Daily Excerpt: One Simple Text (Shaw & Brown) - Getting to Elizabeth

 

Excerpt from One Simple Text: The Liz Marks Story (Shaw & Brown)

GETTING TO ELIZABETH

I careened around Elizabeth’s room, looking for something, anything, that felt like her that I could hold onto. Then, I saw it: her pillow—her favorite, the one she slept on every night, the one with the pizza stains, blotches of makeup, and the fruity scent of her perfume. I clutched that pillow to my chest for the whole ride to Shock Trauma. The drive had taken more than an hour, a span that people tend to think must have felt like an eternity. But it didn’t. I wanted that drive to last forever. I feared that once we arrived at Shock Trauma, they would tell us Elizabeth was dead. As long as the car rolled along the road, Elizabeth was alive.

Paramedics had flown Elizabeth in a medevac helicopter from a cleared crop field a half-mile from the accident scene to the roof of the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, part of the University of Maryland Medical Center—Shock Trauma for short. There, she’d been rushed to the emergency room. The center had been named for Dr. Cowley, “the father of trauma medicine” and the man who coined the term “golden hour” believing it critical for a patient who had sustained a brain injury to receive medical treatment within an hour lest the injury be fatal.

            I grabbed the first clothing I saw and the Bible that I’ve had since I was a little girl and that holds a few strands of my father’s grey hair. By the grace of God, Frank had been working just a few miles away on a contracting job when I called and told him the news. He appeared at our door within five minutes.

           

            My husband drove. As we made our first turn out of our neighborhood, I heard words being spoken to me from inside my body: “She will be okay; it is happening for a reason.” I felt them again, “She will be okay; it is happening for a reason.” I turned to Frank, who was sitting in the back seat and held out my hand. He took it. Together, we cried.

We had nearly reached the hospital when my cell phone rang with the number of Shock Trauma.

“Are you Elizabeth Marks’s mother?”

“Yes!”

“This is Doctor Sutcliffe. We have your daughter here at Shock Trauma,” he said. “Does your daughter have any medical conditions that could affect her treatment?”

“No, none.” Then I screamed into the phone, “You have my consent to do whatever it takes to save my daughter’s life!”  

“I’ll do the best I can. How far away are you?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Hurry,” he said.

 

When we reached Shock Trauma, Jim dropped Frank and me off at the main entrance of the hospital not at the rather distant Shock Trauma Building of the University of Maryland Medical Center.  Dodging people, we sprinted straight to the front desk. Though a crowd of people had gathered in line waiting to be helped, the woman behind the desk must have seen the fear in my eyes because she stopped talking to the person in front of her and asked us, “Who are you here for?” 

She got on her computer, then picked up the phone, and after a few moments told us that someone was coming. I saw a young woman with a hospital badge draped around her neck running toward us.

“Are you Elizabeth Marks’s parents?”

“Yes!”

“Follow me.”

We ran through the hospital, weaving left and right around circles of people until we came to an elevator. When the doors closed, she inserted a key into the floor button panel and pushed 4. The sound when we stepped out of the elevator deafened me. I turned to my left and saw a thick team of doctors and nurses working on someone lying on a bed. It was not until our escort pointed it out that I realized the person at the center of all this noise and emergency labor was Elizabeth. 

I stood stock still outside the action, watching doctors and nurses lean over the bed, then rush back to get something only to return to the bed again. I heard them yelling commands to each other and unwrapping equipment from paper casings. Jim appeared by my side, and the three of us, Jim, Frank, and I, just stood there in shock. Jim started sobbing. Then, Frank did, too, his shoulders slumped like a man defeated. But no tears came for me. I just stood there, stoic. 

At that point, Dr. Sutcliffe took me aside, telling me, “Elizabeth is holding her own.”

I couldn’t believe it—she was not dead yet! I had made it! I would have the chance to say goodbye before she died!

The words Dr. Sutcliffe said next have etched themselves indelibly into my memory: “Mrs. Shaw, on a scale of one to four, four being the worst, we are grading your daughter over three.”

Over three!! I didn’t care how bad she was, I would take her in any condition. Just keep her alive! God, you already took Julie from me, I begged, please don’t take Elizabeth, too.

“She’s going to need emergency surgery,” Dr. Sutcliffe continued. “Many procedures.”

 

 I pushed through the many white-coated and blue-uniformed bodies. I went right up to her face, which had sustained visually obvious damage, but nothing stopped me, her mother after all, from speaking to that face, to my beloved daughter.

“Don’t leave Earth,” I whispered to her, the words bursting from my very soul. “Stay here with Daddy and me. You are the joy of my life. I love you.”

Not allowed to touch Elizabeth because of the need to keep everything sterile, I folded my hands in prayer and got as close to Elizabeth as possible. I repeated those words over and over and over. “Stay with us…please…I love you.” No tears ran down my face. All my emotions had frozen in shock, desperation, fear, and primal love. Outward calm belied inner turmoil, inexpressible in its depth.

After too short a time, Dr. Sutcliffe firmly grasped my arm and maneuvered me into a quiet space to update Frank, Jim, and me on Elizabeth’s condition and his plan of action. The plan included a quick CT scan. That scan would dictate the next steps to be taken. Then, Dr. Sutcliffe and two blue-uniformed interns rolled Elizabeth out of the room.

 

The three of us—Frank, Jim, and I—had been standing together, alone, not talking, not knowing what to say, outside the cubicle that had housed Elizabeth for barely three minutes when the interns brought the gurney with my daughter back. Dr. Sutcliffe followed right behind them—with frightening news. “No time to wait,” he stated curtly. “We need to operate right now.”

 After Frank and I had quickly signed surgical consent papers, Dr. Sutcliffe advised us,

“The operation will take 4-5 hours. If your daughter survives, you can see her after that.”

I remember watching someone shave Elizabeth’s long, beautiful, blonde tresses, of which she was very proud, in preparation for surgery.  How strange it felt to see the bundles of blonde fall to the floor.  I ran up to the intern shaving Elizabeth’s head. “Can I have some of her hair?” I asked.

 “We will get you clean hair later,” he said, annoyed. “This hair has blood on it.” 

 “No, I want her hair now!”  I screamed back.

He turned to look at a nurse who was standing near him, and I heard her say, “Goddam it, give her some of her daughter’s hair!”  She understood what I was asking for—a piece of Elizabeth while she was still alive.

Then, they took her away. We said our goodbyes quickly, and Dr. Sutcliffe and the group of people keeping Elizabeth alive wheeled her away. One of them pushed a button on the wall, opening the double doors, and Frank, Jim, and I watched as the doors closed.

Right at that point, a chaplain approached me. I was crying now but able to talk.

“Why are you here?” I asked him. Looking surprised, he told me that he’d received a call that his services might be needed. We stood in the space where Elizabeth had just had her hair shorn, and I asked him if we could pray. I bowed my head. As he was saying a prayer for our daughter, my mind flooded with questions about the significance of Dr. Sutcliffe’s “over three” rating. Will Elizabeth be a vegetable? Will she know who I am? Is it fair to keep her alive just for me?

When I opened my eyes, I saw drops of Elizabeth’s blood on the floor. Then, I looked over and saw the trash can with my daughter’s once beautiful long blonde hair hanging out of it.

After my brief talk with the chaplain, Jim and Frank thanked him for his prayer for Elizabeth, as did I. Just then, an aide showed up to direct the three of us to a waiting room just outside the trauma area. I looked down at my right hand. I had not realized that I’d been clenching it tightly—and now it started to hurt. I slowly stretched my fingers to ease the tension. As my fingers started to relax, my eyes focused on what I had been so passionately holding: safely secured in the palm of my hand were the strands of Elizabeth’s hair. I opened my Bible, which I had jammed into my purse, and put Elizabeth’s hair in the Ziploc bag with my father’s treasured hair that I had laid inside that Bible so many months ago. Then, I rubbed the hairs together so they might intertwine. —hairs of the most loved people in my life. I silently and desperately prayed to my dad to please save his granddaughter.

“Don’t let God take her away,” I pleaded.

KOPS-FETHERLING INTERNATIONAL AWARDS
LEGACY AWARD WINNER IN THE CATEGORY OF
INSPIRATION/MOTIVATION. 

Read more posts about Betty, Sdave, and their book HERE.

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