Article on Women's Rowing -- Long, But Very Moving
Oct 8, 2021 10:05:34 GMT -5
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Post by breezy on Oct 8, 2021 10:05:34 GMT -5
A winner never quits: Holy Cross rower rebounds from brain injury in 2020 crash
Stu Wilson | Special to the Telegram & Gazette
At 7:26 a.m. Jan. 15, 2020, in Vero Beach, Florida, a silver passenger van carrying half of the Holy Cross women’s rowing team to a training session attempted to make a left-hand turn and was immediately T-boned by an oncoming truck. The van carrying the head coach and 11 teammates was thrown 60 feet.
Sophomore Grace Rett of Uxbridge, seated shotgun in honor of her 20th birthday the day before, was killed. Several other teammates were injured, including Marion 19-year-old Hannah Strom, who was sitting in the middle of the second row.
In addition to several physical injuries, Strom sustained a traumatic brain injury in the crash. While milder forms of TBIs, such as concussions, are relatively common, moderate to severe cases can cause “prolonged or permanent changes in a person’s state of consciousness, awareness or responsiveness,” according to the Mayo Clinic. The process of recovery is arduous and uncertain.
For Strom it was the beginning of a year-and-a-half ordeal she endured with help from a loving family, devoted professionals, a supportive hometown and her own resilience. With help and hope, she has gotten her life back, returning to her studies at Holy Cross full time this fall, ready to get back in the boat.
In addition to the traumatic brain injury, Strom suffered a broken femur, a collapsed lung and a fractured pelvis. She spent weeks in a coma at a hospital in Florida before being medically evacuated to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
In February, while still in a coma, she was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital where specialists began trying to stimulate her brain. Her liminal state was a "hell," she later said, and she wondered "why everyone else could hear and walk, and I couldn’t.”
Hannah left the rehabilitation hospital in June and returned home with a police escort through town. Her speech began to improve, and after beginning to comprehend what she had been through, recovery accelerated with a walker and a ramp.
This seemed an unlikely outcome in January 2020. Vero Beach Police Officer David Farquharson arrived within minutes of the crash and saw the side of the van crushed inward at the passenger side door. In his report, he recalled hearing “several passengers in the rear of the vehicle asking for help.”
Alone, he urged emergency medical services to hurry. A helicopter was on the way, ready to airlift those most critically injured. “I repeatedly looked for ways to try and provide aid to the front seat passenger," he wrote, "but due to the extent of the damage, all I could do was provide limited physical support and verbal reassurance.”
Farquharson heard the driver of the van, Holy Cross women's rowing coach Patrick Diggins, repeating, “I thought I had a green arrow … Did I not have a green arrow? Did I have… we don’t know if I had?”
Soon after, Lt. Matt Harrelson arrived and would be the one to pull Hannah from the wreckage. Speaking with the TC Palm website the next day, Harrelson described what he saw as a “war zone.”
Back in Massachusetts that morning, Hannah’s father, Tom, was beginning his day at the well-known ice cream stand he owns with his wife, Gail, in Wareham. At 10:30 a.m., he received an unexpected call.
“I don’t have any information,” Holy Cross Athletic Director Marcus Blossom said, “but your daughter was in a horrific car crash down in Florida.”
Tom reacted in stunned silence, dreading having to deliver the news to Gail, and their 15-year-old son, David.
Only the day before, Tom had called in a favor with a friend who worked at Delta Air Lines. Hannah had mistakenly booked her departure for the team’s trip for 7 p.m. instead of 7 a.m. Tom’s friend helped expedite her travel, and Hannah joined her teammates in Florida.
Now, he would have to call the friend again to ask for last-minute tickets, dreading the thought of how he’d find his daughter upon arrival. Gail remembers him visibly distraught as they packed, asking repeatedly, “Why did I get her on that flight?”
She can also still picture how, in his room down the hall, David sat stooped with his head buried in his hands.
Hannah's future uncertain
They arrived at Lawnwood Regional Medical Center in Fort Pierce, Florida, at 11 p.m. Gail stayed at the front desk, as Tom and David rushed to Hannah’s room in the intensive care unit, where she was connected to a ventilator, heart monitor, brain-swelling display and IV pump. David returned for his mother, assuring her it was OK, and together they waited in Hannah’s room. After 30 minutes, the doctors arrived to explain.
Hannah suffered a broken femur, a collapsed lung and a fractured pelvis, the doctors said, but they were more concerned about her brain injury. They would need another MRI, but with the elusive nature of TBIs, Hannah’s future remained uncertain.
What they knew was that Hannah was in a coma. According to the Mayo Clinic, though, severe TBIs can present themselves in four “different states of consciousness.” From a coma, she could enter either a vegetative or minimally conscious state. In the former, the patient is unaware of their surroundings but may respond moderately to stimuli. This stage could be permanent, or it could evolve to a minimally conscious state. Here, a patient shows “some signs of self-awareness or awareness of one’s environment.”
Generally, a minimally conscious state signifies a transition toward greater recovery potential. In worst-case scenarios, though, a patient may experience brain death, an irreversible condition in which the individual is only kept alive by breathing devices and feeding tubes.
David remembers how, following the brain scan, doctors tried detailing his sister’s prognosis. The damage to her brain was distributed evenly, with only one area that appeared to have suffered slightly more damage. This could be a good sign, as more acute brain trauma may result in serious long-term impairment or death.
Though the doctors said it was way too soon to predict her quality of life, they believed that Hannah was going to wake up. The Stroms' initial relief was tempered by the knowledge that this was just the beginning of a long and complicated process for Hannah.
For Hannah’s brother, David, an aspiring engineer, the grieving process took the form of control. He needed to understand the terms the doctors used and what the machines were doing. “I would be the one to ask the doctors questions,” he explained, “or maybe look something up during follow-up research.”
He committed himself to learning medical language in order to calm himself through comprehension, reasoning that to understand something is to strip it of its power. He repeatedly said, “I just wanted to know what was going to happen.” He would ask what the numbers meant on the ventilator, how much she was breathing on her own versus how much the machine was doing it for her, what the numbers monitoring her brain swelling measured, and what all of this meant for Hannah and her prognosis.
Among the five other heartbroken families of the Holy Cross women’s rowing team staying with the Stroms in the ICU that week, the 15-year-old was known as “Dr. Dave.”
Together, they became “like a family,” David said. The teammate on Hannah’s right in the van suffered severe physical injuries, breaking “almost every bone in her body,” according to David, but was relatively unscathed in terms of head trauma. The rower to Hannah’s left in the van sustained a less severe brain injury, remaining conscious throughout that day, but suffering significant mood swings as the week progressed.
Tom Strom said that though the families enduring this tragedy together, “we gained 10 friendships.” He also praised Holy Cross, saying that “the school was really nice when that happened. They fed us — whatever we needed, they got.”
Hannah's teammates improved quickly. In the following days, they began being discharged. Tom remembers how, one day, Hannah started moving. Her arm lifted, her legs stretched, but the doctors were quick to check their emotions. They explained that her movement was not a conscious decision; it was involuntary. Moreover, with her broken bones, moving in this way was dangerous.
As the other injured rowers were leaving the hospital, they had to tie Hannah’s feet down.
Moved back to Mass. General
Days turned into weeks. Though Hannah’s life was on pause, the rest of the family had to carry on. David was missing school, and neither Tom nor Gail had worked since the accident. With Hannah still in a coma, they had her medically evacuated to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, just over an hour’s drive north from the Strom family home. Gail would stay in the Wyndham Hotel near the hospital, while Tom stayed home with David so he could attend school. They would visit on weekends.
At Mass. General, a team of doctors that included a physiatrist, neurologist and neuropsychologist delivered what Gail described as “grim news.” They explained how, in a best-case scenario, Hannah could make small, incremental progress. The neurologist, using his hand like a line on a graph, said that she may “go up a little bit and then plateau. Maybe go up a little more, but she may decline.” It was the same guarded message she had received from the doctors in Florida.
To make matters worse, the doctors recommended a tracheostomy tube, a device inserted through the front of her throat intended to help clear secretions from her airway and help her breathe mechanically. This would replace the previously inserted endotracheal tube, which ran from her mouth down her trachea, injuring her vocal cords and deepening her voice. January gave way to February, and Gail would watch her daughter’s unresponsive eyes open from time to time above the invasive device.
On Feb. 11, Hannah was transferred to Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Charlestown. There, specialists began trying to stimulate Hannah’s brain using initial rehab exercises. Gail remembers how, each day, nurses would wheel Hannah away to her sessions, her head held in place on each side with supports. For Gail — now sleeping in Hannah’s room since the move to Spaulding — it seemed progress was slow or even nonexistent.
Separated from the rest of her family, Gail was beginning to buckle beneath the emotional burden of Hannah’s day-to-day health. At the beginning of March, she rearranged her schedule in order to spend the middle of the week with David, a plan that might give her some reprieve. That plan, however, was upended when COVID-19 hit.
“You can stay,” the doctors told her, “but you cannot leave.”
'I was in hell'
“I was wondering why everyone else could hear and walk, and I couldn’t,” Hannah remembered.
She drifted in a liminal state all that spring. Masked nurses would come into her room, talk with her mother, and work with her immobile body, but her existence felt internal only. She had no recollection of the accident. She only knew that this was her new reality, hour after hour, with no sign of her dad or brother.
She tried to shake the feeling, reasoning that perhaps this was all a dream. “I thought that if I went to sleep,” she said, “then everything would go back to normal.” As the days went on and nothing changed, she remembers wondering, “Am I being punished?” She questioned why this was happening to her, the thought echoing in her claustrophobic skull. Until one day, as if in a nightmare, the Catholic college student determined, “I was in hell, not heaven.”
Gail remembers this time differently. While she was dismayed by her confinement to the seventh floor of Spaulding, she took solace in the fact that, as more weeks passed, Hannah began responding to the people coming in and out of her room, tracking them with her eyes. Eventually, Hannah could speak single words but, still, she remained unable to articulate her feelings of existential dread. All the while, Gail was having her own form of a religious experience.
'Heroes and angels'
During the long periods of solitude, Gail would reflect on what she calls her “heroes and angels.” The heroes were professionals — like the first responders in Florida, Hannah's many doctors in Mass. General, and her rehabilitation specialists in Charlestown. But Gail’s “angels” were regular citizens, both seen and unseen, who gave her strength through her nearly four-month stay in Hannah’s room during those early months of the pandemic.
These included people like Tracy Cox, who stayed with her daughter on the same floor. Though the daylight hours were busy, Gail remembers relishing the opportunity to regroup with Tracy at night. They calculated that five laps around the seventh floor was a mile, and they spent walks learning about one another’s families, lives and the changing states of their daughters’ health.
Gail found another “angel” in Sue Vartanian, despite never having met her in person because of Spaulding’s COVID precautions. Sue’s daughter was a rower at Assumption when she got into an accident three weeks after the Holy Cross team. Gail had heard the story and connected with Sue on Facebook. Their online communication bridged their physical divide, as the Vartanians stayed on the eighth floor throughout this time. These relationships helped comfort Gail in the long hours between FaceTime calls with her husband and son.
By late spring, it would be Gail and Hannah’s turn to leave Spaulding. The rehabilitation specialists had determined that Hannah was ready to move from inpatient to outpatient care, setting a return-to-home date for June 3. Her Holy Cross teammates created a countdown poster with links of paper symbolizing the closing days of her stay. As the rings were removed, Hannah believed that she was one day closer to her old life — that this purgatory, hell, or nightmare would soon be over. And so, with her speech beginning to improve, Hannah tried tricking her mother into removing one ring in the morning and another at night, hoping it would get her home sooner.
Support from hometown
Back in Marion, Tom and David were preparing for Hannah’s return. These last few months had been “devastating” for Tom. As Gail struggled with being so close to Hannah’s progress, Tom endured the challenges of being in an external role. “I have 20 people a day at my restaurant asking how Hannah’s doing,” Tom said. Though he appreciated their support, the constant dredging of emotion was exhausting. This stress was compounded with the fact that, at home, “the bills were piling up.” Yet he, too, had support.
Across Marion and the surrounding towns, red and purple hearts — symbols of Tabor Academy and Holy Cross, where Hannah had gone to high school and college — were displayed everywhere. Businesses put them on tip jars and began advertising fundraisers, donating these proceeds to the Strom family, according to Sippican Week.
Additionally, Dianne Anderson of Wareham started a GoFundMe for Hannah, which has since raised $11,000 for the family. These monetary contributions helped Tom equip the Strom home with ramps, wheelchairs and walkers. And, through a similar grassroots approach, Tom had organized a parade for Hannah’s return to Marion.
He was able to keep this news a secret from Gail until a police escort met them at their exit on the highway. Their sirens guided Hannah’s return home through what Tom estimates was “3,000 people” crowding the main street in town. Behind the window of the crawling car, Hannah smiled at the outpouring of support.
To most, it seemed a miraculous day. However, when Hannah got home, Tom remembers that “she went onto the bed and covered her face with a blanket.” Hannah remembers being “confused that there was a wheelchair ramp at my house. We had a walker at home, and I was like, ‘Why do I need this?’ because in my mind, those things are made for injured people or older people.” She had convinced herself that coming home meant that things would be normal. Only through seeing her new accommodations was reality beginning to set in. But there were still parts she couldn’t accept.
At Spaulding, Gail had told Hannah about her team’s accident. But Hannah — in her slow process of cognitive recovery — was either unable or unwilling to comprehend the full severity of that day. Gail admitted to having left out that Grace Rett had died in the crash, reasoning that they wanted to guard Hannah’s recovering mind from the emotional hardship of exactly what had happened. But Hannah remained angry about having to use a walker, and she was starting to ask to use her phone. They knew that with greater access she could find out about Rett’s passing. It was then that David said, “I really think it’s time we tell her about Grace.”
Hannah refused reality, saying that this time “was all very confusing.” She remained in denial until, over a month later, on her 20th birthday, a group of her teammates from Holy Cross met her at her father’s ice cream shop to celebrate. David remembers how “she didn’t really talk at all.” Cars rushed by on Route 6 and for Hannah, scanning her fellow rowers, six months came into focus. “Grace wasn’t there,” she remembers thinking. “Normally, she would have been.” She stayed quiet.
When she went to bed that night, she Googled the story and read everything.
Steps to recovery
That day changed her. Hannah came to terms with the fact that there was no way to sleep this off. There would be no easy way to be a student again. No easy way to be a rower. No way to continue life as though nothing happened, beginning again as if it were Jan. 14, 2020.
The only way out was through. But it had to start with a walker and a ramp.
Her dad remembers those early days of recovery: “We walked out to the ramp, and we walked 10 feet. Then the next day, we walked 15 feet. Then the next day, we walked 20 feet.” They did this every day for the next five months. Eventually, she didn’t need a walker. They would hold hands. “25 feet. 30 feet. 35 feet. Then one day,” Tom recalled, “her physical therapist said, ‘OK, you don’t need us anymore.’ ”
The NCAA Division I rower had learned to walk again. By December, she was running.
All this time, Hannah received speech and occupational therapy, too. These were made more challenging by the fact that her hearing had yet to fully return, something that proved to be a conundrum for both her doctors and her family.
“In the beginning,” David said, “she would do nonverbal stuff,” like pointing up if she wanted to go to her room. Her brother reasoned, at the time, that her impaired hearing made her embarrassed to unknowingly shout. However, Tom brought Hannah “to four different ear doctors, and she passed every test.”
The doctors have since explained that what appeared to be a hearing impairment is instead a cognitive impairment. When outlining what the doctors told him, Tom said, “She’s missing a part of her brain.” He raised his fist, using it to illustrate his point. “If this is what the back of everyone’s brain looks like, she’s missing about a half an inch right there,” pointing to the middle knuckle on his index finger.
Through daily cognitive therapy, though, David said he believes that his sister’s improvements with speech and hearing mirror her physical recovery. “Every night, we had dinner together,” he said, “and we would try to talk to her as much as we could.”
They would ask her what she remembered each day and encouraged her to talk more. When they started, she could hardly recall a thing. David said that Hannah once asked for dinner right after they finished eating. Yet through repetition, “we could tell it was getting better,” he said.
So much so that, as 2020 gave way to 2021, she began taking online classes from her apartment in Worcester. Her processing of sounds was improving, so Holy Cross allowed her to take a Pass/Fail, half-course load. But Hannah’s return to school was complicated by the fact that she was still in physical therapy, at that time going to Spaulding Rehab’s facility in Sandwich.
“It was hard to balance my work,” she said. “I do everything so much slower now. It takes me longer to read.” As a cum laude graduate at Tabor, Hannah was frustrated with the pace of her return. She struggled to appreciate her recovery within its context.
Gail said that Hannah’s neuropsychologist, a 35-year veteran at Mass. General, told her family, “People throw out, ‘Oh, she’s a miracle,’ but in reality, you need to understand, she truly, truly is.” He added, “She was not supposed to survive this, and people in this condition do not recover — not only to the extent that she has, but at this rate.”
Gail explained that Hannah’s doctors believe some of her physical activities have contributed to her cognitive recovery. One such activity is rowing, which she was reintroduced to in the fall of 2020. At that time, the mother of a Holy Cross rower contacted Gail about the Worcester Boat Club. Their president, Joe May, knew all about the team’s accident and wanted to find a way to help. “Hannah needs to meet Joe,” she insisted. That October, Gail and Hannah met Joe at the Worcester boathouse.
They walked the lines of stacked crew shells talking, until, at the end of their visit, Joe asked if Hannah would like to get in a boat the next time she came. Hannah knew she still couldn’t row, but she wanted to come back. When they returned in November, Hannah, Joe, and another one of Hannah’s injured teammates went out on Lake Quinsigamond. She hadn’t been on the water in a year.
From patient to employee
As the fall of 2021 approached, Hannah’s life slowly began to take its former shape. She spent the summer like many rising college juniors: an apartment with a friend in Boston, a 21st birthday in Nashville, Tennessee, and the hunt for internships. Like those peers, the first place she applied to, unfortunately, turned her down. They regretted that they had no intern positions available. However, that same employer’s Director of Inpatient Rehabilitation Services, Dr. Cara Brinkley, replied to Hannah soon after, saying that Spaulding Charlestown would hire her for a full-time position.
Hannah would be the first to admit that her day-to-day work isn’t all that intense. “I go into patient’s rooms, and I take inventory,” she explained. “I make sure everything has the right numbers on it. Like, the shower chair and the wheelchair are all supposed to match the room number, and I just make sure they do.” But there’s more to it than that.
“This one physical therapy assistant, I help her do things now, and it’s just weird that she was helping me before when I didn’t even know I was being helped. It’s a weird thing to see people that helped me, and now I’m working there.”
When she wasn’t working, she often exercised. She ran the streets of Charlestown and bought a 10-class package at Row House, an indoor rowing studio. In the early summer, Joe May picked her up twice each week, with Hannah eventually sculling on Lake Quinsigamond.
In August, Gail flew back to Vero Beach. She wanted to see the officers who saved her daughter’s life. She still messages them, in addition to the director of Lawnwood Regional Medical Center, Hannah’s doctors at Mass. General, and her physical therapists.
On the last call Hannah had with her neurologist, the doctor was quick to notice Hannah’s background, a room in Spaulding Charlestown. Up to that point, they had been meeting regularly on Zoom. He told her that, with the progress she’s made, he wants to “de-medicalize her life.” Instead of saying that they’d talk again soon, he finished the call with “Let’s talk in six months.”
Hannah signed off and got back to work. She walked down the hall that she was once wheeled through by her physical therapists. “I went into my old room, and it was weird seeing someone else there.” She took inventory, and then she left.
Stu Wilson is a freelance writer and English teacher at Tabor Academy in Marion.