I Was Internally Decapitated. That Was Just the Beginning

My family rode motorcycles for many years, and then we got out of it and sold our bikes. A couple of years went by and I got the bug again, so my husband and I bought a motorcycle that we fell in love with.

I wanted to ride the new bike, but my husband was out of town camping. I didn't want to go out by myself, so I called my dad.

I just I followed my dad and we went over Cheaha Mountain in Alabama. It's in my home county, and a road I'm very familiar with. We rode for over an hour and I had no issues.

But then, as we're coming down the mountain, there was a long sharp curve that went to the left.

My dad was ahead, going around the curve a little bit faster than me because I was on the new bike so had slowed down. He was watching for me to come around the curve and saw my headlight wobble and then the bike fell over.

I don't really know what happened. I was trying to go to the left and the bike just wasn't. There was a point where I knew I wouldn't make the curve and was about to wreck.

I hit the guardrail, which stopped my body. I don't remember the impact. I had a helmet on, and its weight and propulsion pulled my head off my spine.

Its official medical name is atlanto-occipital dislocation, but it's also called internal decapitation.

That was the main injury, but I also tore both of my carotid arteries and both of my vertebral arteries; I had lung damage; I had a big open wound on my chin; my arm almost got cut off and was paralyzed for several weeks; my liver, spleen, and adrenal glands were bleeding; I broke my back in three places; and I had a very bad tibial plateau fracture just below my knee.

It was overwhelming multi-system trauma. But obviously, the internal decapitation was the most critical injury and not something many people survive.

I was quite a bit away from my bike. My dad had to turn around and ride back up the road to find me, and said that I was just hanging on the guardrail, not breathing. He thought I was dead.

Before my accident, I worked for over 10 years as a paramedic, so I have a medical background, but I always wondered how I survived when so many others experience "instant death".

I was aware that I was going to crash. I had time to say in my head: This is gonna hurt.

Then it was like turning off a light switch. I didn't feel any pain.

I know I was conscious at some point because I have a vague memory of lying in the road looking up at the sky and hearing myself screaming. Then I could hear my dad.

Fortunately, from that day, I don't remember the pain.

Apparently, I went into work mode because I knew I was hurt really bad, and was telling people to call a helicopter, which is something I'd do as a paramedic.

My husband and I have the Life360 app. It shows family and friends your location, how fast you're driving, and has crash detection, which calls your emergency contact and provides your location.

My Life360 detected the crash and immediately called my husband. He understood there had been a crash before answering because he knew I was on the motorcycle.

My husband is a paramedic too and he was supposed to be at work that day in the county where I wrecked. Had he been at work, that was his call. We're so glad that didn't happen.

My coworkers ran the call. They know us both very well.

One of the medics had a hard time after. We haven't talked too much about it yet, but I'm supposed to do a podcast soon with one of the paramedics who responded. My boss was there too. They all thought I wasn't going to make it.

I don't think any of them suspected internal decapitation. It's not something people survive. Usually, they're done, and you'd never transport that patient. They were all shocked to find out my injury.

I have asked my neurosurgeon so many times how I survived. We've become friends.

Religious people will say it's God. I don't know if it was a higher power or if I was incredibly lucky or my spinal cord is just that strong. I have no idea.

But ICU was very hard for me. For my family, too. I don't know which side of that coin is harder.

My first surgery was to fuse my head back onto my spine. My husband was prepared that I could have a stroke or be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life or need a permanent ventilator.

I survived that surgery and things were getting better. But then about two weeks later I had a complication that nobody could have seen coming. There's no case as far as I'm aware documented in the medical journals. I was a unicorn.

I started complaining of a headache. In neuro-ICU, everybody's probably got a headache, and I had already been cleared from neurosurgery. Nobody was really concerned about my headache, but it kept getting worse and worse.

My husband was in the room and noticed my oxygen level started falling sharply. Basically, I quit breathing. I blew both my pupils, lost a gag reflex, and went into a coma.

The internal decapitation was so severe that my brain shifted a little bit and sits down further. It occluded that natural outflow of your CSF, which is the fluid in your brain. Unbeknownst to anybody, I was collecting fluid.

When your brain has nowhere else to go, there's a hole at the base of your skull and you herniate through it. When your brain swells, it's very quickly fatal, and something else people don't survive.

Fortunately, I was in ICU around a bunch of doctors who realized what was happening.

They drilled into my skull to put a drain at bedside. They had already removed my breathing tube, but they couldn't put it back in because I was in a halo. I was in that halo for eight or nine weeks. So they had to do a tracheotomy, and now have a scar I lovingly refer to as my neck butthole.

I was back on the ventilator for a long time and, surprisingly, survived.

During that life-saving moment, I woke up.

I was paralyzed and couldn't talk as they were actively drilling and things were happening. I was aware enough to know this was lifesaving, but I couldn't tell anybody and say: Hey, I can feel this, I'm here!

That was hard. I couldn't tell anybody what happened for a few days because I went back into a coma, and then was on a ventilator so I couldn't talk or communicate that to anybody.

My sister is a procurement nurse with Legacy of Hope, which handles organ donations in Alabama. When someone is brain dead and donates their organs, she takes them to recover the organs.

She works at the hospital I was in. When my brain herniated, they had to lock her out of everything because I was now in that system to be an organ donor. Her team was following me, anticipating that I would be a donor.

Fortunately, I came through. But I didn't even know that for a whole year until she sat me down and told me.

It felt like reading your own obituary. To be labelled as a likely organ donor—that weirded me out.

After my brain herniated, I got aspiration pneumonia, which is where I had had a bunch of blood and vomit getting into my lungs and made me sick. After that, they found that I had a liver infection, too. I had like a temperature of 104 and they couldn't figure out why.

They would put a cooling blanket on me. The cooling blanket, the halo, the tracheostomy tube—it was all so barbaric.

You just don't think about that as a health care provider. You just do what you've got to do, and you know what your patient needs, but you can't possibly understand the mental experience that they are having.

With my story, I hope to help bridge that gap in understanding between patients and their health care providers, especially in the ICU setting. I feel we don't hear the patient experience talked about very much. What are they going through? What are they feeling?

Because of my medical background, I feel able to better communicate the issues to doctors and nurses than a lot of other patients can. It's important to me to help make them more aware of what patients go through.

For example, I still will not let anybody near my neck after the tracheotomy.

They would have to suction my tracheotomy tube and probably don't think much about it.

But it felt to me like when you're swimming and hold your breath until you can't any longer, and then you break the surface to take in a breath—only, the chance to breathe is suddenly taken away from you again because the suction restarts. It's very hard to explain, but it's a necessary evil.

More than anything, my husband got me through. He was he was there every single day. My husband, my dad—I just felt very supported, encouraged and validated throughout.

My main ICU nurse, Stacey, was amazing. If there was a day when I needed to pitch an absolute tantrum, she just let me. If I needed to cuss someone out, she let me. And then it was OK. I had a safe space to complain or cry or be angry or whatever.

When things got very dark in the ICU, and I was obviously struggling and on a mental downfall, Stacey said: I tell you what, if you get off this ventilator, we're going to take you up to the helipad and we're going to watch the sunset.

At that point, I had been in the ICU for six weeks. And when I finally got off the ventilator, they did it. The process took an hour and a half to move me and all of the equipment. Stacey, another nurse Haley, and my respiratory therapist that day Connie took me to the helipad.

We watched the sunset over the hospital and I ugly cried. My husband and the nurses were ugly crying. And in that moment, they saw me not as a patient, but as a woman and a human who needed a reason to want to live and a reminder that it's not always going to be this hard.

I've adopted that as my personal motto: It's not always going to be this hard.

You don't know when it may come, but at some point, you're going to have a good day again.

We took a bunch of pictures and months and months later, UAB Hospital—a renowned institution that I was fortunate enough to be—did a write-up on my story.

Months go by again and we're sitting at home when my phone starts blowing up. I'm like: What in the world?

Well, it turned out The Good Doctor on ABC had used the story for their season finale. They referenced a case in Alabama of internal decapitation, and they took their patient up to watch the sunset. The show's scene and my pictures are identical. It was wild.

At this point, I'm about as good as I'm ever going to get.

I have a lot of like weakness in my right leg. My hamstring doesn't work. I've had multiple surgeries since I got out of the hospital. I'm not able to turn my head very much because it's fused with titanium rods. I can't bend over and do a bunch of chores, but I can walk and drive.

The biggest issue that I have is pain, in my neck and my leg mostly.

I can't work as a paramedic anymore because I can't do the lifting and climbing. I've lost my income because I don't have a job. I also got denied for disability. I'm in that process right now. My lawyer told me it's because of my age and that I'm educated. That's the U.S. for you.

But for what has happened to me, my deficits are minor. I don't borrow trouble. I'm just really, really happy to be where I'm at.

Even in my marriage, the perspective of everything is so much different.

Last year, we were going to the beach for vacation. We have a camper. And it's about a six-plus hour drive. On the way, we blew all four tires. Not even at the same time. We would drive a little while and blow a tire. And then we would drive a little more and blow a tire.

Normally, that would just put you in the worst space imaginable on your vacation. But we laughed about it and my husband looked at me and said: You know what? We may be out here in 90 degrees changing tires, but we're not in ICU.

I was like: Amen! And we just had a ball.

I feel a responsibility to use what I've been through to impact people in a positive way. I use my YouTube channel to answer people's questions about my story, and because I'm passionate about bridging that gap in understanding between patients and their health care providers.

But also, I just want to stress to people: Quit caring about what others think; quit being scared about embarrassing yourself for wearing the bathing suit or starting a YouTube channel or whatever it is you want to do.

Be unbothered. Don't let your anxiety about what people think take that away from you. Don't be so timid. Don't be so scared. I wake up every day incredibly glad to be here. And I just wish I was able to have this perspective without going through what I did.

I don't think I'll ever be able to say I'm glad it happened to me. That feels very wrong.

But I can say that I am very happy. I feel just very grateful and very determined to live my life to the best I can in the time that I have.

Christy Bullock is a survivor of atlanto-occipital dislocation, also known as internal decapitation, after a motorcycle crash. She is documenting her story on her YouTube channel, LittleTraumaMama. She lives in Alabama with her family.

All views expressed are the author's own.

As told to Shane Croucher.

Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? Email the My Turn team at myturn@newsweek.com.