Driving onto I-80 near her Omaha home, Katie Stearn anticipated the dinner date with her friends would warm the icy February afternoon. Instead, on that frozen day, total strangers stepped in to help save Stearn’s life.
|
|
As her car gained momentum onto the highway, the tires lost all traction on the ice. Her car slid helplessly into a horrible collision with a huge semi-trailer, crushing her car around her.
Stearn was unconscious and bleeding. A passing motorist, Mark Fillet, stopped to call 911 on his cell phone. He decided to alert her family. He found her ID, and made a call to her mother, Laura Stearn. He told her that he believed it was her daughter who had been in an accident on the interstate.
Laura, stunned, looked out her kitchen window onto I-80 and saw the huge clog of stopped traffic. She immediately knew.
With the rescue team on its way, Fillet brought Katie Stearn’s purse to the house, and made sure Laura had a way to UNMC.
No one can be prepared to see one of their children so badly hurt: Katie had sustained a skull fracture, brain injuries, three hematomas, broken ribs and collarbone, a pelvic bone broken in three places, a broken ankle and a punctured lung. She held on through emergency surgery. Then her blood pressure began to sink rapidly after the surgery. A rapid infusion of blood was ordered: seven units of red cells in only 35 minutes. Altogether, she received 12 units of blood.
Doctors gently broke the news to Laura that her daughter had about a 13 percent chance of survival, and an even smaller chance for some level of recovery. If she survived, she would need to re-learn all her motor skills: to sit up, stand, walk, and to swallow and talk again. The rosiest of prognoses for recovery stretched out over at least six months’ time.
Here is where Katie Stearn’s story becomes wonderfully extraordinary. Not only did she stabilize within two weeks in intensive care, her in-patient physical therapy lasted only two weeks. Her out-patient therapy was only one month. Stearn was back at work as a Web site supervisor two months after her February 2001 accident.
Six months after her accident, she was sitting, standing, swallowing, talking and walking. She was able to walk down the aisle as maid of honor at her sister’s wedding.
Stearn and her mother attribute her astonishing recovery to a lot of love. “I had people around me 24 hours a day, praying for me, loving me. They played classical music, talked with me…God had a plan for my life, so I’m still here,” she says, adding that she “almost couldn’t help but heal!”
The American Red Cross Blood Services’ mission is to have blood products ready when they are needed. When lives such as Stearn’s are saved with the help of blood products, the Red Cross — employees and volunteers everywhere — know our work matters.
On April 24, Katie and Laura Stearn arrived at the Dewey Red Cross building to donate blood. Katie is so grateful to the unknown strangers who gave the 12 units of blood that she decided to give evidence of her gratitude. Mother and daughter made their first blood donations that day.
Katie Stearn plans to donate at least 13 units. “Repaying” those units could be exactly what’s needed to help another bright young woman overcome a terrible trauma