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"Part II: The First Year in Intensive Care"
The response we received from Eugene Torri’s first letter was quite amazing. Over 60 people contacted Eugene after reading his story of survival after falling out of a 14-story window.
One of the more common questions and discussion points in those responses revolved around how hard Eugene’s recovery from near death must have been. Many people commented on how strong-willed he needed to be to get through such a harrowing experience.
When faced with such a daunting, life-changing issue as paralysis, many people wouldn’t care to recollect the tougher times during the recovery stages. But in Part II of Eugene’s series of letters, he attacks those questions head-on in stunning detail.
The following letter in our “Eugene Torri Series” is to those readers who asked, and those readers that didn’t – what happens to someone AFTER they survive a 14-story fall and become paralyzed?
Hofstra Dorms
-----------------------
Dear Readers,
While I was in the hospital after my 14 story fall out of the top of a college dorm, I curiously asked a friend of mine if he had witnessed the scene. I was expecting a “no,” for I didn’t even think that my friend was living on the Hofstra campus over the summer break. What I got instead was a vivid recollection of the events that transpired for the first ten or fifteen minutes after the initial fall. He had the ears of the entire staff in the Intensive Care Unit at Nassau County Medical Center.
We were all fascinated by his description. It’s been fourteen years since we last talked, but I remember the look on his face, his tears, and his account perfectly. I still feel bad that I couldn’t hug him, but I was strapped into a rotating bed at the time.
The main thing he pointed out was that nobody had actually seen me fall. The first indication that something had gone wrong was a loud crashing sound. It sent a flurry of calls into the campus police- my friend being one of them.
The crash sent everyone to their windows. The dorm I fell from was full at the time, and there were a fair amount of people in the dorm directly adjacent to that one. Individuals on the opposite side flocked into the west facing rooms to see what had transpired: “I must have had at least a dozen people come rushing in. What we saw was a person lying on the ground. Nobody had any idea it was you. Nobody had any clue that the person on the ground had fallen 14 stories. The main thing I remember was all of the lights that came on in the next high rise. Everybody was staring down. It was an eerie moment.”
Immediately, the campus police at Hofstra were on the scene, as well as a group of onlookers who came rushing out of the dorms. When the scene was lit up, my friend saw something that turned him white:
“In the distance I saw what looked like a Rangers cap. I think my heart must have stopped beating at that very second, but I still didn’t know you were even on campus that night. I thought there is no way…. But I had to go down.”
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw you. You were just totally limp, and even though they slapped the oxygen on you, the campus police didn’t think you were going to breathe. The fall had knocked your shoes right off and they were laying about 30 yards from where you were. Everybody was moved back, and you had this distant circle of onlookers. I figured you may have fallen only a few floors; there wasn’t really any blood that I could see. The dorms were lit up and there were so many faces in the windows. Then the campus police started looking up. Then everybody’s heads started slowly rising up the dorm. Then you could see it! The window from the student lounge (on the 14th floor) had been knocked out! There was a loud gasp, and the next thing I remember was the sound of the chopper landing somewhere. They cleared the area and made room for you to be airlifted to the hospital. I think the helicopter landed on one of the fields near the dorms. Everybody was certain you were dead. I don’t think anyone slept that night.”
I slept for the next month. In that time friends and family members were forced to look at me in a medically induced coma. Completely out, I was strapped into a rotating bed. This contraption rotates you almost completely to one side and back around to the other. What friends and family saw was not a pretty sight. I was completely bloated with water weight from head to toe. Somebody described it as the “Stay Puft Marshmallow Man” from ‘Ghostbusters.’ I had a breathing tube in my throat hooked up to a ventilator. I had tubes in my lungs, nose, and sides. I had IV lines in my chest cavity, and one for kidney dialysis. All of this and still little or no hope of survival.
Then I woke up and the nightmare began. When I was taken out of the coma, all I kept thinking was that I was going to fall right out of the bed. That should have been the least of my worries. Rotating beds are desperate attempts to keep you from having a wide range of medical issues. They keep you from getting bed sores, pneumonia, bloated with water weight, and they help to heal a broken back. No surprise, they weren’t about to take me out of “the rollercoaster” as I called it. Sometimes they would stop the bed, which allowed me to make more use of my arms.
The bed did get the best of me one night. With all of the lines and tubes, each of them had to be checked thoroughly to make sure they weren’t going to get snagged when the bed was in rotation. Unfortunately, the nurses misjudged the amount of slack I had in my IV line one night. It started with a searing pain in my neck. I was strapped into the bed and couldn’t yell for help because of the tracheotomy in my throat. I was pretty much helpless and I knew what was coming next. The dressing and stitches began to rip, then they tore completely off of my flesh, and I could feel the central lines whoosh right out of my jugular vein. Then the warm flow down my neck began. That is a microcosm of the next year I’d spend in the Intensive Care Units of both Nassau County and Westchester County Medical Centers.
When I first woke up I had no idea that I fell 14 floors. I assumed I had been in a car accident, or something of that nature. My recollection was fuzzy for the first month or two after being taken out of the coma. Everyone wanted it that way. It wasn’t until a friend slipped up that I had the epiphany nobody wanted me to have. At the time, it really didn’t matter anyway. I was in hell.
The majority of ICUs do not have but one or two isolation rooms. Most beds are in a single cubicle with a curtain or two separating them. I hadn’t lost my hearing yet, and there wasn’t anything wrong with my eyesight. Death was everywhere. It was in the cubicles next to me, and in the cubicles across from me. When death arrived, it certainly wasn’t the soft parade to Heaven I had always expected it to be. It was chaos. Sometimes it would begin with a quick scream. It would continue with the shriek of a ventilator, the shrill of a heart monitor flat lining, visitors getting chased away, and the entire medical staff rushing toward a cubicle with a defibrillator.
I’d come pretty close to needing the defibrillator myself. My family once told me of an incident where I had my heart rate up to and above 300 beats per minute. At that point it couldn’t handle anything more and it simply stopped. A few seconds later and it miraculously started beating again.
Sparing the gruesome details, a typical day in Nassau County Medical Center could see me get poked and prodded with a half dozen needles. Every week new central lines would have to be run into my chest cavity, neck, or back. The kidney dialysis would put me right to sleep. A dressing would have to be removed from my open stomach cavity. By far the most unnerving thing about this particular ICU though was death. My friends who would visit would always ask about the disappearance of this or that patient. I simply would tell them that they had gotten better and were moved up to “one of the upper floors.”
As an aside, there was one nice story out of all this. A family my father had befriended who had a daughter in the same ICU as me, would later turn up at my brother’s graduation from Manhattan College in 2000. They spotted each other right away at the ceremony. Turns out their daughter had made a full recovery and graduated with my brother in 2000. I’ve always found that fascinating.
The ICU became too much for some. This one particular friend always brought me the newspaper when he would visit. On this particular day the Rangers made the back page of Newsday by getting Wayne Gretzky. On the front page of the paper, the cover showed an image of a horrific car accident on the Long Island Expressway. They also had a picture of the lone survivor of the wreck. When they opened the curtain to the cubicle next to mine, there he was. My friend lost it, “I don’t know how you do this! The lines, the needles, the vent, the tubes! All these sick people!” That would be the last I ever saw of him.
He was quite right though. I don’t think I ever really grasped the reality of what was going on while I was at Nassau County Med. When I look back on it now, it would have been the constant visitors, my family practically living at the hospital, a well trained medical staff, and morphine…
I may have been the happiest guy in that entire ICU. I spent long hours listening to my walkman. The other hours were spent with visitors. Many of those hours were also spent on morphine. Once they tapered it down so I could come out of my coma, I would receive smaller amounts as both drips and shots. It produced a general feeling of well being, sometimes euphoria, and it helped with the pain. One would only have to look at the guy playing air guitar to Men at Work and Neil Diamond songs to know of its effects.
The one major problem with morphine is that it stunts your ability to breathe. One large shot, especially into an IV line, and for a second or two you simply cannot move your diaphragm to take a breath. On a ventilator, that doesn’t pose a problem. Without one, and you’re at grave risk; especially if you cannot breathe for a long duration.
The final day at Nassau County Medical Center was the worst. Knowing full well that I was going to be transferred to Westchester County Medical Center, I could not fathom all that I was leaving behind. The next semester had already begun at Hofstra, and friends would have little time to visit me in Westchester. “When you get better, we’ll come visit you at home.” They made good on that promise.
The ride in the ambulance was going to be rough. Not just physically, but mentally. Right before I left, they loaded me up with Valium and morphine. When my friends visited me at home some two years later, I still vaguely remembered the looks on their faces the last time I saw them. They also remembered mine: “I just remember how you had a big smile on your face, I figured you were just happy to be closer to home. I had no idea that they gave you drugs to calm you down.”
Another friend of mine told me I pulled him aside because of his tearful expression, and I told him to enjoy his senior year, watch Gretzky and the Rangers slaughter the Islanders, and not to worry, I’ll make it out of the hospital. I made good on that promise.
Finally, and I don’t remember this, I was placed inside of the ambulance, gave a thumbs up to everyone, and yelled “break on through!” Then off I went to Westchester County Medical Center. As the ambulance crossed over the Whitestone Bridge, I watched the lights from Queens slowly fade away. I’ve yet to visit Long Island again.
I’ll never forget the first night in Westchester. I had just left three years worth of friends behind, and I think it struck me that I probably didn’t stand much of a chance of returning to Hofstra anytime soon. They had initially put me in a regular room with a roommate. I listened to him talk to his friends over the phone drowning on about how he was missing his best friend’s wedding. Then the nurse brought him a sandwich, and I looked at it angrily with my hungry eyes until my doctor walked in and asked me, “You want to drink?”
I hadn’t touched food or water in months. The nurse came in with a pitcher of what looked like pink lemonade. I poured it in a cup full of ice and ended up downing most of it within minutes. The nurse and doctor looked at me like I was crazy. Turns out it was the barium drink they give you the night before a CAT Scan. It’s vile. I didn’t notice.
I believe they did the CAT Scan in the early morning hours. They took one look at it, and wheeled me right into the Intensive Care Unit.
It was solely family that helped me get through the next six months. It was not easy on them, for it was at Westchester County Medical Center where I completely lost my mind. The first few weeks weren’t bad; I was even healed enough to go to a Jets-Colts game in Indianapolis, ‘The Sally Jessy Raphael Show,’ dinner at center ice in Madison Square Garden (with the ice still there), and I was back at Hofstra playing intramural floor hockey with my friends. Sounds weird? It was; I was in another medically induced coma after a few trips to the operating room. For some reason I remember every single morphine induced dream during that coma. Somebody must have had the television on in my room, and with every single show I became one of the characters. I was even at a bar with the cast of ‘Days of Our Lives!’
When I came back down to earth I learned the doctors had discovered a whole new list of problems. The holes in my pancreas and intestines were not healing at all, my platelet count was next to nothing, they had discovered a bunch of new infections inside of my body, and my hearing was slowly but surely going. Most importantly, I was growing more insane with each and every day. The isolation room they had me in didn’t allow me to see other people walking around the ICU. The walls were beginning to close in, and the only time I’d see the nursing staff when they weren’t taking care of me, was when death made its chaotic presence known in the rooms next door.
Not being able to eat or drink for close to eight months is enough to drive anyone mad. Although you are kept hydrated and given nutrition through intravenous lines, it is no replacement for water. I ended up swindling as much as I could from the ice bags the nurses would use to keep me cool. I’d wait until they’d melt, and then tear them slightly open and suck out some of the water. I was eventually caught and was no longer able to sneak a drink. Long story short, I now knew what it was like to starve and go without water. There shouldn’t be any of that in the world today.
The other problem I started to have every single day were panic attacks. Christopher Reeve talked about having the very same problem. It’s made especially problematic when you’re breathing is being assisted by a ventilator. It’s simply like suffocation. They’re not always panic attacks, in fact, in most cases it’s your heart rate and respiration increasing due to some sort of stress on the body. It could be a bed sore, an infection, or something more serious. It’s incredibly frustrating when a doctor tells you to just calm down, when you were fine and relaxed just a half minute ago. Not anymore! There goes the heart monitor beeping fast, your oxygen level going down, and the ventilator not coming close to meeting your needs. Every problem compounds the others. If you are lucky, you’ll eventually pass out. If not, and it’s as if someone is holding their hand over your mouth and nose. Every day, sometimes twice a day.
The simple fact that I had survived the initial fall, and that there was an inkling of hope that I might make it out of the hospital and return home, complicated my medication program. If I was ever going to come off of the vent, the morphine and other narcotic medications were going to have to go. A steady routine of intravenous anti-anxiety medications, painkillers, and sleep aids will kill off anybody’s ability to breathe. Everything needed to be tapered down, and therein lies the paradox. Lowering all of those medications will initially cause you greater pain and anxiety. Forget sleeping.
The doctors and nurses did quite a juggling act trying to wean me to lower, safer doses. I still haven’t a clue as to how they put up with me. The final few months at Westchester County Medical Center were probably the toughest. The daily onslaught of needles, panic attacks, pain, trips to the operating room, lines and tubes being shoved inside, and not being able to eat and drink, were causing psychosis. I recently got a letter from someone I knew at Hofstra who did pay me a visit at Westchester County Med. He put it best:
“You were the complete opposite from what I remembered at Nassau County Medical Center. It was night and day. The one thing that I remember the most was when I first walked into your room, you were totally bloated with water weight again. The parts that weren’t bloated were just skin and bones. I guess I was just expecting you to have made some improvement by then.
You tried to hold it together as best as you could while I was there, but I could tell that you were getting frustrated and were choking back tears. I noticed when you held back a bit that the heart monitor would start to beep faster. I was kind of intrigued by this. I mean it just got to the point where I told you to just let everything out; I was worried you were going to have a heart attack or something.
You really couldn’t talk because of the tracheotomy in your throat. You couldn’t hear me because you had lost most of your hearing. We took to writing everything down on paper. You briefly unlocked the tube from the ventilator that was hooked up to your trach so that I could hear your voice. You sounded like a hoarse Joe Pesci, and I laughed and it kind of made me realize that you were still somewhere inside that body.
You had more tubes in you at that time. I’ve never seen anything that bad in any horror movies. I could never watch an episode of ‘ER’ after that last visit.
The doctors and nursing staff were really nice. I remember a few of them coming in to put something in your IV line a couple of times. I think you were getting much smaller doses of your meds than what they were giving you at Nassau County Med. The nurses would sit in the room for a while with me and your dad.
When I started to leave, I was pretty upset. The nurses and doctors actually let me talk to them at the nurses’ station. They didn’t sugarcoat that you had a long road ahead, but they explained that you had a chance of making it to a rehabilitation hospital, and then eventually home. It just looked so hopeless back then.
You did have a panic attack right before I left. I could hear you pounding and shaking the bed rails all the way in the visitors’ waiting room. I stayed a little longer with your father to make sure everything was all right. I think they gave you a little something to calm you down, and I was able to leave knowing you were comfortable, even if it was just for a little while.
When I got back to Hofstra, everybody wanted to know how you were doing. I explained what the doctors and nurses had told me, but I don’t think anyone of us believed you were going to make it. There was just no way.”
I had become so deranged by that time, that I cannot recall the visit he described above. I was hoping to get a description of what he might have seen while I was still in Nassau County. When I received his letter, I was completely blindsided that he had also seen me at Westchester County Med. I had truly because a monster, and I’m surprised I was able to hold it together for the duration he spent in my room.
Throughout my stay in the ICU at Westchester County Medical Center, what we all needed was a miracle. Simply put, my family and I needed to get out of that place. A rehab hospital is not equipped to deal with the nature of injuries and other medical issues that I was suffering from. Helen Hayes Rehabilitation Hospital seemed well out of reach, yet what we needed was a stark contrast from life in the ICU. Like night and day.
Best wishes,
Eugene Torri Jr.
Eugene would like to thank William Stroock for his contributions to this letter. If you would like to comment on this letter, Eugene can be reached at etorri44@yahoo.com. You can find him on facebook as "Gino Torri".
To see Responses, Results and Reactions to this letter, click here.
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