Dr. Alison Delgado: Taylor’s presence may have delayed my transfer, but the University emergency department was prepped and waiting for me. Radiology was on hold, surgery and neurosurgery were there waiting. Everyone was in the trauma bay.
Dr. Taylor Delgado: My younger sister was a social worker in that emergency department, and she was on shift. She and my residency director went to CT with Ali. As the images from Ali’s CT scan showed up on the screens, everyone in the room gasped. She had a nonsurvivable head injury.
The AirCare 2 doctor collapsed into our director’s arms and cried: “She’s going to die tonight.” He responded: “I know. But we’ve got work to do.” Then he asked my sister how close she was with me. She told him we were extremely close. “Good, because we have to break the news that she’s going to die tonight.”
But the doctor never told me. I was in the consultation room. He came in and told me that she had a lot of bleeding around the brain, but he couldn’t find the words to tell me the true severity. He didn’t have to.
Dr. Alison Delgado: I was in a coma for 5 days. Shift by shift, they were amazed that I was still there. I had a broken jaw, broken vertebrae in my spine, a broken clavicle and sternum and contusions to my heart and lungs. I was later found to have a dissection of my carotid artery as well as an aneurysm to the carotid artery. These were both caused by the accident.
My jaw was wired shut and a tracheostomy was placed. They coiled the aneurysm and put a stent in the dissection. I was placed on dual antiplatelet therapy to prevent stent thrombosis.
When I initially woke from the coma during my hospital stay, I could not speak, but I remember being told why I was there. My first two thoughts were: Was it my fault? and I need to get back to work.
Two and a half weeks later, I was stable enough to go to an in-patient rehab facility.
I was very motivated. I made a lot of good progress, because Taylor was there with me. We looked through pictures, trying to jog my memory and help with my vocabulary. I’d look at a bird and know this is a flying animal but couldn’t think of the word bird. I couldn’t remember my mom’s name.
Dr. Taylor Delgado: She was becoming more fluent with her speech each day. Her right arm was working more normally. We started going on walks outside. Within 14 days she was discharged home.
When we left the rehab facility, I took a couple extra tracheostomy tubes and supplies, because I didn’t know how long Ali would have her trach. The emergency medicine person in me just thought, always have these things on hand.
A few days later, her ENT doctor decannulated her tracheostomy tube. In our minds, we were done.
The next night, she had the intracranial hemorrhage.