Episode 4: ICU – Life on the Edge (Part 2: The Crash)

There was a moment when the doctors told my family I was not going to live.

In this episode of Resilience with Tasha Schuh, I take you inside one of the most critical and life-threatening chapters of my journey following my 16-hour neck surgery.

As I returned to the ICU, complications quickly arose. My body began to crash, my lungs filled with fluid, and no one could fully explain what was happening. While I was heavily sedated and later placed into a coma, my family was being told to prepare for the worst.

In this episode, I share what I’ve come to understand about those days — through my family, the medical team, and the pieces I experienced as I began to wake up. I take you into the code blue, the uncertainty, and the power of prayer and perseverance when everything pointed to the end.

I also open up about the hallucinations, fear, and confusion I experienced as I began to wake up, along with the emotional moment I realized just how close I had come to losing my life.

This part of my story explores the space between life and death… and the fight that continued even when I didn’t know it was happening.

In this episode:

• My 16-hour neck surgery and what followed in the ICU
 • The moment my body crashed and a code blue was called
 • Being placed into a coma during a life-threatening crisis
 • The power of prayer, family, and refusing to give up
 • The hallucinations, fear, and confusion as I began to wake up
 • Coming off the ventilator and preparing for the next phase of recovery

This is Part 2 of my ICU story. In the next episode, I’ll take you back to my childhood and share the foundation that shaped who I was before the accident — and why that matters so much in the journey ahead.

Learn more about my resilience coaching and speaking at: https://TashaSchuh.com

I would also love to hear from you. If there are topics you’d like me to cover or guests you’d love to hear from, please reach out and share your ideas with me at: Tasha@TashaSchuh.com

If this episode encouraged you, please subscribe to the podcast and share it with someone who could use hope and resilience today.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome back to my podcast, Resilience with Tasha Shu. This is episode four in my story series titled ICU Life on the Edge, Part 2: The Crash. I am so grateful you are here. If you listened to episode three, you know that I had just been told that I would never walk again. The doctors were preparing me for surgery that would fuse together my fourth through sixth vertebrae and at best leave me a C5 quadruplegic. Now, if you have not yet subscribed to this podcast, I would love for you to do that now so you never miss an episode. And if this podcast has encouraged you in any way, would you consider sharing it with a friend? Resilience grows stronger when we move through it together. And if you want more tools, encouragement, or information about coaching, you can visit my website at tashashoe.com for additional resources and ways to connect. So today's episode continues right where we left off. So let's step back into that ICU room. I still had hope, and I was living in denial of what the doctors were telling me. I honestly felt the surgery was going to fix everything. But what I didn't fully understand at the time was how much information was being shared with my family and how little I felt like I really knew. There were a lot of conversations happening around me. Doctors coming in, talking with my parents and family, explaining things in ways that I don't fully remember, or maybe wasn't always included in. And I don't think that that was intentional. I think that they were trying to protect me. I was young. I mean, I had just gone through something very, very traumatic. There was so much uncertainty. But I remember feeling like I was in the dark. I knew the big things. I knew that my surgery was coming. I knew they were going to fuse my neck. I knew they were saying I would never walk again, but I didn't fully grasp the severity of everything that was happening inside my body or what could happen next. And maybe that's why I held on to so much hope. Because in my mind, the surgery was the turning point. They were going to fix my neck. They were going to send me to rehab, and I was going to work my way back. I truly believed that. I still thought I was invincible. I remember them telling me that there was a gym on the rehabilitation unit. And in my mind, I pictured a full weight room. I pictured lifting weights, getting stronger every day, and going back to school so buff and fit for all of my classmates. That's honestly what I thought this was all gonna look like. And I was actually pretty excited to start rehab, but the surgery was first. I needed to focus on that. So they began prepping me for surgery. And before the surgery, they really gave me a choice. They told me that if I wanted one incision on the back of my neck, that I would need a halo to stabilize my neck after the surgery. But if I wanted a collar, it would require two incisions, one in the front and one in the front of my neck, and another one in the back of my neck. I did not want to have a halo. I knew a woman in our small town who had been in a car accident and had to wear one, and I remember thinking, I never want to have to wear one of those. So I told them, cut me up all you want. I want the neck collar. So on November 14th, three days after the accident, they did the surgery. It was 16 hours. Eight hours they worked on the front of my neck, eight hours they worked on the back of my neck. And I ended up with two incisions. Like I said, one the front on the right, if you can see it right here on the right hand side of my neck if you're watching the video, and the other directly down the back of my neck. And from everything I was told, the surgery itself seemed to go really well. But this is where things began to get really fuzzy and really confusing because I was very heavily medicated and still coming out from the surgery. So I don't really remember much, but from what my family has told me, like I mentioned, everything seemed to go well with the surgery itself. But when I came back up to the ICU, things started to change. I was having issues with my breathing. After they took the intubation tube out from the surgery, I was having a really hard time breathing on my own. My stats were pretty low, and there were concerns about what was happening. I was struggling to get enough air, and my body was not responding the way that they had hoped it would after surgery. And there were moments where things didn't seem right. At one point, my family was in the room when my body crashed. They made my family leave the room quickly as they frantically worked on me. And my family was really scared and were very surprised to see my body reacting in such a negative way. And there was a lot of urgency, a lot of movement, a lot of people coming in and out quickly. But thankfully they were able to stabilize me and everything seemed to be okay again. But that would not last for long. Now, I want to say here that this is from my memory and from stories that have been told to me. So I may not get every single medical detail perfectly accurate. And if you want a more precise timeline and more documented details, please check out my books. But this is what I'm sharing to the best of my ability, a recollection and what has been told to me over the years. But I do know from one of my nurse's recollections that she had been an ICU nurse for many years. And I was so thankful that she was working that night. Her name is Ginny. And she had just poured herself a glass of water and came into my room because she wanted to take one more look at me before the doctor was leaving. She just had this weird, bad feeling. And I am so thankful that she followed her intuition. So she asked the doctor if he could come in and just take one more look at me before he left for the evening. And when he came in, my body completely crashed. My blood pressure dropped significantly. They called a coblue. Doctors and nurses flew into my room. My parents and family stood by watching, realizing this did not look good, and they were very afraid. And I had no idea this was happening. I don't remember any of this. But Ginny has told me multiple times that in this time when my body crashed, they could not get the ventilator back into my lungs. My lungs were so rock hard that they could not intubate me. So instead, someone had to bag me. And bagging means that they used a manual resuscitation bag to force air into my lungs by hand. And so a nurse, a doctor would squeeze the bag over and over again, breathing for me, because my body could not do it on its own. And this didn't just last for a few minutes. They had to do this for over two and a half hours. So for two and a half hours, someone stood there manually breathing for me, trying to keep me alive. And Ginny never got back to that glass of water. When she left that night at 11:30, that glass of water had not been touched. And when she went out to the nurse's station after all of this had happened, the reports that had come out of the printer from all of the doctor's notes, orders, prescriptions had taken up and covered the entire floor. She said she had never seen that in all her years of nursing. But it didn't take long after that for the doctors to come out and talk to my family. And what they told them was very serious, but also very uncertain. They told my family that they weren't sure what had happened, but that my body had crashed and something was very, very, very, very wrong. And at first they were trying to figure out what could have caused this. I mean, they thought it might be a blockage in my intestines, or that maybe I had a pulmonary embolism. And they knew that something was not right inside my body. They just didn't know what it was yet. And they needed to do, really, in order to find out what was wrong, they needed to do a CT scan to get answers. But I was too fragile to be moved. My body was in such a critical state that even trying to transport me for imaging was incredibly risky. So they decided to wait. Honestly, I don't think they thought I would survive very long. It was that dire. And over the next couple of days, there was a lot of watching, a lot of waiting, and a lot of uncertainty. And every time the doctors would come in, they were trying to assess what was happening, trying to piece together what was going wrong inside my body. But they still did not have answers. And let me tell you, I had so many amazing doctors. Many doctors dedicating their time and their energy to help and try to save my life. And each one of them brought so much wisdom and so much knowledge to the table. But there was one doctor. One doctor who refused to give up on me, Dr. Harrison. He stayed with me for hours. He went home, took a shower, ate breakfast, and came right back. I've been told that he has spent upwards of 15 hours with me, trying to do everything he could to figure out what was happening and trying to keep me alive. Now he knew pneumonia was ravaging my body. They knew that. But that did not explain the other symptoms and why my body was continuing to deteriorate. But finally, when I kept living, when my body didn't give out the way that they thought it would, they made the decision to do finally to do the CT scan to try to figure out what was actually happening. But even that decision came with great risk. They truly believed that moving me could be the thing that my body wouldn't survive. They had not moved me, they had not fed me, they had not rotated me. I was that fragile. My fever was 108 degrees. Imagine that, 108 degrees. And my heart rate was double, sometimes even triple what it should have been. My body was working so hard just to stay alive. And so when they finally did the CT scan, they got their answer. They sent me down, everybody prayed like crazy, and when I came up, they knew what was wrong. I survived it, thankfully, but they found out I had developed septic shock. Septic shock is a life-threatening condition where an infection enters the bloodstream and spreads through the entire body. It causes your blood pressure to drop dangerously low, your organs to begin shutting down, and your body to go into a state of overwhelming inflammation. It is one of the most severe medical emergencies a person can experience, and many people do not survive it. In my case, the infection likely started as pneumonia from the food that I had aspirated in the helicopter. And somehow that infection spread into my bloodstream. And so when they found out it was a septic shock, they immediately started me on multiple antibiotics. And this is when everything shifted. This is when the doctors really were concerned that I was not going to live. They knew it was dire before, but now that they knew it was wrong, the doctors gave me a 0% chance of surviving. They told my family my body would begin to shut down, my organs would quit, and that I would die. And they told my family that they needed to say goodbye. But thankfully, my family refused. They would not say goodbye. Instead, they told me to fight, they told me to not give up. And even though I never heard those words, they were speaking them over me. My family was praying. I mean, they had put me on every single church prayer chain known to man. And within hours, there were thousands of people praying for me. Because this had become a battle that only prayer could help. Because in the natural, I had no chance of surviving. During those eight days, from the time my body had crashed to the time I woke up, I was induced into a coma to let my body rest. My body was under such extreme conditions, my fever, my heart rate, the infection spreading throughout my body, that there was really nothing more they could do in that moment medically, except try to support me and let my body rest. And the coma was not just something they chose lightly. It was necessary. It was the only option they had in hopes that my body could settle down, that the infection could begin to respond to the antibiotics, and that I could somehow stabilize. Now, I had no idea that any of this was happening. I had no idea that my life was hanging in the balance. I had no idea that the doctors were telling my family that I wasn't going to live. And I had no idea how serious everything had become. Because during that time, I was dreaming. I was dreaming dreams that were very real. And I remember dreaming about Serena and I. If you remember, Serena was my friend that was in the car accident three days before my accident. And in my dream, I was in the basement of a house and Serena was in the attic, or vice versa. I don't remember exactly which one was which, but what I do remember is that between us was a spiral staircase. And there was this very pale woman with long, straggly black hair, and she would not let us get to each other. And we were trying to get to each other, but we couldn't. And no matter what we did, we couldn't reach each other. And it was very scary, very vivid. And at the time, I didn't understand what it meant. Now, eight days after my body crashed, I woke up. And when I woke up, I was very confused. I had no idea that it was eight days later. They were telling me that the next day was Thanksgiving. And I thought to myself, wow, time really flies when you're in the hospital. How is tomorrow already Thanksgiving? But everyone kept telling me how grateful they were that I was alive. And I remember my neurosurgeon sitting on the edge of my bed, crying, like sobbing, telling me what a miracle it was that I was alive, that I shouldn't be here, that I was a fighter. And there was no medical reason for me being here. But I didn't understand. I mean, I was still on so many drugs. My fever was still very high. And I was on a ventilator, so I couldn't talk. I couldn't mouth words. I had no way to communicate the way that I normally would. And so I actually was using what they call an alphabet board. And it was this board that had all the whole alphabet and numbers on it, I think. And I would blink my left eye for yes and my right eye for no. And I would slowly spell out words one letter at a time. It was so exhausting. It was so frustrating. But it was the only way I could communicate. And everyone kept telling me how fortunate I was to be alive. And I kept thinking, well, yeah, I mean, I could have landed on my face when I fell. I could have died in the accident. But I didn't realize what they were talking about. But they kept talking about this and kept talking about this. And finally, one day, I just spelled out on the alphabet board to my sister, was I sick? And she looked at me, her eyes got as huge as saucers, and she immediately began crying and saying, You don't remember? You don't know what you went through? And when I shook my head, no, she climbed into bed with me like she had been doing so many times and started to explain. Now I just have to segue here for a moment just to say that my sister had not left my side since she came to Rochester. My sister was my advocate. She was asking all these questions that my parents did not know to ask. And she really stood up for me as there were so many things that I didn't understand. Again, my sister Angie was my advocate. And little did we know how important her role would become. My sister, she's eight years older than me. And when she graduated high school, I was in fifth grade. So she had already built her own life. At one point, her and her husband, Scott, even lived in Ukraine. So she had her own adulthood, her own life, her own rhythm. And we loved each other deeply, but we weren't incredibly close before the accident because we were in such different stages of life. But now I was seeing that trauma collapses distance. And over the next weeks and months, my sister would become my rock, my protector, my interpreter, my calm, my safe place inside that hospital room. And so as she laid in bed with me, she explained what I had been through, how the doctors told them that I was not going to live, how close I had been to death. And in that moment, everything shifted because I had been wanting to die. I had been wishing that my life would end. And realizing how close I had come to getting that wish made me realize something deep down. Not fully yet, but deep down that I must be here for a reason. I didn't want to live, but I did. And if I had made it through that, if I had survived something that severe, then there had to be a reason. There had to be a purpose for my life. But the reality was the fight was far from over. I was still in a very fragile state. My lungs were full of fluid. Because of the pneumonia, there were pockets of fluid sitting in my lungs. And I was having such a hard time getting enough air. It constantly felt like I was suffocating, like I couldn't get a full breath, like I was dying. And respiratory therapy was always in my room, adjusting the settings on the ventilator because I felt like I was not getting enough air. And this would cause me to hyperventilate, cause me to panic. With all the fluid in my lungs, they had to suction my lungs constantly. And suctioning was the only thing that gave me relief. And they could only do it every 30 minutes. So I would watch the clock tick, tick, tick, waiting for that 30-minute mark. Because when they suctioned me, I would get maybe five, maybe 10 minutes where I could actually breathe a little easier. And then my lungs would fill back up again. And I would go right back to the feeling like I was suffocating. Tick, tick, tick. Honestly, it was one of the most awful feelings I've ever experienced. And at the same time, I kept asking about Serena. And what I found out was that while I was in my coma fighting for my life, she was also in a battle for hers. The doctors were telling her family that she had no brain activity. And they were telling them that they needed to disconnect life support. And just like my family, thankfully, they refused. They would not give up on her. And I am so incredibly grateful that they didn't because she survived too. And now my dream made sense. We were both in a battle for our lives at the same time. Find that so crazy in the timing of that. But during this time, my body was also reacting in ways that I did not understand. I was having intense hallucinations. I don't know if it was from all the pain medications I was taking or from my continued high fever. But in the following week, I had many things happen to me. There were times when I truly believed that the TV was talking directly to me. I also thought that every morning I woke up in a different room. I thought that while I was sleeping, they would move me to a different room because every day I had a different room. I had different colored walls. Some were like wood paneled, some were painted. Every morning I woke up with different color walls, whether it was different paint, different styles of walls. And at times, I even had a fireplace in my hospital room. It's crazy. I mean, I'm amazed what the mind can create, what isn't reality. And I had multiple times where I thought my nurses were being mean to me and were ignoring me when I was calling out for help, which was not true because all of my nurses were amazing. But I had times where I thought I was laying on a metal tray instead of a hospital bed. Just crazy things that my mind was creating. And I also remember hallucinating that my room was really dirty. And in my mind, that dirt was taking up the air in the room. That little bit of air that I had, I felt like it was being taken away from me. I also had a hallucination that I had a human-sized blood pressure cuff wrapped around my entire body and it was squeezing me tight, so tight that I couldn't get enough air. I constantly felt like I was dying. And now I was afraid of it. Before I had wanted my life to end, but after coming that close to death, I was terrified. I was afraid to go to sleep at night because I didn't know if I would wake up. I would only sleep during the day because I felt people were awake and would know if something happened, if I crashed, they'd be aware of it. So in order to sleep at night, people stayed with me. Friends and family took nights off of sleep so that I could be comforted throughout the night, so that I could rest, which was so crucial for my recovery and my healing, so that I wouldn't be alone, so that if something happened, someone would be there. Now, as I continued to fight through all of this, the doctors began telling me that they needed to take out the ventilator. Because the longer it stayed in, which this was in my mouth, the longer it stayed in, the more risk there was for infection. And trust me, the last thing I needed was more infection. So they told me that they needed to do a tracheotomy. And a tracheotomy is a surgical procedure where they create a hole in your throat and they insert a tube directly into your windpipe so that you can breathe through it. So instead of air going through your mouth and your nose, it goes directly into your lungs through this opening. And my family, oh goodness, my family kept telling me, oh, this was gonna be a good thing. You know, now the tube will be out of your mouth. So Tasha, you're gonna be able to mouth words. They're telling me this is gonna be a good thing. This is you're gonna you want this. And I still couldn't talk, but they were saying that I could mouth things with my with my with my word mouth, use words with my mouth. They just kept trying to assure me that this was gonna help, but I didn't want another surgery. I didn't want anything else done to my body. And after the surgery, I was so mad. It hurt so bad. My neck burned, and now I had a hole in my throat. But eventually, my family was right, the tracheotomy surgery would pay off because within a week or two, I was able to come off the ventilator. And that was a huge victory because it meant I was stable enough. I was stable enough to begin moving on to the next phase. And it also meant I could finally talk. I still had the tracheotomy, but I was off the ventilator. And I would still need to be suctioned, but I was breathing on my own. And after everything I had been through, I could finally use my voice again. And I had so much to say. This was the first time that I could finally explain. I could explain the hallucinations that I had been having. I mean, my family thought I was crazy when I was trying to explain things like having a human-sized blood pressure cup wrapped around me, or that the room was dirty and taking the air away from me by trying to spell it out on the alphabet board. But now I could finally explain what I had been experiencing, that I wasn't losing my mind, but I was talking too much. So much, sharing so much, and the doctors actually threatened to put the ventilator back in if I didn't stop talking. It's kind of a funny moment. I'd always been a talker, so, but I had so much to say. But it was a funny moment in the middle of such a challenging time. I do also want to mention that my boyfriend was visiting during this time. He was there through all of this and he was so sad at the fact that I had almost died. And I remember the look on his face. I remember the sadness on his face, the worry. I mean, he could not believe how close I had come to my life ending. And this really strengthened our relationship. And I knew that he really cared about me. I knew he really loved me. And I had so many of my friends that were visiting too. Crazy story: one friend actually walked into my room, saw all the machines and all the beeping, and my sister could see her standing there getting whiter and whiter as the seconds went on. And thankfully, my sister caught her because she was wearing bib overalls. So my sister just grabbed her by the straps as she went down. She passed out from how overwhelming this scene was. I thought, man, did I look, do I look that bad? It's pretty crazy. But I did have such an incredible support system. People visiting me, sitting with me, talking to me. I mean, the waiting rooms were always full with my friends and family and loved ones. And those visitors meant so much to me. I mean, it made the time go by faster because usually I was focusing on the clock for when I needed to get suctioned again. And I was so grateful for every single one of them because, again, made the time go by faster, made me take my mind off of the pain and take my mind off of really the struggles that I was having with breathing. And so as I started to improve more and more each day, my doctors continued talking about moving me to the rehabilitation unit. And shortly after I came out of the coma, occupational therapy and physical therapy had started visiting me. They started stretching my legs, stretching my arms, massaging my shoulders because they were so tense from all the stress and all the anxiety. And in those eight days that I had been sick, I had lost 50 pounds. 5-0. I was just skin and bone, and I can barely move anything with a little movement that I still had with my injury. And so I couldn't wait to move to the rehabilitation unit. I thought rehab was gonna have me walking and gaining back all of my strength. Little did I know, the hardest months were still yet to come. The next episode is titled Small Town Dreams, Big Lessons. We're gonna go back to my childhood. We'll talk about growing up in a small town, my personality, and the values that were being shaped in me as I grew up, the role of family, community, and faith in my early life, who I was becoming before the accident, and why that foundation mattered more than I ever could imagine later. Because resilience did not begin in the ICU. It began long before. So if this episode meant something to you, please, like I mentioned in the beginning, please subscribe. I would love for you to share it and join me next time as we step into my life before the accident. So thank you for being here. And remember, there was a time when I didn't want to live. And then there was a time when I almost didn't. And now I understand just how precious life really is. So if you're in a place where things feel hopeless, please hold on because your story is not finished yet.