Arnold student focuses on positives after freak accident

PANAMA CITY BEACH — Kaitlyn Beckham’s casual jog over the Hathaway Bridge on Nov. 17 nearly resulted in her death through an almost incomprehensible conversion of events.

Moments after passing the three-mile mark on a training run aimed at her first half-marathon, Beckham was blindsided from her left by an object that struck her with such tremendous force it bowled her over, snapped her head off concrete and rendered her temporarily unconscious.

A tire had jolted loose from a trailer being towed behind a passing truck. Traveling about 45 mph, the tire cleared a protective 3-foot retaining wall and hit Beckham from behind as she jogged on a walkway for pedestrians over the bridge from Carl Gray Park toward Panama City Beach. Beckham remembers nothing about the impact, only the moments shortly before and after.

“When I came to, there was a lady standing over me,” Beckham said. “She had seen it happen and pulled over (on the bridge). She was calling 9-1-1. I was trying to get up, and she said, ‘No, no, no — do not move.’ … I knew I was skinned up, but I didn’t realize my head was bleeding until I reached up and brought my hand back down.”

Beckham, 18 years old and a senior at Arnold High School, said the wound on her head wasn’t bleeding profusely and emergency responders initially didn’t believe the injury was life-threatening. Beckham was transported to Gulf Coast Medical Center, where she began to develop symptoms that suggested the head injury was more serious.

“Sitting in the emergency room it started hurting more, then hurting more, and I made my mom turn the lights off,” Beckham said. “They ended up giving me three doses of morphine before they could move me for the CT scan. My parents and my brother were there freaking out, and I’m like, ‘It’s going to be OK. It’s going to be OK.’ I never thought, this could kill me.

“Then I heard them say they needed to do emergency surgery, and I’m like, ‘What?’”

Beckham said a second review of the CT scan’s results revealed a ruptured artery on her brain. A subdural hematoma was placing pressure on the brain tissue and could have led to brain damage or death if not detected or left untreated. Beckham was told a neurosurgeon had been called in, and she would be rushed into emergency surgery shortly.

With his child’s mortality suddenly brought into question, Beckham’s father, John, said he started crying along with his wife, Jeanie, and 15-year-old son, John William. Kaitlyn, however, continued to reassure everyone she would be fine. John Beckham marveled that it was his daughter offering parents words of encouragement.

“She was the most adult of the adults,” he said.

Another setback

Beckham maintained her positive attitude even as she was being prepped for surgery. Doctors had to cut an incision beginning in front of her right ear four inches straight up the side of her head to expose the hematoma.

Beckham’s primary concern?

“I remember asking, ‘Does that mean you have to cut my hair?’” she said. “They said, ‘Yeah, we have to shave your head.’ I was like, ‘Uh, no, no, no.’”

Though doctors didn’t insert a metal plate during surgery, Beckham said that remains an option to further protect a hole remaining in her skull.

“When they did the surgery, they took out a piece of bone,” she said. “Part of it was so damaged that it crumbled into pieces so small they couldn’t put it back in my skull.”

Although the pressure on her brain began to dissipate, Beckham required five days in intensive care and an additional day for observation. Needless to say, she was eager to leave after six days spent primarily bedridden.

“So ready, so ready,” she said. “When they moved me to regular care, I said, ‘Please get me out here.’”

Surely, a return home was just what Beckham needed. Or not.

Fate, it seemed, was not satisfied doling out just one calamity.

A captain of Arnold’s cross country team, Beckham was forbidden from running and relegated to safe, comfortable living around the house. Training for the Run for the Redfish half-marathon set for Dec. 4 in Panama City Beach was placed on an indefinite hiatus.

Beckham was resting in her bedroom exactly one week after the accident, and said she stood up too fast, got light-headed and fell. Her head was spared further trauma, but the fibula in her left leg was less fortunate. The bone broke above the ankle and required a trip back to the hospital. Worse still, the leg injury required surgery two weeks later, as well as an insertion of a plate and screws to hold the bone together.

“I didn’t think I broke it at first,” she said. “It hurt really bad, but my parents — my mom especially — thought I would fall down and hit my head or something. They’d been watching me constantly, and I think I sat there about half an hour thinking it would stop and I’d get up and walk away. I didn’t want to have to call her in there because I knew my mother was going to kill me if I hurt myself again.

“So I sat there for almost a half-hour before I called her in there and said I can’t walk on this. At that point I almost feel like my leg bothered me more than my head. There’s another eight weeks of no walking or running.”

Beckham’s leg injury required surgery the day before Thanksgiving, she said, two weeks after her initial accident. Already behind on school work, she was determined to get back to Arnold the next week. Beckham has shuffled along on crutches through the hallways at school to stay on track toward graduating in the spring. She mailed an application to attend the University of Florida two weeks before her accident, and she hopes she learns good news on that front in January.

‘Normal is good’

“I’m caught up in school as of today, which was a relief,” she said earlier this week, crediting friends with tutoring her while she missed class. “Now I’m just healing and getting back to normal. It’s getting more normal little by little. I could drive last week. Little things like that are exciting. … Honestly at that point I was excited to get back to doing things. I was ready to do school. I was excited to get back out and not sit at home or in the hospital. Yeah, I was pretty excited. Everything new and normal is good.”

Beckham has no logical explanation for what happened on Nov. 17. People have compared what happened to her with the odds of being attacked by a shark (11.5 million to 1) or struck by lightning (576,000-1). But each of those examples requires only two variables: one person and an object harming that person. If any of the several variables that factored into Beckham’s accident changed even slightly, a different outcome could have resulted.

To collide with Beckham, the tire had to break loose from the trailer, roll uphill at an angle across a shoulder lane 10 feet wide, and then bounce over the protective retaining wall at the precise moment Beckham jogged into its path. Beckham possibly would have avoided the accident entirely if she had started running a second or two earlier or later.

Beckham said she hasn’t troubled herself with ‘What if?’ hypotheticals, nor does she look at the site of her accident when she has to make trips over the Hathaway Bridge.

“There’s probably a reason for it, but I don’t know it,” Beckham said. “I’d like to think everything happens for a reason. That’s what I keep telling myself.”

Beckham doesn’t punish herself by poring over how things could be different. Instead, she’s turning a life-changing experience into a life-shaping one.

“Before all of this I was considering (studying) engineering,” in college, she said. “It’s kind of between medicine and engineering. But after going through all of this and being around all the medical stuff, I think going into medicine is very likely. Seeing all the people who have helped me so much, I think I’d like to help other people that way.”

She couldn’t be blamed for peeking over her left shoulder every now and then, but Beckham seems to have her eyes pointed straight ahead.

“It hasn’t affected me that much,” she said. “First of all, it was crazy what happened in the first place. I start to think of what I’d do if I didn’t stand up in my room, if I’d just sat there would I have a broken leg? That kind of thinking is what frustrates me the most, and I can’t think that way.

“I try not to think about what happened. I’m lucky, lucky, lucky, and I keep reminding myself of that.”