Fate and fortitude: Kellie's story

It was a shirt-sleeve kind of morning a year ago -- unseasonably warm for the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Jason and Kellie Cosner had spent the night before tucked into a woodsy cabin just beyond the "Gateway to Paradise" highway sign that heralds the entrance to Mount Rainier National Park.


	The story of a young woman's grueling quest to walk again -- and rebuild her shattered life. - Kellie's story - Audio interview - Q&A with Kellie - Photo gallery

The Bellevue couple were celebrating their first wedding anniversary. Jason, lively and funny, had burned steaks on the grill, making Kellie laugh, and the pair had spent the rest of the evening piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of Florida, their home state.

Five miles down the road, Rainier begins its gradual ascent out of the ground, a mountain big enough to make its own weather. As the Cosners' green Ford Explorer headed toward the snow-draped peak, they had no way of knowing that National Weather Service spotters would later estimate winds gusting up to 70 mph near the Longmire Ranger Station.

Jason was eager to experience the mountain. An avid biker, he loved adventure. As a kid, he used to tease his mother by rappelling off a balcony over the living room. Kellie, too, wanted to see the emblem of the state where they'd made their first married home.

They were both 26.

Like a riptide of wind, a mass of air churned through White Pass -- from a high-pressure field east of the mountain to low pressure on the other side. The swirling gusts weren't out of the ordinary for a fall windstorm.

But wind is a capricious master.

Wind shear can drop a plane from the sky. And on that day, a wedge of wind knifed through the canopy of old Western hemlock that clings to the flanks of the mountain. It sledgehammered a massive tree, snapping it off 70 feet above the ground.

The Explorer was coming out of a curve on Longmire Paradise Road, the pavement slick from scattered showers, when the severed top of the tree -- three stories tall, with a trunk thicker than a telephone pole -- hurtled earthward. It crushed the roof of the SUV like a wrecking ball.

Jason, who was driving, died almost instantly.

Kellie's course, like the wind, took a sudden change of direction.

At 1:15 p.m., Nov. 24, 2001, park rangers got the first report that two trees were blocking the road.

Two nurses -- Jody Walker and her friend, Megan Bauer -- were driving a few cars behind Kellie and Jason when the trees came crashing down within a hundred yards of each other. It was eerie, witnesses recalled, that a gust would hit with such precision that it would knock down just two trees in such a densely wooded area.

The road blocked, Walker and Bauer got out to investigate. At first they couldn't even see the mangled vehicle buried in the branches.

The Explorer was smashed so severely the belly of its transmission had slashed gouges more than a foot long in the asphalt. Up closer, they realized people were trapped.

"There was no way we could get it off them," Walker recalled. She grabbed for Kellie's hand. Bauer picked her way through the back of the SUV to hold her neck. Kellie was moaning.

They couldn't feel Jason's pulse.

The tree had fallen at a slight angle, 4 inches further back on the driver's side than on the passenger's. A tiny shift with a huge consequence. Like their timing on the road that day.

"I just held her hand and kept telling her it would be OK, that people were coming, that we were there with her," Walker said. The labor and delivery nurse was used to helping life come into the world, not leave.

Kellie was bleeding from the nose and mouth; Walker could hear gurgling in her lungs.

"We knew she had internal injuries," she said. "We knew it was bad."

In a strange twist, two off-duty EMTs and a former policeman happened to be passing by. And in one more lucky coincidence, the local fire department was training nearby. By the time they arrived with chainsaws, minutes later, the others were already doing what they could to rescue Kellie.


		Paul Kitagaki Jr. / P-I
	Kellie, exhausted from physical therapy, naps as her mom, Debbie Hobin of Florida, sorts through hospital bills. Her mom has been with Kellie since the accident.

One of the EMTs happened to be wearing a neck brace. She took it off and passed it to the nurse in the Explorer. Charles Bennett, the former cop, commandeered a chainsaw and worked the accident like a crime scene.

"There were angels coming out of the woods that day," Kellie's father, Ed Hobin, would say later. "Without them, she wouldn't have made it."

The 10 rescue workers and half-dozen good Samaritans worked frantically for more than 30 minutes, shouting over the high whine of metal on wood as they struggled to pry Kellie from the tangle of branches and twisted metal.

None of them knew it, but this would be the first of many teams of people who would help Kellie piece her life back together over the next year.

At 1:56 p.m., they cleared the tree and, using the "Jaws of Life" -- a rescue device powerful enough to split a car apart -- they freed her. She was shock white. An ambulance was waiting to take her to a landing zone behind a grocery store just outside the park entrance, where she could be airlifted to Seattle.

A few minutes later, paramedics pulled Jason from the car. The roof had collapsed over his chest. His unscratched face registered no surprise. His hands, still at the steering wheel, were relaxed. They were unable to revive him.

No one knew either victim's name. Rangers wouldn't find Jason's wallet until the next day. It was wedged so deep into the console, they had to use a crowbar to pry it out.

Kellie, barely conscious, held onto Bennett's coat while on the gurney. Her hand started to slip.

"Don't you leave me," he said.

And she clung so hard they almost couldn't load her into the ambulance.

Expected to die

Harborview Medical Center names its unidentified patients alphabetically, like hurricanes. Kellie hit that day as Sara Doe.

Gregory Jurkovich, chief of trauma at Harborview, was seeing patients when his beeper went off. The doctor flipped the pager from his hip and checked the readout: "999." The emergency code means: Don't call ahead, just come. Fast.

Brown-eyed with a peppery gray goatee, Jurkovich is a naturally curious man prone to asking questions. This time he didn't stop to ask any. He raced to the ER.

Trauma doctors aren't fazed by much. No amount of violence to a human body surprises them. They see beyond the gaping wounds and smashed body parts to the problem that needs solving.

But Kellie looked like a nearly unsolvable case. Even Jurkovich, a 20-year ER veteran, wasn't sure where to start.


		Paul Kitagaki Jr. / P-I
	Debbie Hobin has to do much of Kellie's basic care as she recuperates from the accident. Kellie still can't raise her arms high enough to brush her hair, and she has difficulty grasping objects in her left hand, the hand she uses most. Not since Kellie was a baby had she been so completely dependent.

Her "golden hour" was long gone, he said.

You can bleed about an hour and still have a good chance of survival. The body clamps down bit by bit, shutting off the supply to non-vital organs to save blood for vital parts. You can stand the pain and shock for about an hour. The body releases enough stress hormones to put it on auto-control to try to self-correct for what's going wrong.

"But the body can only do it for so long, then it needs extra help," Jurkovich said. "If you can't get that help, you die."

Two hours and 15 minutes had already lapsed by the time Kellie arrived.

By now, Jurkovich's mind was flooding with questions;

"Is doing angio (to determine where she's bleeding) first the right thing? Or should we go straight to the OR? Are we risking losing her legs because there's not a good supply of blood, but saving her life?" he said. "You worry all the time -- is this the right call?

"What are the priorities? How do we step back from the abyss?"

The patient was cold.

Normal body temperature is 37 degrees Celsius. Hers had fallen to 32.1.

At that point, "the body is at the end of its ability to even store heat -- it's that desperate," Jurkovich said.

A body temp of 32 degrees is a death sentence for trauma victims.

And she was bleeding. Everywhere. The body holds about 5 liters of blood. Kellie had lost about half of that by the time she made it to the ER. Her colon and large intestine were torn. She was bleeding in her chest, abdomen and pelvis. Her spleen was fractured.

And she was broken.

"It was as though she had slammed into a wall at 50 mph, without a car," Jurkovich said. The force had shattered her pelvis, one of the strongest structures in the body, snapped her thigh bone in half, dislocated her knee and crushed her ribs. Her wrist bone nearly stabbed through the flesh of her forearm.

Blood was pouring into her lungs, causing them to collapse. She was drowning on the inside.

Kellie was in the top 2 percent of the worst cases Harborview has ever seen.

"If she had died," the trauma chief said, "that would have been the expected outcome."


	Paul Kitagaki Jr. / P-I
Debbie Hobin looks at X-rays of Kellie's pelvis, which was shattered in the accident. "The first time I saw it, I couldn't believe she had so many screws and I didn't know how broken she was inside," Debbie said.

Tragic news spreads

Around midnight on the other side of the country, the phone rang at Debbie and Ed Hobin's sprawling rancher in Brooksville, Fla.

Groggy, Debbie looked at the caller-ID. She didn't recognize the number, so she went back to sleep.

Three hours later, someone pounded on the door.

Debbie grabbed her bathrobe. On the doorstep was an ashen Pam Cosner, Jason's mother, and a friend. Pam couldn't say the words, so her friend did: "Jason and Kellie were in an accident. Jason's dead."

Debbie went into shock. For one awful moment, she and Pam clung to each other united in grief. In the next, they were divided by an unforgiving reality: One child lived, one child died.

The Mount Rainier rangers had worked methodically for hours to discover the identities of the victims. They searched the smashed Ford in hopes of finding clues that would lead to their names. Instead, they found a notation about Jasmer's, the inn where the couple stayed the night before, on a map tucked in a bicycle magazine, and a copy of their marriage license.

In the cabin, they discovered a piece of saved wedding cake -- a chocolate bicycle still on top, but no phone numbers for the couple's parents. With nothing else to go on, they called the minister who married them in Florida.

Then, in a flash of realization, the innkeepers called Ragen Lindstrom, a former guest they remembered Kellie had mentioned as the one who had recommended their place. Ragen, one of Kellie's best friends, headed straight to Harborview.

The hospital asked her whether she could identify her friend. At first, she couldn't believe the battered and swollen patient was Kellie.

Then she noticed the pattern of moles on the patient's right cheek, and thought, Oh my God.

The hospital would tell the Hobins that their daughter was "very, very sick."

"Not 'she's hurt' or 'badly injured,' just that 'you need to come. She's very sick,' " Eddie Hobin recalled.

Without realizing it, they had received the first instruction in a philosophy that would soon become a way of life. Deal with right now. Do what needs to be done and don't worry about the future.

The parents rushed to the airport.

At 4:30 p.m., they were at her bedside. They barely recognized their daughter. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, Kellie was known for her sense of humor and throaty, infectious laugh. Just embarking on a career in communications, she had only days before been bubbling about her first major trade show for Sierra Entertainment, the Bellevue computer-games developer she worked for.

Now she was silent, cocooned in layers of dressings, tubes crisscrossing her body, her breathing orchestrated by machines. There were still needles from the tree imbedded in her skin.

"I was just thankful I could see and touch her," said Debbie, her eyes reddening. "Pam didn't have that luxury."


	Paul Kitagaki Jr. / P-I
Kellie applies makeup for her first trip outside the hospital since the accident. Her mom, Debbie Hobin, makes the bed. They are going to have Thai food, something Kellie used to do once a week before the accident. Two recreational therapists will accompany her as she practices maneuvering her wheelchair into a van, crossing streets and navigating in a crowded restaurant.

'God's got other plans'

By the time Kellie's parents arrived, Jurkovich had finished six hours of surgery on Kellie.

The first priority had been to stop the gush of internal bleeding. Although she was getting constant transfusions, they would do her no good without stopping the source of her hemorrhaging.

A team of a dozen surgeons, technicians and nurses choreographed her surgery. They put tubes through her chest wall to drain her lungs, and with one long slice down the midline, laid open her abdomen. They flooded her with warm IV fluids, and stitched her torn colon to keep the contents from spilling into her gut.

Her body ballooned to twice its normal size, a typical response to trauma -- the same way a thumb swells from a painful blow.

"It's like she hit her whole body with a hammer," Jurkovich said.

She was so swollen, they couldn't close her up after surgery. So they left sponges and towels in place and held her gaping abdomen together with a temporary Silastic sheet.

They wheeled her back to the intensive-care unit, where an orthopedic surgeon rigged her with an external contraption like an Erector Set to temporarily stabilize her shattered pelvis.

Her fractured rib, dislocated knee, broken wrist and thigh bones were considered non-life-threatening and ignored.

"We couldn't even address those injuries in that first round of surgery," Jurkovich said. Her body had had all it could take.

"We had to give her a chance to recover."

So they waited.

When Kellie didn't die that night, the doctor thought, God's got other plans for her.


	Paul Kitagaki Jr. / P-I
Kellie explores the home she shared with Jason, who died in the freak accident a day after Thanksgiving in 2001. Her mom Debbie looks in another room.

A life on the brink

In the waiting room, Kellie's surrogate family -- her friends and co-workers -- were preparing for a siege, laying in supplies and coordinating schedules so someone could always be there. One went to the couple's house to clean it for her parents' arrival. They delivered a car for them. They got food.

Kellie, a born ringleader who loved to plan, would have been proud. But she knew nothing.

For patients, time in the ICU is surreal. There's no night or day. Lights are always on, monitors always bleating. It drives some crazy, a condition called "ICU psychosis."

Between sleep deprivation and narcotic medications, Kellie became disoriented, agitated. She hallucinated. Untethered from time and place, she floated in and out of awareness.

Patients seldom remember this time. It's as though the brain shuts down to let the body heal. But the amnesia serves a purpose, like anesthesia for the soul.

For days, friends and family kept their 24-hour vigil and prayed.

Suddenly, a week after the accident, they sensed her leaving. She had been spiking high fevers off and on for days and doctors suspected an infection, but they couldn't pinpoint the source. She wasn't responding to big-gun antibiotics.

"You could see in her face, she wasn't there," Debbie said. "She wasn't there."

Doctors don't like to tell families a loved one is dying. Instead, they told the Hobins, "If you need to get anybody here to see her, you should do it now."

The bells at St. James Cathedral started ringing a few blocks away. Debbie started to cry.

She went outside and gulped cold air. "OK, God, I can't fix this," she said. "Thy will be done."

Two days later, Kellie's eyes flew open.

"Once she opened her eyes, I thought, 'She's going to fight,' " Debbie said. "She's decided to fight, and fight she did."

Jurkovich told them to brace for a long haul. "Expect to have good days and bad days," he said. Recovery is not a steady course.

This was the second lesson of a long rehab.

Months later, Kellie remembers only snatches of conversations. She remembers desperately wanting a pen so she could communicate, but not being able to tell anyone. She remembers not wanting one more person to touch her.

She doesn't remember that sometimes tears slipped down her face as she lay silent, and otherwise expressionless.

But her mother does.

"I thought, 'Oh my God, what are you thinking?' " Debbie said.

On the 35th day, Kellie asked about Jason.


		Family Photo
	Kellie and Jason Cosner in a high school prom photo. The two were married about two years ago.

Best of friends forever

Jason and Kellie met in 10th-grade band camp in Brooksville, a town of 8,000 people with vestiges of its Old South roots still clinging to it like Spanish moss on an ancient oak. Nestled in the hills 70 miles west of Orlando and 15 miles east of the Gulf of Mexico, it was once known for its tangerine orchards, now long gone. She was a Dancerette. He played sax.

She was instantly comfortable with the lanky, brown-eyed boy with the cowlicks and quick wit.

"He was a jazzy kind of guy," she would say later. "And when he smiled, he smiled from within, like a full-body glow."

That year they had history class together. They became best friends.

She set him up with a friend of hers, and the two of them double-dated.

She jokes they went to their senior prom together, but not with each other. They were platonic housemates at Florida State University.

"Our paths kept crossing," Kellie said.

Things changed during a college break. They'd each taken a semester off, retreating back to their hometown: Kellie to regroup from a romantic breakup; Jason to figure out what to do with his future. Kellie had a job at the local Christmas store. Jason was working at the bike shop, where he was known as "the source" because of his passion for cycling. They hung out together, talking and watching movies.

"Everything was a story, told in a grand, storytelling manner," she said of Jason. "And he always looked like he was up to something."

He ribbed her constantly and she gave as good as she got. Friends, and even Jason's parents, could see what was happening before they did.

One day, it dawned on Kellie that she wanted him in her life forever, either as a friend or a husband.

So she told him.

That night, they kissed for the first time.

Two years later, they married in a twilight ceremony at a historic Brooksville mansion. Her best friends carried lanterns in on shepherd hooks under a canopy of century-old oak trees. Jason danced down the aisle to the tune of "Soul Man."

Everyone said, "That's Jason for you."

Healing body and soul

"Jason?"

Kellie, still hoarse from weeks on a respirator, could barely speak the word. It was Dec. 28.

Debbie had been dreading this day. On the plane ride out, she rehearsed how to tell her daughter about Jason. She spent hours since then talking to hospital staff about how to handle news of his death.

"I made a pact with myself to always tell her the truth and not answer anything unless she asked," Debbie said. But Kellie was still half-delusional.

And she didn't know what the news might do to Kellie's fragile physical state.

"I'll tell you tomorrow," Debbie said. She gathered her courage that night, and kept her promise.

"Jason didn't make it," she said the next morning.

Kellie whispered, "I'm sorry, Mama."

The body mends at different rates. The brain takes a long time to heal. Nerves take months to regrow a fraction of an inch. Bones knit faster, and muscles can repair as long as the nerves that fire them are intact.

Kellie had sustained massive nerve damage when her pelvis blew apart. It wasn't clear to doctors how much she would recover, or when.

But Jurkovich knew the answer to one question: What takes the longest to heal?

"A broken heart."

CONTINUED

Part 2: Heartache and helping hands. Rehab is a grueling process. Uncertain whether she will walk again, Kellie struggles to regain her strength. Read more ...

P-I reporter Carol Smith can be reached at 206-448-8070 or carolsmith@seattlepi.com

Add P-I Local headlines to