A True story by Gabe Taylor
May 6, 2007
A True story by Gabe Taylor
This story is not embellished. This is how it happened. If you feel weird after a crash, go get checked out. If you hit your head, go get checked out. Shit happens.
It wasn’t that bad of a crash. I did have a bad premonition about it, and I didn’t like the jump much at all. But it was one of those, worst case scenarios. I was in Big Bear for the TWS team challenge and filming with Torey Piro for the upcoming movie Voice. I was doing a front cork or something and it went wrong, I re-corked onto the landing and my arm jammed all up into my mid-section. The wind was knocked from me but I thought that was it. After hitting the jump again and then talking with some friends I decided to bounce back to Mammoth. On my way down the hill I stopped at the Ski Patrol hut and was complaining about my shoulder hurting and feeling a little off. I didn’t hit my shoulder during the crash and I tried explaining this to the patrolman but he said I was fine. (Note for file, when your shoulder hurts and you have had trauma to your mid-section, it is a sign of internal bleeding, either to your spleen or liver.) This would have been nice to have known earlier, but as it was, I got in my car and was on my way down the back of Big Bear headed to Mammoth.
After about an hour of winding down the hill I started to feel weird. Real weird. Light headed, spacey, dizzy and an all-together feeling of serious wrongness. I pulled over and got out of my car. This is when things start getting a little hazy. I remember my eyes started to flick into the back of my head and I thought I was going to pass out. My arm was wrapped around my side view mirror keeping me from falling on the ground. The furious attempts being made to flag someone down and get some help were proving futile. The lack of cell phone coverage didn’t help either. I’m not quite sure how long I was on the side of the road, dangling from my Montero. I do remember concentrating on the clouds so I wouldn’t pass out. Not passing out seemed really important to me. I also remember looking into the eyes of an older woman as she drove by with a look of disgust. I was screaming, “Help Me! Help Me!” and she just kept on driving, but I’ll never forget those eyes. Maybe she thought I was overdosing or something. The Apple Valley on the backside of Big Bear is known as one of the biggest Meth producing spots in California, so I can’t totally blame all those people who drove right on past me.
I decided to get my shit together and try to leave that place. Back behind the wheel I continued down the hill and into Apple Valley. I started feeling a bit better and thought maybe I should just head up to Mammoth. “What is the worst that could be wrong with me?” I was thinking. Without knowing I had taken a few wrong turns and was headed North instead of the Westerly direction I was supposed to be traveling. Everyone has things happen to them for a reason, those times in a life where a decision can drastically change the outcome of the rest of that life. As I sat at a red light, with no traffic anywhere, without knowing, I was smack dab in the middle of one of these life-altering moments. After what felt like five minutes but was probably one, I was about to gas it and burn the light when a red cross caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. A Hospital. I bounced back and forth but decided on getting a quick check up before getting back on the road. I parked in front of the hospital and after getting out of my car new immediately I had made the right decision. My footsteps were erratic at best and walking the 100 ft. to the entrance was proving extremely difficult.
I burst into the front entrance yelling, “I’m fucked up, I’m fucked up! I don’t know what’s wrong but I’m so FUCKED UP!” Probably not the best way to enter a hospital, especially considering the amount of Meth overdoses that place sees, but what was I going to do? The nurse looked at me with little compassion and asked what I had taken. “C’mon son, what are you on?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about and after she realized this got me into a room where my shirt was removed only to reveal a stomach resembling that of a woman with child. My whole abdomen was huge and after a quick x-ray my doctor had a choice for me.
“So, Gabriel, I have two choices for you. I can remove your severely ruptured spleen right now, or not, and you’ll probably die within the hour.”
I shit you not this is what the guy said to me! It was so fucked up. He didn’t even flinch. I told him to do what he had to do and he then started explaining how difficult the surgery was going to be.
“This is a very serious operation and it doesn’t have a 100% success rate. Blah, Blah, Blah.”
I was fairly terrified, and after signing my life away, literally, I was prepped and ready for surgery. People have asked me what I was thinking about as I laid on that stretcher, waiting for the drugs to knock me out, and I can’t really explain. In hind site I was super calm, I didn’t think I was going to die but in actuality it was a possibility.
It felt like someone had ripped my stomach in half, which they had. Awakening to the most intense pain I have ever experienced was a rude awakening at it’s absolute worst. Once the morphine touched my veins I regained my breath and made friends with the itchy calmness that the drug provided in this time of utter discomfort. Two weeks were spent in that hospital and I was a mess. My stomach had 20 staples that resembled a zipper stitched up the middle. The hose extending out the end of my dick was how I would be peeing for my stay and it was very uncomfortable when the nurses would walk by and bump it. In fact, there were tubes all over the place and when I’d go for a walk around the hospital wing, I had to have two people to carry all my shit.
I was back snowboarding in two months and the whole experience really made me re-evaluate what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to snowboard. I had always liked snowboarding, but that experience made me realize how much I loved it. I was not giving snowboarding what it deserved and since then I have progressed more and loved every minute I’ve spent strapped in.
My mom got all the paperwork from the hospital to review and read. Through all the scientific operation talk the doctor wrote that the “Patient should have expired on the way to the hospital.” Reading that was insane, it put a lot of things in perspective. We all here how short life is but fuck, it really is. In the weeks after my injury two people in mammoth died from a ruptured spleen and the blood loss that is associated with it. They didn’t know what was wrong and went to sleep only to never wake up.
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