written by my cousin,
On Wednesday, June 25th, 2003, Nicola and her boyfriend Bobby were in a terrible car accident. For those of you who don't know, Nic has been in Albuquerque, NM for the past 13 weeks as a travel nurse. Her assignment had just finished, and they were making their drive back home.

2 hours into their drive (9:15pm), a deer jumped out onto the highway. Bobby, who was driving at the time, swerved to the right to avoid this deer, but realized that he had swerved too much and swerved back left. Well the car flipped several times, and was dragged for quite a while on the passenger side, and eventually ended up on it's roof. Bobby immediately got out of the car and yelled for Nic to get out. However, Nic was unconscious with the seatbelt hanging across her neck and bleeding very badly from the top of her head. Bobby flagged down the next available car, which happened to contain a nurse and a firefighter. The firefighter called 911 and went against their orders to keep her in the car and removed her with the help of others. Nic was then airlifted to a hospital in Santa Fe, where we have been, and still are, ever since we received that devastating phone call.

She had a 12-inch laceration on the top of her head, where she lost 2 pints of blood. She arrived at the hospital in a coma, and amazingly, she came out of the coma in just under 24 hours. Her skull is fractured, as are two of her vertebrae (C4 and C5 for those of you who know where that is). Her right wrist is broken into several pieces, and her forearm is also broken near her elbow. These injuries will heal completely over time.

A person has two main arteries on either side of their neck. These arteries are the main blood supply to the brain. Nicola s right hand side artery was pinched/crushed shut. This, unfortunately, has led her to have a total of six strokes. Five of those were outside the skull, one of them was in her cerebellum (the Central Processing Unit of your brain). This artery also branches off and supplies blood to a section of the spine. Therefore, approx. 1 inch of her spine is not receiving blood. This has caused some paralysis, however, the doctors won t indicate if it would be temporary or permanent paralysis.

Four days later, Sunday June 29th, was the worst day of our lives. Nic was consistently having strokes with no signs of them subsiding. The neurosurgeon said that if an MRI came back indicating these strokes to be progressing, Nic would only have one or two days left to live. We had to wait for an hour to get those results, and let me tell you, it was the longest hour I've ever been a part of. The entire family broke down; the tears were flowing like rivers! Luckily the results showed that they were levelling off....and her chances of survival would be on a day-to-day basis

The doc then said that he was going to put her back on the ventilator, and for us to just go home and rest. Well, not 5 minutes later we were in the waiting room gathering our belongings, when this same doctor ran out to us and said, "You might want to stick around, she s not responding well to the intubation". I don't think I took another breath after those words. The doc resurfaced 5 minutes later and told us she was okay......her heart rate and oxygen had dropped pretty badly, they feared losing her.

A few days of being somewhat stable, with no setbacks followed. Nic received a tracheotomy and a tube in her stomach, which they call a "peg", to feed her. She hadn t moved any of her limbs for about 10 days, and on Sunday, July 6th, she miraculously started moving her legs and arms voluntarily!!! She is also trying so hard to talk. She can mouth words pretty good, although it is hard to understand everything. She gets pretty confused at times...like moving her leg when asked to move her arm.

It seems that as she overcomes all these battles, she is forced to face more. She is running a fever that gets as high as 103, she has 3 different bacteria s that have surfaced from 3 different places. These can cause some serious problems if not slowed down/stopped. We are now waiting for Nic to become mentally stable before we can air ambulance her home. We're hoping it will be towards the end of this week.

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