David M. Beshears

On Friday, October 12, 2007 at 10:00 AM, I received a phone call from a Captain Anderson from the US Army. Our son, Sergeant First Class David Michael Beshears, had been severely injured in Afghanistan.

David was medivacked to Bagram, Afghanistan, then to Germany, and finally to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC. He lost consciousness somewhere en route to Bagram. Due to the concussive blast, he had suffered severe traumatic brain injury, major spinal and internal injuries.

We reached the Walter Reed campus gate, showed our identification and were passed through. We drove past the helipad up on the right, and were dropped off at the front doors to the hospital. In the coming weeks, our hearts would sink every time we heard a helicopter arriving. Another wounded kid was being brought in.

We signed in, went to the elevators and up to the fourth floor. We walked a maze of hallways to Surgical ICU (SICU).

Stepping into our son’s room sent my mind spinning. There was my boy in the hospital bed, barely recognizable and yet immediately identifiable. Ventilator tubes crawled out of his mouth, strung to his left and attached themselves to a machine with banks of buttons, LED readings and glowing red numbers.

A wire protruded from his skull, attached to a line that ran from his brain to a machine next to his head, this also flashing a number: the pressure inside his skull.

A massive neck brace kept his head from moving. The concern wasn’t that David would move on his own, but that shifting would occur when medical staff had to work with him.

Mounted on the wall behind him were green oxygen tanks and clear plastic bottles, some providing moisture to David’s ventilation, some collecting moisture from the breath that the machines pushed out of his lungs.

Near the ventilation equipment was a two-foot high box that served as a thousand dollar thermometer.

On David’s right was a wheeled rack apparatus containing a number of different medicines, all fed through blue plastic boxes with more flashing numbers, all sending their drugs along tubes running down to collection points surgically attached to his upper chest like Borg implants.

A weight apparatus kept David’s left leg pulled toward the end of the bed.

Above his head and to one side was the monitor that displayed heart rate and blood pressure. A line ran down from this and directly into his arm. The blood pressure reading was arterial, getting its measurements from inside the artery.

In the midst of all this technology, a twenty dollar floor fan had been placed on a metal folding chair in the corner. It struggled to keep the room from becoming too hot.

The walls on the left and right were simple curtains that separated David from other SICU patient stations. Having curtains rather than solid walls allowed staff to quickly rush from one patient to the next in the event of an emergency where every second counted.

This would happen more than a few times during our time there.

Seeing intensive care television program sets on TV in no way prepared us for that moment when we stepped into that room for the first time, and the heart-wrenching reality of SICU would be reinforced every day over the coming weeks and will stay with me forever.

David was enveloped in this grotesque nest of medical equipment, at once advanced and yet strangely primitive, all working to keep him alive. None of it was meant to make him better. Its sole purpose for being was to keep him from dying.

Beyond the near visual overload and the claustrophobic sensations was the noise. Sounds reached out from every piece of equipment; hissing, breathing, beeping, whining, whistling; all fighting for attention. Alarms sounded to alert staff that a drug was running low or that David’s blood pressure was climbing again, or that his heart rate was too high or too low, or that his brain was swelling beyond acceptable limits, or that his lung expiration readings weren’t what they should be.

I pushed my way through the overwhelming sights and the sounds and stood at my son’s bedside. I rested a hand on his arm, reached over and cautiously touched his face. I brushed his brow, just as I had when he was little. I wanted desperately to hold him, but even if I could get through all the paraphernalia, I was afraid of doing more damage.

He was so swollen; arms, legs, torso, neck, face. Some of this was from the implosion, but most of it was from the medicines that they were giving him.

Though the doctors did not know initially, no shrapnel had penetrated David’s body. The damage was from the sheer force of the concussive blast within the Humvee, and the sudden, explosive pressure of the side of the vehicle slamming into his side. His body was a deep, deep purple along the left side of his torso, from the armpit to down past his hip.

He had a deep, wide wound running down the center of his belly, three inches wide and more than a foot long. This had occurred not as a result of the blast, but later at the hospital in Bagram. This was the exploratory surgery that they had told me about. They had gone in looking for internal injuries. They had found some.

The wound they left behind was deep, wide, discolored, messy and ugly. It was packed now with gooey gauze that needed changing several times a day.

We spent only a little time with David before the staff had to begin making preparations to take him to surgery. They brought in portable versions of some of the monitors, reattached ventilation lines to the equipment that they mounted onto the bed, and wheeled David out. Much of this would be reattached to equipment in the operating room.

We were told that this would be a very long surgery, so we were surprised when after only an hour or so we were called out into the hall by the surgical team.

They had to stop, or David would have died on the table.

That was day one at Walter Reed.

My wife Sylvia and I spent six weeks at Walter Reed Hospital arriving there the day after our son was flown in from Afghanistan, where his small unit had been training Afghan police units, traveling rural roads in a pair of Humvees. An IED blast had sent the forward vehicle twenty feet in the air. He suffered severe traumatic brain injury, major spinal and numerous other internal injuries.

After six weeks, David was stable enough for the polytrauma facility in Palo Alto, California. Thanksgiving week 2007, we left DC and flew cross country, David in a cargo jet medivac a couple of hours behind us.

The next seven months at Palo Alto were filled with dramatic ups and downs as David climbed oh-so-slowly up from the lowest levels of consciousness. It wasn’t until a week before we brought him home that we were told “there is no impediment to David becoming fully conscious”; this was quite an improvement over what we had been told just a few weeks earlier when they were recommending what were essentially warehouses for “people in David’s condition”.

Bringing David home, we knew we had years of work ahead of us, but there was never any question that our son was going to get whatever it took to make him better. We targeted 100 percent recovery in spite of being advised that we should be realistic. We had been told again and again “this may be all you’re going to get”, but each time David blew past their expectations. Why then would we ever put a limit on his recovery? We’re going for it all. If in the end we don’t get there, at least we’ll have given David every chance to come fully back to us.

For months we sought out the therapists and facilities and medical expertise that would best help David along the road to recovery. We met dozens of sincere and dedicated people, all working tremendously hard. There is a largely unseen world out there that struggles daily to support those with disabilities. But the resources can be difficult to find, difficult to gain access to once you do find them, and from where we live, a long way to go and a difficult commute.

We work hard to have our son approved for each benefit. We research and identify and jump through all the hoops to get this therapy or that, this equipment or that, sometimes struggling for months to see results. And we feel fortunate at each accomplishment, aware that for our success, there must be so many others who fail.

Despite the success that we have had, David is not recovering as well or as quickly as he might. While we have been able to bring some of what he needs to him, any real expertise that targets TBI and other disabilities is a good distance away, the commute nightmarish. Additionally, the services that are out there are provided by many different entities, each requiring a different approach to access.

So was born the idea of creating a community center where we live; a facility offering those with disabilities everything that we have been working so hard to bring to our son.

So I designed a facility around what we felt David, and we as his supporting family, needed. Also, what obstacles had we faced? What pitfalls can we help others avoid? What is out there but difficult to access? What have I not been able to find at all? Finally, what would a really great facility look like, designed exclusively for a person with a disability and his or her family?

Next came the glaring question of how to get such a facility going.

It was about this same time that a number of people who had been receiving the email updates on David’s status over the previous few years began asking that I bring all those updates together so that they could go back through them.

And so was born the next idea… put all the updates together into a book, wrapped within a narrative, and offer the book as a way to raise funds for the community center. That is how Climb the Mountain came to be, and hopefully how the center will soon come to be.

My heart aches for the day that we wheel David through the front doors and into our community center for the first time. I long even more for the day that he stands and walks out those doors on his own.

For now, as we struggle to get the community center going, we work every day to make David better; and he is getting better, though these days progress is painfully slow. It is only when we look back to Walter Reed and then Palo Alto that we realize just how far he’s come; how far we all have come.

For more information on our son’s journey: David’s Journey
For info on Climb the Mountain: Greybeard Publishing