was that simple. Didn’t make it hurt any less, though.