3/6/10 5:00 PM - Bike Meets Truck

A week ago yesterday, we got the call every parent dreads... an unfamiliar voice, asking "are you Katharine Wencel's mother?" When I responded that I was, the gentleman said, "well, she's been hit out here on East 21st Street, about a mile and a half west of Santa Fe Lake Road." I asked if she was okay, and he said she was pretty banged up and seemed to be having some trouble breathing but that it appeared to him that she would be okay. I asked if she was conscious, and she was. In fact, I later found out that she had given him our phone number.

Mark was upstairs painting our closets and I ran up to tell him. We were both amazingly calm, though we were also both very quiet on the ride to the accident site. When we began to see flashing lights in the distance, my stomach got a little tingly, but calm still prevailed. We pulled up to the south side of the road and were approached by a Butler County sheriff's officer, who asked if we were the parents. I saw Katharine's bike lying on the north side of the road, maybe 20 feet up the bank. It was misshapen, which was a bit heart-wrenching, but not mangled.

The officer said the ambulance had just pulled away moments ago and he also reassured us that she was very likely going to be okay. She appeared to have some broken bones but her lucidity was reassuring. Her helmet had done its job. He didn't appear to feel that we needed to rush immediately away to meet her at the hospital, which was also reassuring. He answered a few of our questions, including how it happened (the driver who was approaching her from behind hadn't seen her until the last second, and appears to have tried to swerve in time to clip her on the left side of her body, throwing her to the right, about 10-15' off the road). He asked a few questions of his own, then we turned around to head back in to Wesley, and as we did, I noticed another officer talking with a gentleman standing by a brown pickup truck and realized that was the truck and that was the guy. My heart went out to him, thinking how shaken he must be, and if I'd noticed him sooner I think we may have approached him and given him some reassurance that although he obviously made a mistake, we did not bear malice toward him. I still don't feel any anger at him, interestingly enough. A week has gone by and we are intensely aware that the accident was the catalyst for many more graces and blessings for us that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

When we arrived at Wesley, Katharine was in the trauma bay, the first set of x-rays had already come back and her left leg was being put in a cast. She was crying and apologizing (?) but she was wide awake and could talk. Her hair was full of dirt and grass and her body was covered with dirt, but that was of pretty much no concern at the moment - the staff just needed to figure out what was damaged and get busy fixing it. More x-rays arrived and were displayed on the screen and I watched as a radiologist went carefully over all of them; he paused over a couple of spots in the one of the spine but after clicking an image, he moved on. He never appeared to be alarmed, which made me breathe a little easier.

Since it had been determined by that time that Katharine's right hip was broken, her left arm was put in a splint rather than a cast. There was a good chance that arm would need surgery to provide support as soon as possible for the left leg and right hip as they healed; a wheelchair, walker and then crutches all depended on two functioning arms.

Friends arrived at the emergency room soon after we arrived and their presence was enormously calming and reassuring. They didn't need to say much (which I noted for future reference), but their presence was huge.

Eventually Katharine was rolled out and taken to 420 on 4 Tower and hooked up to oxygen, a Foley catheter and IV meds. She was in an enormous amount of pain but the staff began right away trying to get it under control. They brought in a chair for me that pulled out (flat!!) into a small bed and we settled in for the adventure ahead, whatever it was going to be. I had an overwhelming sense of thankfulness that everything appeared to be fixable at this point, and that God, who has been faithful through Katharine's many challenges to this point, was going to continue to provide strength, courage and comfort in exactly the amounts needed.