Photo Credit: Mr. Suphachai Praserdumrongchai

In this medical fiction tale, after surviving a car crash and defying medical odds, Shannon confronts betrayal and ultimately triumphs over a reckless partner.

This medical fiction tale is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies that appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. The technical details surrounding the event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are, therefore, entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish.

Shannon met Gram at a tattoo parlor. He was there for a Harley tattoo, she was there for a stud, and they had teased each other. The teasing led to going for a beer and ended with breakfast in bed. They had seen each other on and off for months before it led to sharing an apartment—hers had flooded because of a rat gnawing through a water pipe in the kitchen. They shared some beliefs and values; they both liked watching drag racing, they both liked weed, and they both cussed like sailors. He was kind to animals and thought most politicians were full of it. She did too. She craved speed, experiences, and the warm glow of tequila after a gulp of beer. He did too.

They differed on almost everything else, though, and while that started as sparks, it eventually drifted to the ground and landed there as despair. As they wore down the sparking bits, they rubbed each other’s souls raw. Friday nights out became less about sparks and more about her wanting to go home sooner than him, him wanting to drive drunk when she said he’d had too much, and her rolling her eyes when he told one of his favorite jokes. He started getting frisky when she was getting irritable and wanted to party when she desired sleep. It was one of those arguments that started with him yelling that he was plenty sober enough to drive the truck and her ending up in the pages of a medical journal.

Drunk Driving Disaster

She could never remember the actual event: the moment when Gram misjudged his speed, the rate of closure, and the path of impact with the back of an eighteen-wheeler lugging logs. He swerved in the last few moments, enough to take the driver’s seat out of a direct path and leave Shannon’s side to take a direct hit. She had slid down and out of her seat as the truck reared, and her head hit the crumpling dashboard. From thirteen minutes before impact until being fed into the eye of an MRI machine, her memory was a series of disembodied video clips. There were faces, the smell of burned rubber and brake fluid, the taste of blood, the sensation of just a head floating along. She didn’t remember the cutters shearing off the roof posts or hear the low whistle of the paramedic, him saying, “Jesus, look at her neck!” She was not mentally present when the EMTs rigged stabilizers around her neck so they could slide her body out without changing the position of her head.

She had a snippet of memory of being cold, neon lights flashing past her, and people beside her towering in the distance. She was unresponsive and unaware as the emergency medicine crew connected oxygen to her plastic airway, cut the rest of her clothing off, and set about inventorying her injuries. She woke up as the roof of the MRI tunnel passed over her head; she asked out loud if she was home yet, and if there was any custard. The radiologist and technician talked to her, but Shannon was not yet processing the fact that she had been in a serious car crash and was in the hospital.

Diagnosis: Decapitation

By the time the neurosurgeon had arrived, studied the scans, and phoned three colleagues for advice, Shannon was cleaned up, awake, and in a hospital bed with a mirror positioned over her head. He went through the “easy” parts first: her head injury, the spine damage, and her unknown prognosis. It was easy, but not very rosy. Then he tackled the difficult bit. She shouldn’t be alive, nobody had ever heard of anybody with her injuries surviving for long, and in medical literature, there were very few cases documented with long-term survival. Shannon was already one of the 1% of 1% to be alive after having suffered an internal decapitation. Her spine, he explained, trying to demonstrate by clasping his left thumb in his right fist, had been severed just below the point at which it entered her skull. Now, he continued, her spinal column was dislocated from her skull, and this was almost always immediately fatal.

In the following days, her skull was attached to a steel frame with screws, her bed was tilted so she could see people, and she was pored over by a multitude of medical specialists. She also started to receive visitors.

Reckless & Feckless

Gram arrived with an entourage of his friends in tow, and—other than a slight limp from a bruised heel and two stitches from where the airbag had slapped him in the face with his wristwatch—Gram was in rude good health. His friends bragged about Gram having the luck of the devil, about how amazingly few injuries he had, and about how badly wrecked the passenger side of the truck was. They had brought her flowers stolen from a graveyard, a bottle of Fireball (which they drank), a tray of dried fruit and chocolates (which they ate), and a small bag of weed, which two of them snuck out and smoked. The sneaky smoking resulted in a loud argument amongst the group when the two returned, smelling strong and stoned. It was at this point that the nurse arrived in response to several call buttons pressed by patients to report them and promptly ordered the group out. Gram stayed a short while after his friends had left in order to explain to Shannon that since she was likely to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life and probably needed help going to the bathroom and bathing, they should probably break up and go their separate ways.

Shannon had been reaching cautiously for the call button to summon the nurse and have Gram kicked out, but her hand found a surgical screwdriver instead. It had been left by the technician who intended to return to further adjust her steel cage. The tool had good balance, a professional-grade sterilizable rubber grip, and a stainless-steel shaft and hardened tip. She grasped it in her right hand, slipped it under the blanket, and slowly moved her fist until it was just past her left shoulder. Gram didn’t even have the decency, she thought, to look her straight in the face and tell her flat-out that she was no longer worth his attention. He was droning on about how he—he—was the injured party here. Sitting on the side of her bed, staring out of the window, he lamented how his truck was a write-off, he was probably not going to get an insurance check because the cops had found her open beer bottle in the cab, and he was facing a drunk driving charge which would cost him further money. It was when he said Shannon would owe him cash to care for her cat while she was lounging about in the hospital that her arm acted up. She grunted in pain as her arm lashed out in a backhand and jolted her as it came to a sudden stop. She passed out, and her arm and Gram both slid quietly off the side of the bed.

Case Closed

Several minutes later, when the nurse came by to roust straggling visitors and ready patients for their evening medications, she discovered Gram in a heap beside Shannon’s bed. At first, she thought this was another drunken stunt, but with a screwdriver embedded deeply in the base of his skull, it was clear that this was a police matter. Gram was one of the 99% for whom a spinal injury at the first vertebra is immediately fatal. Shannon woke up long enough to receive her evening sedative, have her drips checked, and get her vitals taken. The police arrived while she was asleep and collected relevant information, like the existence of rowdy visitors before Gram died. They further discovered that there had been drinking by the visitors, illicit drug use, and a loud argument between Gram and Shannon. Security camera footage from the hospital entrance and parking lot verified much of this, as did the other patients and staff in the unit.

Two weeks later, Shannon left the hospital on her own two feet. This made her an even rarer case and was reported in a medical journal as one of the one percent of the one percent of the one percent of people who sustain such a spinal injury, survive the immediate effect, survive long enough to leave the hospital, and then survive to stand up and walk. She called an Uber, fetched her cat, and got a tattoo of a phoenix rising.

Gram’s murderer was never found. Police suspected two of his friends, but they died in a car crash the following month while trying to escape arrest. The case was closed and never questioned again.

Watch for “Shannon, Part 2,” in which Shannon’s dark tale is told from the viewpoint of the emergency medicine physician who receives and stabilizes Shannon and then sticks with her until her release.