‘Thank you is just not enough’

Near-dead victim credits rescuers for ‘this amazing life’

By Mary Garrigan , Journal staff | Monday, August 25, 2008

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Jaci Kennison and the Johnson Siding Volunteer Fire Department recently gave each other the gift of a happy ending.

Almost two years to the day after Jaci, 28, nearly died in a motorcycle accident on S.D. Highway 44 west of Rapid City, she walked into the fire station during the department’s monthly meeting to say “thank you” to all the people who helped saved both her life and her legs on Aug. 15, 2006.

Those two little words were insufficient to hold all the gratitude that Jaci feels, so she added heartfelt hugs, a few tears and a glimpse into a post-accident world that’s filled with more joy and beauty than she ever imagined possible.

“I have this amazing life now, and they gave that to me,” Jaci said. ‘Thank you’ is just not enough.”

Fire Chief Steven Smart and his crew assured Jaci and her parents, Larry and Micki Kennison, of Rapid City that it was.

“We always see the worst of it, and we never hear the follow up,” Smart said.

Happy endings in accidents as severe as Jaci’s are rare. When and if they do happen, medical privacy laws make it impossible for the ambulance crew members who responded to hear about them, Smart said. “So this is very special to us,” he said.

That Jaci, her parents and her grandmother returned on Aug. 19 to say “thanks” is not only highly unusual and much appreciated, it also helps boost morale in a department that, like all small fire departments in South Dakota, struggles to find enough volunteers to fill its ranks, Smart said.

“Something like this helps keep people’s spirits up,” he said. “Because we do care. That’s why we’re in the business.”

The severity of Jaci’s injuries made the ambulance call a memorable one for the fire department. Jaci, however, has no memory of the accident at the Falling Rock Road turnoff, just down the road from the Johnson Siding station. Instead, she has a thick folder of medical records and a body crisscrossed with scars to document it in excruciating detail.

She was the passenger on a motorcycle when the bike went down rounding the curve and launched Jaci into the path of an oncoming commercial trailer hauling a Bobcat skid-steer loader. Jaci and the bike driver survived, but nearly every bone on the left side of her body was broken – from her little toe to all eight of her ribs to her shoulder. Doctors used metal plates, screws and a halo-device to repair her ankle, knee cap, femur, pelvis, her left arm in two places and her scapula. She also punctured both lungs and lacerated her liver and her spleen.

For months after the accident, she assumed a scalpel-like wound across her abdomen was a surgical repair of some sort. Later, she found out it was caused when a ballpoint pen in the pocket of her purse sliced across her stomach.

The most horrific injuries were the wounds to her lower legs. The tires of the passing trailer ran over them, severing an artery in her right leg and shredding the muscles and tissue of both shins to the bone. Jaci almost bled to death at the accident scene, saved only by the makeshift tourniquets made from the shirt of a passerby and the belt of one of the emergency responders.

Because of the steep, forested terrain at the accident site, the ambulance crew had to transport Jaci back to the Lifeflight helicopter that had landed at the nearby fire station.

At Rapid City Regional Hospital, an emergency department team resuscitated her when her heart stopped. Doctors also delivered the blunt prognosis that her best chance for survival was amputation of both her legs.

Micki Kennison remembers being told, ‘If we can save her, we’ll have to take her legs.’

“I would not accept that,” she said. In a response that she describes now as more of an affirmation of his medical skills than a command, she told the doctor, “You WILL save her. And you WILL save her legs.”

In what has since become family legend, Micki’s daughter and husband suspect otherwise.

“My mom’s about 5-foot-2 -- she’s just this little tiny thing -- but she got right in his face, and told him you will save my daughter and you will save her legs,” her daughter said.

“It’s just a mother bear type of thing,” Micki said. “Your first reaction in that situation is ‘You will not take my child from me.’”

The Kennisons credit the skills of Dr. Wesley Sufficool with saving Jaci’s life in the emergency room that day, and Dr. Michael Kadrmas with saving her legs over the nearly two months she spent in the hospital.

Jaci says her mother’s nutritional support -- her insistence that she eat only fresh, whole, organic foods while in the hospital -- gave her body an exceptional ability to heal itself. “We don’t eat the foods we need for healing,” Jaci said. “Your body can’t heal on processed foods and sugar.” Instead, Micki delivered meals full of fresh fruits and vegetables and easily absorbable proteins to the hospital three times a day.

She also lists her father’s unflagging positive attitude for her own belief in her ability to walk again.

“My dad’s emotional support never wavered. He never let on to me that the doctors had ever even told them I probably would never walk again,” she said. “When I told him I wanted to walk by Halloween, he acted like he believed I would.”

It was slow and painful and she was on crutches, but Kennison walked on Oct. 31.

Micki says the power of prayer has a lot to do with her daughter’s recovery.

“We’re just very, very blessed people. There were people praying all over the world.”

Jaci doesn’t dismiss her mother’s belief, but says she also had to decide not to give in to bitterness and despair. “When they come in to clean your wounds and you know it’s going to hurt beyond anything you can possibly imagine, you have to decide. I don’t doubt the role of a higher power in all this, but I had a choice to make, too” she said.

Today, she has returned to many of the outdoor activities she enjoyed pre-accident -- hiking, biking, snow skiing and rock climbing. She does those things wearing knee braces and not without some pain, but she exults in every step.

Much to her mother’s dismay, Jaci also has returned to motorcycle riding.

“I figure if it had been a horse, everybody would say to me, ‘get back on.’ So I did.”

Their disagreement about motorcycles aside, mother and daughter say the accident changed their relationship for the better and made them the best of friends.

“We’re a lot closer now,” Micki said. “Jaci is so happy. She treasures every minute of the day.”

Instead of worrying about money and career and status, she focuses on people and relationships and love, trusting that everything else will take care of itself.

They all do more of that these days, Micki said.

“You can’t go through something like this and not have it make you reexamine your priorities,” she said.

Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8424 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com