By Bella Munson
My younger sister and I didn’t often get along growing up. We loved each other like family was obligated to but fought more often than not. I often hated her for how happy she was, how easy life and friendship seemed to come to her.
As she entered her freshman year of high school and I my junior year that didn’t change much, except when it came to soccer.
It was almost like a miracle. She was always more athletically gifted, but that also meant she didn’t put as much concerted effort into developing her soccer skills. For once, the natural gifts I was always so jealous of worked against her.
Sammy wanted to make the JV team when soccer tryouts came around in late August, so she asked me to help her practice. It was less a recognition of any skill I might possess and more the need for a physical body to train with. I didn’t care. I was honored to help.
She ended up making the JVC roster. I made the JV roster. She was far and away the best player on the roster amongst those who had never kicked a ball before, but she wasn’t as good as the girls on JV who had played SELECT for years. One month of practice couldn’t stand up to years.
The first, and only, time we got to travel together and watch one another play was when the JV and JVC teams took the ferry across the sound to play Bainbridge High School.
Watching her play, I felt a sense of sisterly pride I don’t remember experiencing before. This game was my opportunity to witness her hard work and loudly, publicly cheer her on.
I sat amongst a throng of teammates chatting, doing homework and listening to music at the top of the covered concrete bleachers. An area somewhere between five rows high and 20 seats long was littered with Ingraham duffel bags and backpacks, providing safety in numbers to protect all of our property. From that perch I watched my sister outplay her opponents and teammates for one half.
But the games were back-to-back so JV had to start warming up before the JVC game finished. As a goalkeeper I had individual warmups. This meant a unique combination of repetitive catches, warming up the cold hard foam of my goalie gloves through repeated hits of the round leather ball, and diving side to side on the ground. This prepared my body for all the times it was about to collide with the spongy yet painfully solid turf.
The routine brought familiarity to every single game I played no matter the newness of the venue. I was in some small turf-covered, fenced-in pen that was almost certainly meant for some sort of track event. It was somewhere I had truly never been before, but that was okay because I had my routine.
I held in my disdain as my routine was interrupted by the JVC goalkeeper who was panicked and out of breath.
“Something happened to Sammy. A ball was kicked really hard into her face, but she kept playing. Then she passed out on the field. She woke back up but isn’t really making sense. I think they are calling an ambulance. You should go to her.”
Suddenly, nothing else mattered.
I tried to remain calm as I hurriedly jogged the length of the soccer field to reach her.
She was laying down in the back of one of those modified golf carts with a truck bed that only professionals, private schools and public schools in rich neighborhoods have. The Bainbridge athletic trainer was calmly looking over my sister sprawled across the metal bed; teammates had used their bags and jackets to prop her head up.
The athletic trainer asked Sammy her name. She didn’t remember.
I don’t remember how long I waited in that truck bed before the distant wail of ambulance sirens brought my spiraling thoughts back to the scene of my helpless sister.
She was in no condition to walk across the field and out of the stadium to the ambulance. So the modified golf cart transported me, the trainer, and my sister out to where the paramedics would arrive.
People were saying things at me that barely registered, even as I calmly responded and made decisions. Teammates, parent chaperones, coaches, the athletic trainer and paramedics — it was all going through me.
It was the paramedics’ turn to evaluate my sister to see if and where the ambulance needed to take her. They asked her to remember a fact — that the grass was green. Less than a minute later she was answering that the grass was blue.
She didn’t seem like she was in pain; if anything she almost seemed like someone high on marijuana with massive giggles. She was out of it, loopy like she had just come out of sedation.
The paramedics decided she needed to go to Harborview, where all of King County’s most severe medical emergencies are sent. We had to leave right away. Otherwise we would miss the earliest ferry.
I had my backpack with my cellphone but the rest of me and my sister’s stuff was in the piles of bags back in the stadium. If I was going to go in the ambulance with her I had to leave it all and go. Through the chaos of my sister being loaded into the ambulance, my teammate, Hannah, reassured me that everything was going to be okay. She said she would take care of all of our stuff.
Going from the chaos surrounding the ambulance to the quiet, sterile inside of the truck itself was the opposite of calming. I was surrounded by white and silver drawers containing every possible medical supply possible while sitting on a bench embedded in the wall of supplies. I was afraid to touch anything or take up too much space. At the same time I felt I needed to be strong like a mother would be in that situation.
The paramedic sharing the treatment cabin started to fill out some paperwork. He asked my sister her name, address and parents’ phone numbers. She knew her name this time, but the address and phone numbers she recited were complete nonsense. As tears welled up in my eyes, I could blurrily see the paramedic starting to write the address she had told him.
I guess the adrenaline had worn off because I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Tears began to flow unfettered as I asked him, “Do you want our actual address? That’s not it.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said nonchalantly as if my sister’s nonsensical response was no big deal.
I could tell he thought I was being dramatic. But I was 16 sitting in the back of an ambulance with my sister spewing absolute nonsense after a head injury and my parents weren’t answering their phones. I couldn’t stop crying. Still I felt myself shrinking into my cutout seat in shame.
Finally, I reached my mom on the phone. I explained everything while the driver kindly told my sister she got to ride with the sirens on so that we could make it on the ferry. She was enthused and smiling. I still had a massive fear rumbling in the pit of my stomach.
We made it on the ferry, and Sammy was becoming more coherent. While our sterile medical chamber travelled across the rough Sound, my parents and the paramedics decided we could take Sammy to Seattle Children’s Hospital instead of Harborview.
The following hours spent in the hospital felt like seconds compared to those first 30 minutes of crisis. I wouldn’t leave her side until I physically wasn’t allowed into the CT scan room with her. She was surrounded by professionals, and with my parents on the way, she wasn’t alone. I wanted to still advocate for my sister, but decisions no longer went through me. The pressure on me was off.
She was okay. That is what mattered.
I like to think this was the scariest experience of my life because I care so deeply about my sister. But really I was terrified that I would handle things wrong and never be able to forgive myself if an injury took or changed her life. Or worse, my family would never forgive me. I guess it motivated me to do my best, and both can be true.
When we arrived home late that night, Hannah had dropped off all of our bags and equipment to our house, along with some tubs of ice cream. What the relationship of ice cream is to healing a head injury I don’t know. But it was a welcome surprise after one of the longest nights of my short life.
What would I have done without the support of all those people?
What would have happened without the kindness and support of all those throughout the night who I had never met before, whose names I had never learned and that I never saw again?
Sammy suffered a concussion that wasn’t all that bad in the end. But it took a village to ensure her health and safety.