Now she was irritated; the bad weather would push her arrival close to midnight.
Two hours and 12 minutes behind schedule, American Airlines flight 1420 took off.
“Quite a light show off the left-hand side of the aircraft,” the pilot announced.
“I’m going to have to slightly overfly the airport for turn back around to land.”
As the plane circled and dipped, it jolted in the wind.
Still, she was alive.
That night, June 1, 1999, Ferganchick became a hero.
She pressed together two pieces of his limb, stanching the bleeding until the rescue crew could arrive.
The debris was eventually cleared, and the news cameras moved on to the next disaster.
She had survived relatively unscathed on the outside.
Mentally, she says, “I didn’t even get off the plane.”
What happens on the day after the worst day of your life?
We read about the devastation every day, but not what happens next.
“Anyone who lives through something like this returns to a life that is totally different.”
Still others deepen their spiritual beliefs or change their career and life goals.
What can these women teach the rest of us?
“You still have your fears and grief and suffering, but you have made your suffering meaningful.
“I was afraid and depressed all the time,” Ferganchick says.
Her already rocky marriage sped toward its end.
She even contemplated suicide.
One night, unable to sleep, she took a small handful of Xanax her doctor had prescribed.
I had stopped seeing any way to escape from the constant panic and fear.”
But the pressure proved overwhelming.
“There was no person left.”
In October, she got into a fender bender but had no recollection of stepping into her car.
Later that morning, she admitted herself into a mental hospital.
Between 6 percent and 9 percent of people who have experienced or witnessed a life-threatening accident will develop PTSD.
That most won’t is an astonishing testament to the sturdiness of the human mind.
One possibility is that women’s brain hormones make them more vulnerable to PTSD."
How someone copes also depends on her mental health before the accident: Was she already depressed or anxious?
How strong was her social support?
Did she have any other traumas in her past, and how well had she dealt with them?
Ferganchick’s family ties were strong, she had a loyal circle of friends, and she loved teaching.
The crash’s aftermath also recalled an assault during her childhood, conjuring familiar feelings of hurt and helplessness.
“We call it the dose response curve,” Dr. Napoli says.
“The larger the dose of trauma, the more likely they will develop PTSD.”
The less control a survivor felt during the event, the greater her struggles may be.
And multiple traumas have the potential to wreak havoc on even the strongest among us.
Reidt suffered a broken pelvis and nerve damage in her brain that caused long-lasting double vision.
Yet losing consciousness spared her from being haunted by graphic visions of the accident.
And she felt strangely protected, as if now she’d had her share of trauma.
This time, she watched the car approach and her windshield shatter.
“It was unbelievable, almost too much,” she says.
And after her father’s deatha period in which she lost 25 poundsshe began taking antidepressants as well.
“I had no appetite,” she says.
“I was always anxious and couldn’t sleep.
I don’t want to live my life being constantly scared.
People don’t realize how life-changing accidents can be.
Friends told me, ‘You look great.
Why can’t you move on?’
But resiliency is a skill we can enhance.
Simply talking about the trauma helps, Tedeschi says.
“Some survivors can’t believe what happened.
Discussing how life has changed in the aftermath can be even more important.”
Valerie Gaus cannot count the times she’s revisited the day she nearly died.
says Gaus, 47.
“The instant I realized it was there, I was under it.”
For weeks, Gaus relived the accident.
“I’d see myself being run over, my head getting smashed like roadkill,” she remembers.
Memories of her time in the ER proved even more persistent.
“That was my trauma,” she says.
“I screamed the whole time.
Every day for five years, I flashed back to those moments.”
“What I saw was horrifying, but it didn’t mean I was insane.
Letting myself feel what happened helped me become unstuck from it.”
“What everyone had in common was isolation,” she says.
Car accidents in particular encourage others to want you to get over it.
“With time and context, memories that were vivid and uncontrollable become part of your normal autobiography.”
She was given permanent disability instead.
“All my lifelines were ripped away.”
She was plagued by guilt.
“People said that God must have a special plan for me.
That just crushed me.
There was nothing more special about me than the people who died.”
She went on and off antidepressants, antipsychotics, antianxiety drugs and sleeping pills.
“There’s a bottom line that life is dangerous and there are no guarantees.
Once you realize that you could’t control everything, you find the things you could control.
It makes people more mindful of how they want to live.”
She works out at the gym and runs despite her chronic hip injury.
She has switched from nursing in a chaotic emergency room to serving as a hospice care case manager.
Valerie Gaus calls her accident her “birthday”: She is happier and less of a workaholic today.
But her recovery is still a work in progress.
She flinches at the sound of diesel engines and when anyone approaches her from behind.
And after her son, Gabriel, arrived, she fixated on gruesome threats like crib death.
I smell his hair, feel his skin.
I focus on what is happening right then because he is right there in my arms.
Sometimes she thinks back to that night in the Dallas airport when she felt so frustrated.
We spend so much time being unhappy, but any moment could be our last.
Would I wish what happened to me on anyone else?
But from my worst experience came the most beautiful and powerful giftthe knowledge that tomorrow is not a guarantee.
The only thing you have control over is how you treat other people.
I want to help people learn that lesson without having to go through what I went through.”
Photo Credit: Nathan Perkel
