Cookie's Corner: A surreal experience in Santa Caterina

Cookie’s Corner: A surreal experience in Santa CaterinaI have to apologize for the time it has taken to get this next article to you guys, but as you probably heard, I have been on a temporary ban from doing anything. I can tell you that this will be worth the wait though because I have quite a story to tell. It was reported last week that I crashed in the downhill in Santa Caterina, Italy, and was taken to the hospital for observation. Sorry if I scared anybody, but I am fine and will back on the slopes as soon as I can.

I would like to give you the full story of my time in Santa Caterina, but that is not going to happen at this point because I cannot remember much of the time before and the day of crashing. I hit my head pretty hard and had a little problem with short-term memory for a period of time. The exciting part of the story is not the crash, but the time immediately following it and the following days.

From what I heard (because I obviously do not remember) I was having a fairly decent run down the world championship track until the last difficult turn on the course. This turn was a right-footed, two-gate corridor with small bumps at both gates and a bit of compression in the middle. As I passed the first gate I got knocked off balance and when I hit the compression in a bad position it did not hesitate to eat me up and spit me straight into the fence. The fence was about 20 feet away from the track, and I hit it at full speed and going headfirst. A coach that was in the area said that after coming to a stop I slowly got up to my feet and looked like I was fine, before I feel back over.

No one really knows if I passed out during this time, and one coach told me that from the time he got to my side to when they loaded me in the ambulance, I was asking over and over again how my teammates did. I guess that is how they immediately knew that I had hit my head hard. I am pretty sure that it would have been pretty comical to be by my side at that point

The first memory I have of that day was a brief moment in the ambulance when I was trying to talk to the nurse, and she had no idea what I was saying, so I thought, ‘Hey, Italian and Spanish are similar right?’ …Judging by the look she gave me, apparently they are not. I remember laughing and being all (or at least mostly) smiles in the ride down to the hospital. The ski team doctor that was accompanying me could have made a really dumb joke and I probably would have laughed. The whole ordeal may have been really scary given I could not talk to anybody and they could not talk to me, but having a team doctor there made the situation much more relaxing.

My next memory was in the waiting room where I met a man who had broke his wrist. He might have been the only man in Northern Italy that spoke English! I don’t remember anything that we talked about, but when I left the waiting room, I had one more e-mail address than when I had entered. I am just joking he was really old, but was so nice to me I will not forget him.

From that point I just remember being taken from room to room. I may have visited every room with big machine in it in the whole hospital. They were testing for everything. The last room that I was in before I finally went to my room for the night was a casting room. I realize that the practice of medicine in America is the best in the world, but I seriously would not have guessed that the casting practices could be so far behind in some regions of the world; diagnosed with a grade 1 MCL sprain (really not that bad, people have skied on a grade 2 before), it was decided that my injury warranted a full-leg plaster cast. I am not joking. That thing may have been 10 pounds and literally went from the top of my leg to my ankle.

They took me to the room where I would stay for the night. I was alone in this room. But not five minutes after arriving, and thinking I could finally go to sleep, a very sharp and very loud noise started right outside my room. Having the head injury that I did, the noise seemed twice as loud as it probably really was. I tried to plug my ears. Since I wasn’t totally with it yet, I assumed the noise was a fire alarm hat other noise would be that awful in a hospital? I was thinking, ‘What luck I have, first time in a hospital and there is a fire!.’ As I am waiting for the nurse to come and rescue me and my 10-pound cast from my bed, the noise suddenly stops. ‘Thank goodness,’ I thought, ‘I think I will try and get some rest now.

As I was nearing that long-awaited place again, the beeping sound brought me back to wakefulness. They have some issues here that they need to sort out with the fire alarms, I thought. After 30 seconds of the anguishing noise, it stopped once again. I was so mad. I was not as tired anymore. And I realized that I wasn’t lying down anymore: The bed was in a sitting-up position. I thought I would become tired again if I were to lie down, so I looked around for the button to lower the upper part of the bed. . To my surprise there were no railings on the side of the bed. I checked the other side to see if there was a railing over there. Nope, no railing. Thoroughly confused at this point, I wondered where on earth could the button to lower the bed be if it is not on the railing. I looked around and couldn’t see it anywhere. Wanting so badly to just lie down, I decided my best bet was just calling the nurse to ask for help. I pushed the button with the cute little picture of the nurse’s hat. Guess what? For the third time in five minutes, the fire alarm went off.

After the nurse came into my room and pushed a hidden button (finally I made the connection that the fire alarm was really the nurse pager). I felt ready for some sleep. The nurse had cranked my old-school bed headrest down by hand, and being so proud I was able to figure out that there was really no fire, I was once again ready for bed. Oh no, not going to bed yet. From the time I was in the hospital to this point, they had been pushing so much water into me by i.v. that it was going to take four trips to the bathroom before I could finally settle down for the night.

After having a good night’s rest (besides being rudely awakened every hour for monitoring) it was morning-time and I was feeling great. The nurses came in and opened the curtain to a wonderful bluebird day. The first thing that I did of course is go to the bathroom. I was allowed to stand up out of my wheel chair to wash up and see my face in the mirror for the first time sense the crash. Every skier has scraped up their face, probably multiple times, but I made this time count. The left side of my face was so swollen that I have motivation for the rest of my life to stay in shape (we’ll just say the chubby cheeks and swollen nose look was not for me). After laughing and crying at the same time about my new look, I had the nurse help me back to my room.

Let me remind you that I was feeling great that morning. I felt I could have raced if my leg was not in a cast. For the most part, I thought I was almost back to normal. After trying multiple times to ask for some food, I finally got my point across and was served a wonderful meal of two packets of small dry toast, . Not joking about this either: They might as well have been two packs of saltines (at least those taste good). Convinced that this was just a starter, I patiently waited for my breakfast to come. I waited a good five hours until a meal that very closely resembled a lunch came.

That morning, while I ugly and starving,, I also realized that I was being kept in the psycho ward. Yeah, they thought I was mad. (I was later informed that the ‘psycho ward’ I was being kept in was really just the neurological unit, and I had some really good timing with making it in there with other people who were slightly more crazy then
me).

After realizing that I would be ugly for at least the next five days, that I was not going to get any food, and that being sad or mad about the situation was not going to help, I made a pact with myself. I was going to do everything that I could to be back on snow as soon as possible. . My new slogan was ‘If you can’t beat them join them.’ So I maneuvered my way out into the hallway in my wheel chair and decided that before I left that place I was going to become a skilled wheelman. I had races up and down the hallway, and beat my own record time at least ten times. Then I attempted wheelies before I decided that the possibility of going over the back and hitting my head again may require me to stay in this place longer, so I gave that up.

At around five that night, the doctor and two coaches came to my rescue. While the hospital really wanted to keep me an extra night (possibly because of my behavior in the hallway) I convinced the doctor that I was fine, but wouldn’t be if I had to stay there. He was able to sign me out and I got to return to the hotel and be with my teammates once again.

It was so nice to be back with my teammates. And that night the trainer allowed me to cut my cast off. What a relief. The next day I woke up too late to eat the breakfast at the hotel, but right on time to go watch the first run of the GS race on television. After lunch and a quick nap, I went and watched the second run on tv, but hardly made it through as I was starting to feel some nausea. . They had warned me that I might feel this way, so I didn’t think much of it. I went to lie down again. I was in bed all afternoon, did not eat dinner, and started throwing up that evening. It was our trainer’s immediate reaction to take me back to the hospital, but I convinced her to let me stay that night, and take me back if I were still throwing up in the morning.

Of course, in the morning I was still throwing up, so with a bag by my side we went back down to the hospital. After a hundred more tests, they determined that my brain was still fine but that I needed to stay the night. Miserably, I agreed and was taken to my room, this time in the medical unit. It doubled as the old persons’ home (at least it appeared that way). This time I had a roommate, and nice old lady who of course spoke no English. We did not even try to talk at all, and I just went to sleep to try to make the time pass. That afternoon they pumped six liters of fluid into me intraveneously. I was extremely dehydrated, which may have caused some of the nausea.

That pretty much ends the exciting part of the story except for my adventure at the airport. I wasn’t able to carry all of my bags to the counter, so I carried them one at a time. I left the others where they were, and someone called the cops on them. Then my flight to Denver was delayed past the point of making my connection in Denver to Reno. I was threatened with the thought of having to spend the night in the Denver airport before I found an alternate flight home that landed in Sacramento.

12 days after the crash, I am doing much better, really, and am starting to be able to move like a normal human. I am hoping to be back on snow in about another two weeks to be ready to race in the NorAm super G in Apex, Canada, and then in Big Mountain. I will keep you updated on my condition, but please don’t worry, or feel sorry at all. I am going to be fine, and am not really missing that many races that are important to me this year. I hope everyone out west is enjoying the huge snow pack, and that everyone out east will finally get some snow!

Talk to you soon

Stacey