The Moth - 25 Years of Stories: Critical Crash

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

This week, remembering a very special storyteller. This episode is hosted by Sarah Austin Jenness. Host: Sarah Austin Jenness Storyteller: T. Dixon

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. GoodLamoth.org forward slashordSlashHuston to experience a live show near you. That's theMoth.org-FordSlashHuston. Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Sarah Austin-Jonesse, your host for this week. Many things are happening in the world right now, and we're here today to remember joy, and to muster up a little hope.

In every Moth main stage we direct, we try our best to include a few local storytellers. Years ago, I heard this great open-mic slam story from a woman named T. Dixon who was living in Los Angeles. She was an army veteran, a trauma surgeon, a volunteer, a dog lover, a writer, basically a modern-day shira, a woman who did it all. So I called her and I asked her to be our local storyteller in an LA mainstage called State of Affairs. She agreed and we called each other a few times a week leading up to the show to develop her story.

The night before the Moth mainstage, after the rehearsal, we had dinner with the whole cast. T and I sat next to each other, and she told me stories the whole night. Other stories than the one she had been working on. She was like a jukebox of stories. She had lived through it all, saved lives in combat, saved lives in hospitals all over the world, and she still laughed with every anecdote she told. T didn't drink, and the night before that show, I heard stories of her nights on the military base with all the male marines where she sneakily poured the shots out over her shoulders instead of drinking them, stories from her family in the south, stories of her

trusty pickup truck, and how she adopted her dog. Tee was basically a dream. Whip smart, the kind of cool you can't manufacture, beautiful and joyous. She was everything we all wanted to be. Everyone had a little crush on her, including me. Tee passed away this year after 48 years of touching people's lives and making the world a better place. We thought we'd give you the chance

to listen to her once again. T told this story in 2018 with them off at Avalon Hollywood in Los Angeles. Here's T. So, I'm a physician, a surgeon actually, and that took a lot of sacrifice and a lot of time to get all of that training done. And over that time I went to four years of undergraduate and four years of medical school. At first I thought I wanted to be an anesthesiologist, so I did some training in that before doing my surgery training. And then ultimately I did trauma critical care and burn surgery fellowship down here actually but that's 16 years of training and at the worst of it I was at Hopkins in Baltimore and it was before

the 80 hour work week rule and so we were working about 134 hours a week and there's only 168 hours in a week. I mean like in the entire week right? So that's 34 hours to eat, sleep, and hopefully sleep with your girlfriend you know. I mean not a lot of time for the important stuff people. So at one point I went like 93 days without a day off. I'm talking no Saturdays, no Sundays, just 93 consecutive days. And when we were on call, it was usually every other day, every other night, and it was in the hospital, it wasn't home call. And so we'd go in at 4 a.m.

and you might not get home until 4, 6 p.m. the next day. So 36, 40 hours on, a few hours off, and you're back at 4 a.m. One of those times my counterpart, the other resident, was sick, and so I ended up in the hospital for four days without leaving own call. And I'm not talking about the call room. I'm talking about work. And so it was like 101, 102 hours.

And that's why there's a saying in surgery that is, eat when you can, sleep when you can, and don't fuck with the pancreas. But that's another story. So anyway, there was one point when I was in residency, I was going through a really tough time just personally. There's not enough, a lot of time, like I said, for your personal life. And it was just a dark time for me.

I was in a dark place. I didn't know if I wanted to continue with my surgery training. I didn't know if I wanted to continue with medicine at all. I was depressed. I mean, I was just, I was really hurting. And at the time, I was depressed. I mean, I was just, I was really hurting. And at the time, I was the chief of the trauma surgery service, and we got this call. We got this patient that was coming in, this girl. And the story from the paramedics is she, it was her 16th birthday, and she

wanted to take a drive. She wanted to get in her car by herself and go to McDonald's and come back home. Well, she didn't put on her seatbelt and she took a curve a little too fast. She goes flying off this curve, which was on a hill. So she goes flying off the hill, through the windshield, and then the car flipped over and landed on top of her. So this is a devastating crash, and she's unconscious, obviously,

and has to be intubated, which means a breathing tube put in at the scene. And she comes into us and she has a head injury that is horrific that could have killed her. She had bilateral lung contusions that could kill her still and she had a grade four liver fracture that could kill her.

She had a grade five splinic fracture that could kill her and a grade five pelvis fracture that could kill her. I mean grade five pelvis fracture that could kill her. I mean, this girl was broken. You know, I mean, I guess we kind of both were at that point in time, but that night was insane. And I get her to the intensive care unit and get her on a ventilator, and we're starting this massive transfusion.

Normally, we had to take that spleen out, you know, you don't need to need your spleen out. You don't need your spleen. But we were afraid to open the abdomen for fear that it'd let loose that liver. And ain't nobody living without a liver. I mean, it's in the name, liver. You got to have a liver. So we couldn't do that.

So this crazy transfusion, just trying to keep her alive, minute by minute. And at some point, I hear that the parents have arrived. The crash was in a small town. So even though this, this chick, we don't know who this 16-year-old is, she's just Jane Dota. She's a random patient. And so her, but her parents knew that she'd had a crash and they knew where the medics

were bringing her. And so they're, they've gone through administration all in there in the consultation room. So I finally get sort of a tiny little minute that I can go and just kind of update them. And I end up alone with them for a minute. And you know, and as I was walking there, I was thinking, you know, these five injured, any one of these injuries could kill her. Like this is so awful right now. And I have to go and prepare this family. I have to let them know how bleak this is so awful right now, and I have to go and prepare this family. I have to let them know how bleak this is, but I also don't want to squash any hope they may have, because that doesn't help anybody, you know, to squash that.

So it's one of those weird things in trauma surgery, especially in the intensive care unit, where the doctors and the nurses are spending almost as much time taking care of the family as they are the patients who are oftentimes not with it or completely unconscious, you know. And so it's a very delicate balance to do this job. And so I end up alone with them for a minute in this consultation room and I say to them, you know, I just want you to understand, I don't know if she'll make it through the night, you know.

And I'm going through all these five injuries and how each one of them are trying to take our life as we speak. And I said, she's 16. I mean, as best I can tell, she's a healthy, fit 16-year-old. And if anybody could beat it, that would be it. They're still hysterical. They're sobbing. That was the closest thing I could give them to any kind of hope.

And so I'm like, but I gotta get back in there, she's real critical. And so I stand up to leave and I'm walking to the door and all of a sudden the sobbing stops. And it's like everything calmed down. And the mom says, she's gonna be okay. And my hands on the door and I stop and I turn back around and I said, ma'am, what? And she said, she's going to be okay. Her name is Savannah and she kind of points at me.

Your patient doe is Savannah. And I looked down and I'm wearing the appropriate scrub top for that hospital, but for whatever reason, and I think it's the first time it ever happened, I was wearing the inappropriate bottoms. My scrub bottoms were for my medical school and I had done my clinical rotations in Savannah, Georgia. So Savannah was written across my ass. And that was just what they needed, that little tiny bit of encouragement.

And if my ass can bring hope to the people. I'm here to help. What can I say? So anyway, so I was grateful that they had some shred of hope, but you know, I walked out of there and I was like, that was funny. But you know, but oh my gosh, you know, this girl's still dying, you know. So I rushed back in there and you know,

and it was just, I mean, I never left her bedside. And it was just insane the entire night. And she didn't make it through the night. But then every day it was like that. There was, you know, it was a constant battle to keep her alive. And, you know, I'll go in there and I'll be like, hey Savannah, it's Dr. T, she's unconscious. And, you know, I'll go in there and I'll be like, hey Savannah, it's Dr. T, she's unconscious,

but, you know, I'm still talking to her. And we had to do a lot of painful procedures on her during that time to help get her through this. You know, she had, you know, chest tubes put in, chest tubes taken out, those chest tubes are very large. They're like garden hose size tubes that go in between your ribs to drain off fluid, air, and blood from around the lungs so the lungs can work better. And she had to have those procedures multiple times. I put in multiple central lines which are like

really large IVs that go in your neck. And ultimately obviously we had to give her a tracheotomy, which is a breathing tube through the neck as opposed to through the mouth. It's a more stable, long-term treatment for somebody on a ventilator, particularly with a bad head injury and a feeding tube. So there were all these things, and I tried to warn her before I did anything to her and just continued to take care of her. We made it through day by day, but still, you know, you knew that they were going to come complications from all these.

Like, these were too horrible of an injury to get away with just, oh, you're healed. You know, so it was just like, when is the next complication coming? When is the next fight for her life coming? And it was like that every day and week after week. And even at that, we're like, even if we get her through this, we don't know if one day she's gonna wake up at all. And if she does, with that brain injury, will she be catatonic? Will she be in a regress state?

Will she just have some deficits? I mean, we had no idea. But I took care of her on that intensive care unit for two or three months, and then I consulted through the Vascular Surgery Service for some blood clots for a few more months. But after about five months or so, it was time for me to move on. I rotated out to a different hospital in that same town. And I lost track of her.

I mean, that service had anywhere from 30 to 50 patients on it at any given time. And I mean, I treated hundreds of patients over those same months that I was taking care of Savannah. So I lost track of a lot of patients. And I went on to go back to the, I mean, it was the same as it was there, but you know, 100 plus hours a week and just a high stress, you know, job all the time. And I was still struggling and still didn't know what I wanted to do in my personal life. I didn't know what I wanted to do in my career. And with surgery, the stresses are as much mental as they are just the time. It's not just the physical tiredness and the time,

but the type of person that took my work home with me a lot, so I would worry about the patients in the cases, even when I was off duty. And so it was a very difficult time. And I just felt like I was really just kind of limping along during that time. So about a year after Savannah's surgery, or about that not surgery, but after her accident that she had, I was back in that same intensive care unit again, and I don't know where she

was. And, you know, and I'm working on all these patients. And one day I'm talking to this nurse and if you hadn't noticed, I'll talk a little loud. That's just normal. And so I'm talking to this nurse across the way, and this girl approaches me, and she is like, hey. I'm like, oh, hey. And I don't know who she is.

And she lowers a shirt a little bit in the front to show me a tracheotomy scar. And just about the time I realize who she is, she says, it's me, Savannah. And I was like, oh my gosh, you know, she looked great. She was healthy and she was talking to me and she only had one class to make up so she could graduate with her fellow, you know, high schoolers and she was so excited.

And it was so much better than, you know know I ever thought that she would be after all that she had been through and all those those injuries she had and then all of a sudden it occurred to me I was like wait a minute how do you know who I am but you've never met me you were unconscious every time I ever took care of you and she said well, I recognize your voice. You are the one who talked to me. So all those times that I would say Savannah, this is gonna hurt, but I'm gonna do everything I can to try to make it as painless as possible, but it's gonna hurt a little bit.

She had heard me, and she remembered it. And so I knew that treating people like a human being, it does matter, and it does make a difference. And for me, that's when I finally realized that all that sacrifice and all that blood, sweat, and tears, it was worth it. Thank you. That was T. Dixon. Raised in the deep south, T went on to medical school and then to the United States Army

and was a combat veteran of the Iraq War. She worked as everything from a tutor to a trash collector to a waitress in addition to her work in medicine and surgery. Tee was a volunteer for Mission Continues, Wounded Warrior Project, Team RWB, Habitat for Humanity, and Team Rubicon. She passed away this year. In memory and in honor of Tee, even in the darkness, look for that hope, that silver lining.

And let's please not forget Tee's words of wisdom, eat when you can, sleep when you can, and don't fuck with the pancreas. For 2022, we've been counting down each year of the Moth's 25 years of existence, and we are honored to feature T's story for our 2018 episode. If you have a story you'd like to pitch us, we'd love to hear it. Find details about that and the Moth's forthcoming book, How To Tell A Story at the Moth.org.

Thanks so much for listening. Sarah Austin-Genez is a director, the Moth's executive producer, and a co-author of the forthcoming book, How To Tell a Story, the essential guide to memorable storytelling from the Moth. This episode of the Moth podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Jones, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Solinger. The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bulls, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham,

Marina Klucce, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Inga Gluvaski, and Aldi Kaza. All Moth Stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio, more public at PRX.org. Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at perex.org.