July 1999 Volume 80 Number 7
"serving the protectors"
| July 1999 Volume 80 Number 7 "serving the protectors" |
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| SAVED: A Woman and her Career | |
| By Brett
Williams |
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Life-threatening injuries: Constable Sharon Savage reflects on the crash in which she almost died. |
Constable Sharon Savage faced death from internal bleeding as she lay semi-conscious in a smashed police patrol car on a rainy December morning in 1997.
She had lost all control of the car while responding to a code 403 (intruder on premises) with her partner, Senior Constable Greg West, at around 2am. A combination of light rain and misdirected water from council sprinklers had left the road on which she was travelling like a glassy pond.
Without even speeding, the car had aquaplaned along The Golden Way before mounting a footpath and slamming into a tree at around 70km/h. The airbags activated with a deafening thud; the car came to rest among bushes three metres from the road.
The collision’s devastating impact had thrust both driver’s side doors and pillar inside the car, with enough force to bend the barrel of Savage’s revolver. Doctors would later find “a gun-shaped fracture in her pelvis”.
But beyond that fracture, Savage, then 37, had suffered extensive, life-threatening injuries to the entire right side of her upper body.
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A side view of the crashed patrol car in a police facility. |
Blood from her lacerated right lung poured into her chest. Her liver, which had literally split, also bled profusely. More than half of her right ribs had fractured, some in as many as three places.
Her right collarbone and shoulder blade had broken and two bone spurs had snapped off of her lower spine. Even her right front tooth was dislodged, apparently from the force of the airbag.
Now, her life lay in West’s hands. He had miraculously emerged from the crash fully conscious and suffered only a few cracked ribs. So, in the morning darkness on this deserted main road, only West could summon help. But he never expected to find Savage on the brink of death.
“I saw her lying there and she was just groaning,” he remembers. “Her eyes were only half-open; she didn’t look good at all. I just grabbed her shoulders and said: ‘Are you okay?’ There wasn’t any response. It really shocked me.”
But before West could help her, the car began to fill with what he believed was smoke. He was “filled with terror”.
“I thought the car was going to go up in flames,” he says. “I tried to get my seatbelt off and couldn’t.”
But somehow, West, then 39, freed himself and clambered from the car. The substance which had so terrified him proved to be smoke-like powder from the airbags. With pain in his hip, he hobbled around the car to inspect the driver’s side damage.
“Her side was absolutely obliterated,” he says. “I didn’t really appreciate it at the time - I suppose I was a bit shaken up. (But) I remember seeing it on the news that night, and that’s when it really struck home how badly damaged the car was.”
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Sergeant Steve Mahomet: “...it was quite distressing for everybody concerned.” |
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Dr Bill Griggs: “I was concerned that she was going to bleed to death...” |
Shocked, and without his glasses after losing them in the crash, West made a call for urgent help on his police radio. Within minutes, another police patrol arrived just ahead of ambulance crews and firefighters.
Steve Mahomet - the crash victims’ sergeant - felt the deadly seriousness of the situation in West’s voice over the radio. He rushed to the scene to take charge. And, when confronted with the mangled police car wreck, he realized instantly that either of his officers could have been killed.
He would later note the tragedy as one of the two most traumatic events of his 33-year police career.
As Mahomet directed what had become a mission to save a cop’s life, Savage’s colleagues rallied around her. They held her head in their hands and offered reassuring words.
“Sharon was lapsing in and out of consciousness,” says Mahomet. “When we were tying to talk to her I don’t think any of it was sinking in. The team was very strong throughout the whole thing, (but) it was quite distressing for everybody concerned.”
Mahomet himself struggled to “keep my feelings repressed” as he watched his “very hard-working and conscientious officer” teeter between life and death. And he understood with great sadness that, even if she survived, her police career may still be over.
But Mahomet, then 52, was yet to face the grim responsibility of notifying Savage’s detective husband, Nigel, of the tragedy. He went to his patrol car and called him via a mobile telephone.
Says Mahomet of the conversation: “I didn’t go into too much detail. I just told him: ‘It would probably be better if you came out straight away’, which he did. He impressed me greatly through the whole ordeal (at the scene) by his calmness.”
SA Ambulance paramedic, Leonie Wilton, was called to the scene as back-up to other ambulance officers. When she and her partner arrived, the crash scene instantly struck them as “pretty horrific”. Expecting the worst - and even before emerging from their ambulance - they requested a retrieval team from the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH).
With 11 years’ experience as an ambulance officer and paramedic, Wilton was staggered that only one serious injury had resulted from the crash.
She quickly determined the high likelihood of internal injuries to Savage’s chest and abdomen. She could “feel some crepitations” (crackling) around her lower right ribs, and wasn’t able to “get a decent blood pressure on her”. She rated her injuries as critical.
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A close-up view of the two doors which were thrust into the car causing massive injuries to Savage. |
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An overhead view which shows just how far the doors were forced inside the car. |
Of equally great concern, however, was that Savage’s lower legs remained trapped in the wreckage. Wilton realized that she and her fellow-rescuers would have to work frantically to both stabilize and free the cop who had become their patient.
When extricating her with a spinal immobilizing device became too awkward and time consuming, Wilton became concerned.
Inserting an intravenous line and raising Savage’s blood pressure was also proving near impossible, so a faster process was needed to substitute for full immobilization.
“We had to just oxygenate her; put a cervical collar on her; and extricate her using a spinal board,” she explains. “It’s not the full immobilization that we would have liked, but the fact that she didn’t have a blood pressure that was recordable was taking precedence.
“We were at the scene for about 23 minutes trying to get Sharon out, and the potential for her to succumb to her injuries was very real.
“She wasn’t alert to the circumstances but was in a lot of pain. She was groaning and kept asking what had happened.
“No matter how many times we told her she’d been in a car crash, it didn’t seem to be retained. She kept asking: ‘Is my partner okay?’ ”
Finally, Wilton and her colleagues had Savage out of the wreck, attached to a cardiac monitor and on her way to the RAH by ambulance.
At the same time, RAH Trauma Services director and Intensive Care Unit senior consultant, Dr Bill Griggs, rushed from the hospital in another ambulance to meet Savage en route. The two crews met near the Holden Hill police station.
Griggs dashed from one ambulance to the other. From an instant assessment by sight alone, he could tell that Savage was “in a lot of trouble”. “She was clearly having difficulty breathing,” he says.
“I was concerned that she was going to bleed to death before we could get control. If Sharon had had her injuries on the highway at Ceduna, she would have died.”
As the ambulance raced toward the hospital, Griggs gave Savage a blood transfusion and prepared to “put her to sleep and intubate her”. They soon arrived at the RAH, where a trauma team was prepared and waiting.
“We took her into a ‘resus’ cubicle,” says Griggs, “and started going through the treatment processes.
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The driver’s side airbag which apparently dislodged Savage’s front tooth. |
“Her husband was there at the same time. He watched me carve a hole in Sharon’s chest and put a drain in to try to re-expand the lung and drain the blood. I was worried that he (might be) emotionally distressed by this, but he was holding together.
“We couldn’t control the internal bleeding, so we put special catheters into her arteries to try to find the points where they were bleeding. We weren’t able to keep up; we were struggling significantly. That’s when I thought we were going to lose her.”
And Griggs’ fear of losing Savage would continue throughout her first 12 hours in the hospital. By 9am, the blood she’d been given equated to more than twice the volume which her body would normally hold.
Meanwhile, the Savage children, Jodie and Jason, then 13 and 14, knew nothing of their mother’s crash, or the uncertainty of her life. Their father returned home to tell them of her plight. At the hospital later that morning, Jodie asked Griggs if her mother was going to die.
Griggs assured her that he would “try very hard to make sure she doesn’t die”. “I’m very reluctant to make promises,” he says, “but it’s difficult when you’ve got kids - I’ve got kids of my own.”
So Griggs and the trauma team’s relentless battle to save Savage continued. After 24 hours, she was still in critical condition. Griggs’ concern had slightly lessened, but he was now mindful of the risks of complications.
Over the ensuing days, Savage would be attached to a breathing machine; placed in an induced coma to aid her breathing; and undergo a tracheostomy (incision in the windpipe). By late December, Griggs would still consider her to have a “lousy respiratory function”.
But on January 2 came a breakthrough. “We got her breathing by herself for the first time since the crash,” says Griggs. “She was coping with less oxygen but still got collections inside her chest and abdomen, which we were draining.”
And in those first hours of 1998, Savage woke from a two-week coma to find a mass of tubes connecting her to life-sustaining machinery. Her pain was agonizing; and her injuries had left her with no memory of the crash.
She found her right side “totally black” with bruising between her shoulder and leg, and couldn’t move even slightly without excruciating pain. Her only relief came through two-hourly doses of morphine.
She had lost 5kgs during her coma and was greatly weakened. And now, as a previously fit, healthy policewoman and mother, she was unable to do the smallest things for herself. This frustrated her intensely.
But Savage’s rare brand of optimism and strong will had survived the crash intact. She believed she was “lucky to be alive”. And in light of being lucky, Savage felt her injuries “didn’t mean anything”.
She neither descended into self-pity nor asked: “Why me?” She simply resolved to make some improvement each day.
And by January 4, she’d improved enough to move from the ICU to a high dependency ward. Her recovery would continue as she later moved to a general surgical ward.
But with the support of her ever-present husband, she never had to undertake that recovery alone. Seemingly always at the hospital, he encouraged her in the torturous tasks of reducing her morphine intake and eating solid food.
He changed her dressings, lifted her into and out of bed, and held her as she slowly embarked on walks of only 10 paces.
Finally, after three weeks in hospital, Savage decided to leave. She’d “had a gutful”, and was determined to be home for her son’s 15th birthday.
Her arrival home brought some long-awaited joy: 40 flower arrangements and over 200 get-well cards. Many were from members of the public who knew Savage only as a policewoman.
“That just blew me away,” she says, “and I had so many people come to see me that day and the next. I’ve never really cried over the accident; I’ve only ever cried about what other people have said or done. I was overwhelmed that so many people actually thought of me.”
But Savage still had a long and arduous recovery to make.
“I couldn’t even get out of a chair when I first went home,” she remembers. “I couldn’t get out of bed either. Nigel had to lift me, and about the farthest I walked was from the bedroom to the chair in the lounge.
“I couldn’t do anything with my right arm, and it took me a couple of weeks to even get my legs going - they were weak. Everything was weak. After a couple of weeks I got strength back through eating and exercising.”
At that time, however, a simple walk to the letterbox was all the exercise Savage could endure. And she was disheartened to have to leave the entire running of the household to her family.
“They were excellent,” she says. “They did everything. The kids cooked; they helped me get out of bed; they did a huge amount of things. They certainly had to grow up in that time.
“(And) Nigel was always there for me. He had the kids to worry about and went through so much - and he still stuck by me.”
During her first week at home, Savage vowed to return to work by July 1, 1998, only six months after the crash. This defied medical reports which indicated that she’d be unable to work for at least 12 months. But with her family’s ceaseless support - and regular visits from friends and colleagues - Savage made remarkable progress.
Strangely, however, she was heavily burdened by guilt during her convalescence. She considered herself entirely to blame for West’s injuries, and the trauma her family and colleagues had suffered. For this, she made personal apologies to West, his wife, Mahomet and all of her team-mates.
West and Mahomet insisted that her apologies were unnecessary and she should feel no blame. Their compassionate assurances eased her mind.
“I’m the only person who knows what happened in that accident,” says West. “There was no one else there, and Sharon doesn’t remember it. So I’m the only one who can really tell her (what happened), and there was absolutely nothing she could do.”
Eventually, six months had gone by and Savage’s July 1 deadline had arrived. Her unshakeable determination to return early to work had remained. This alarmed many of her family and friends, who had perhaps hoped for a change of mind.
She concedes that her goal may have seemed “a bit unrealistic” but, at the time, refused to be swayed. She even refused offers of desk jobs and insisted on a return to operational police work via light duties.
So on July 1, Savage finally realized her goal by returning to a six-and-a-half-week term of light duties at Para Hills police station. But much more physically and emotionally significant would be her subsequent return to policing the streets.
“The first week was incredibly hard,” she says. “It was wet; my shoulders were aching from hanging onto the steering wheel; and I was very nervous. At the end of the week I had a major ‘crack-up’.
“I never let anyone know how much pain I was really in. At the end of that week I couldn’t take it anymore. I just went home and cried. I was a wreck.
“I think seven nights were too much to take on. But I still got through the seventh night, and that meant more than anything.
“It’s getting easier every time I go out on night shift. Last night shift I did not have a crack-up the whole (time). I can only take it as it comes but I expect they’ll get further apart, and I’ll deal with them more easily.”
A recent night-shift drive along the Golden Way in wet conditions opposite the crash scene also gave Savage some emotional torment. She pulled over shaking and her partner offered to drive. She refused his offer knowing that this was another psychological barrier through which she had to break.
Mahomet sometimes found her crying at work and would engage in “long talks with her”. Sometimes she wouldn’t reveal the cause of her tears. Other times she’d explain that the memory of all that people had done for her was something about which she couldn’t restrain her emotions.
Mahomet saw this as totally understandable and without ill-effects on her work performance.
And Griggs fully supported her return to the cut and thrust of operational work. “Emotionally and psychologically - and to some extent physically - it was enormously good for her to do that,” he says. “It becomes part of the rehabilitation process.
“She did very well. I think the whole family coped well with what was a very difficult situation.”
Savage now has a very simple occupational goal. She intends to be an operational police officer for as long as she can. “It’s all I want to do,” she says.
Still able to laugh, she jokes that she aims to be “the oldest female constable on the road”.
But she’s still unable to speak of her family’s commitment to her without weeping. Perhaps for that reason she recorded a personal account of the crash and its aftermath. In it she wrote:
...most of all I want to thank Nigel. I could not have made this recovery without you by my side. Nigel, Jason and Jodie, I have put you through a lot, and I want to tell you how much I love you.
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