Mike’s Story: Taking it One Day at a Time After Accident

Mike’s wife:  I don’t know what’s next.  We take it day by day.  There’s a song that we’ve kind of started living by its quote, “I don’t buy green bananas,” because I don’t – I can’t think of the lyrics right now.  But that’s kind of been our mantra.

I [indiscernible 0:00:30] work around 7:00 AM Tuesday morning.  And I went downstairs to do laundry, left my phone upstairs and I missed phone calls for probably a half an hour.  My brother-in-law who lives around the corner from me came over and said Mike was in an accident.  You need to get to the hospital.

When I got to the hospital that day and I saw that his acuity level was a one - that set the tone.

Physician:  When I met him in the trauma bay, he could not tell me what had happened.  You know, he just couldn’t remember.  He was alive and talking but, you know, yes, I knew that just a shock of trauma or head injury.  Those are my first suspicions.

Mike’s wife:  There was a flood of people just came in, the one nurse, her name was Julie.  That’s one of them that I remember.  She let me say a few things to him and we had to go out to the waiting room for a while and they brought me back in by myself and she brought me over to his bed and told me to talk to him.  They were just doing a lot of different things and she explained to me what – because his chest was just very abnormal breathing.  He was not awake like he was downstairs.  And she was telling me that they were going to do an epidural, I believe, to kind of ease his breathing, but then things turned really bad.  And they had to vent him and they let me in but they brought my kids in and –

Physician:  He had severe injuries to his chest wall he had a gross chest wall deformity.  So his injuries were complicated by the fact that not only did he have bleeding but his ribs were fractured in so many sites and his chest wall so distorted that he had ribs that had gone into essentially his lung parenchyma, his lung tissue.

Mike’s wife:  We waited and waited and it was about a five-hour surgery I think.  And he came out and told us that things went about as well as could be expected and that only time would tell.

Physician:  His brain injury was discovered on CAT scan.  I mean, we had a suspicion for it because he could not remember exactly.  He was talking but he could not – he was very repetitive.  And he could not remember and tell us what had happened.

Mike’s wife:  He had two brain bleeds that they told us about then and then subsequently since he’s been going to the neurologists, we found out about another injury to his brain.  So I don’t know if it’s the bleed or what but, I mean, his memory is affected.  He’s having seizures now and that’s – it’s just going to be something we have to live with.

Physician: It’s too disappointing that people get injured and we cannot, you know, bring them back to normal – they are not back to normal activity.  You know, that’s how I look at it.  I mean, I would like to – people going back to be who they were and, you know, in a positive way.

Mike Cornwell: Before I was allowed to leave, I had to be able to walk on my own under a controlled – you know, I could hold on to a wall or we live in a bi-level house.  So they told me I had to learn to go up and down the stairs.  So I – with Angela’s help, my therapist, I was able to do two to three flights of stairs before I could leave.  I had to prove to the occupational therapy that I could fix myself something to eat if I had to.  I had to be able to step in and out of the bathtub because we have a regular bathtub shower at home.  I had to show that I could get in and out of the shower.  I had to go home with a shower chair, a high-rise extension for the toilet, medicine and the will to get better.

Mike’s wife:  Since he walked out of the hospital, we’ve been back here a lot.  He’s had appointments.  The first few months, he had probably four appointments a week.  He doesn’t have a driver’s license because of the seizures from the brain injury so I am driving him everywhere can’t be left alone because the brain injury and vestibular issues.  He falls a lot.  The memory is a big part of – he doesn’t remember the day we were married.  

Life is a blessing.  Every day is a blessing.  We were high school sweethearts.  We’ll be married 30 years in September. The fact that I get to wake up with him every day is a blessing.

Mike Cornwell:  I get to see my grandson every day.  We have another grandbaby due in December.  You know, I’ll be here to see him or her.  I’ll get to watch them, you know, grow up in life.

Mike’s wife:  We see the commercials on TV about Miami Valley.  I don’t know how much people pay attention to it but it truly, truly is – it’s an awesome care center and I think that had he went anywhere else that he wouldn’t be sitting here.

Physician:  The fact of the matter is the privilege to save someone’s life.  You know, we went into medical school.  We went into our professions to help people and sometimes we forget about that privilege.  And so, I would say the rewards for physicians are usually having an opportunity to benefit someone be it saving their life, making them better and at the same time the worse feeling is when they don’t do better, when they don’t have those kind of outcomes.

So – and those were the things we probably remember more so but I think it’s an opportunity, it’s a privilege and I think it’s wonderful to know you can – you have the skills and the opportunity to do that, but also it’s not usually just the individuals.  It’s the team, so I didn’t save his life.  I had the opportunity to participate in saving his life.