SPASH student goes from death’s door to college offer in 13 months

“It was the closest I’ve ever come to sheer panic; it’s one of your biggest fears when you’re a cop, that you’ll be on a crash scene of a family member,” Ryan Fox said.

Fox, usually quite stoic, had to pause several times while recalling that night.

“It’s hard to talk about,” he said, clearing his throat. “It’s weird, because I responded as a dad, but when I got on the scene, I was in cop mode. It was a surreal moment, because I was, at first, ‘dad,’ but then I couldn’t get the cop mode out of me. There was already a First Responder there but I did my own assessment, like I do with anybody, head-to-toe.”

Nick was found lying on his side, some 25 yards or so from where the car came to a stop. The Jeep was totalled, with the rear passenger side completely smashed in.

“I remember saying how good it was that nobody was sitting there because nobody could have survived that,” Ryan Fox said. “But then one of the deputies told me, ‘That’s where Nick was sitting.’ It turns out that one of his friends was driving.”

There were four teenagers in the car that night. The cause of the accident was distracted driving, Fox said, and while all of the occupants sustained varying injuries, Nick’s were by far the worst.

The Jeep left the roadway and hit a small rise near an entry to a potato field that launched the vehicle “Dukes of Hazzard-style” into the air before it rolled five or six times, Fox said. Nick was the only occupant ejected from the car — presumably, through the rear windshield, based on some superficial injuries on his shoulders discovered later.

Back at the family’s home, Ryan Fox had already alerted his wife, Jennifer.

“The first thing I asked was, ‘Is he alive?’ And then Ryan took a deep breath, and that scared me, and he said, ‘He’s alive, but…he’s seriously injured,” Jennifer said.

The police chief said he was sending Lt. Tracey to bring her to the scene, where Nick was being evaluated in the back of a Portage Co. ambulance. Nick was awake and talking, Ryan said. He didn’t appear to be in immediate life-threatening danger, but nobody could tell how bad the extent of his injuries really were, or if he’d survive them.

Jennifer Fox said the 15 minutes she waited for Tracey’s arrival felt like “an eternity.” While hurriedly dressing, she kept calling her husband’s phone, desperate for any updates. She also texted Nick’s phone, unsure how bad the injuries were but certain he’d been checking his phone, to say that she loved him.

Nobody knew it at the time, but Nick’s phone had landed separately from him, 20-30 yards or so away from where where the car came to a stop. It was found later that night by a law enforcement officer and returned to the family.

When she arrived on the scene, Ryan Fox said he made sure that she didn’t have to “witness the trauma of seeing that wreckage.” Both parents were able to talk to Nick in the ambulance, briefly, before the crew transported him to the trauma center at Aspirus Wausau.

It’s against county policy for any civilian to ride along in the back of ambulance, so Ryan and Jennifer Fox decided to follow the ambulance to the trauma center at Aspirus Wausau, taking a shortcut around County Hwy. J to meet up with the rig closer to I-39.

“We just kept saying to each other, ‘he’s alive, he’s alive,'” Jennifer said.

But in taking that shortcut, they accidentally wound up following a different ambulance, so the chief called a dispatcher to find out where their son was.

“[The dispatcher] said, ‘They’re losing him, they had to pull over to bring him back…'” Ryan Fox said, his voice breaking, and unable to finish the sentence.

Fox then remained silent for several moments, when Jennifer spoke: “It’s really difficult for Ryan to talk about, so we don’t talk about it very often,” adding that she still hasn’t heard all the details about the exchange her husband had with the dispatcher.

Nick doesn’t remember much

The night started out as a normal Friday in the Fox household. Nick and his friends had just returned to the home — the group’s usual hangout — following an away basketball game at Wisconsin Rapids.

“We were just hanging out here and we were driving to Kwik Trip to get some snacks, and on the way to Kwik Trip, that’s when we ended up crashing,” Nick said, adding that while he usually does wear a seatbelt, he can’t remember if he did that night.

Much to his mother’s relief, Nick, now 18, said he doesn’t remember any part of the accident.

“I remember a little bit of the game itself. I remember my friends got a tropical smoothie in [Wisconsin] Rapids, and that’s about all. There’s really nothing else. I remember waking up in the hospital, but that whole time in between, nothing,” he said.

Nick’s played basketball for most of his life. A slender but athletic 6’5″, he’s a natural on the basketball court. He played for Pacelli High School prior to transferring to SPASH during his junior year, and was about halfway through his first varsity season there when the accident happened.

His first few days in the hospital are also a little fuzzy for Nick.

“I remember waking up on an emergency bed. It’s kind of blurry, but I remember my parents were there. I remember I called my girlfriend. I remember they transferred me from…I was on this blue plastic thing, it was the worst thing because I couldn’t move or anything,” he said. “They were trying to move me and they’re like, ‘Try to move with us,’ and I’m like, ‘I can’t move.’ It was super painful because it was this hard plastic board and my back was all shattered. That was super painful.”

After that, Nick remembers things in flashes. Seeing doctors. Sipping broth. Being forced to eat jello.

“I don’t like jello,” he said, chuckling.

Nick doesn’t recall being afraid. He does remember being worried about the other kids in the car.

“He kept asking about his friends, if they were OK,” Jennifer Fox said, adding that Nick almost seemed to downplay how seriously he was injured when he called some of his friends from the emergency room.

“I think I was (being) positive; I don’t know how, but the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh, I’m okay’ and I was calling my friends to say I’m OK,” he said.

The injuries

In the emergency department, doctors found that Nick had sustained lacerations to his face, two collapsed lungs, a muscle injury to his shoulder, a concussion, a potentially fatal blood clot near his spine, and three crushed vertebrae.

“When you looked at his x-rays, if you think of a Jenga tower, that’s what it looked like…it didn’t even look like a spine,” Ryan Fox said. “Then he had bone shards all the way up his spine. One vertebrae was shattered so bad they couldn’t even put pins in it.”

Doctors had to cut nearly half of Nick’s back open to successfully remove all the bone fragments, he added.

But before going into surgery, Nick had to be stable enough to endure anesthesia, which wasn’t achieved until Sunday morning. That meant about 36 hours of excruciating pain before doctors could go in.

But following the six-hour surgery, when doctors fused eight inches of his spine, the almost unbearable pain continued.

“He’s such a strong young man and to hear him scream in pain for hours and hours and hours, sometimes Ryan or I had to step away because we just couldn’t handle it,” Jennifer Fox said. “The strongest of their drugs couldn’t touch it.”

It took time to get Nick on a pain management schedule, she said. At one point, the parents set a timer for every five minutes, alerting them to pull the trigger on his drug pump to deliver more pain relief.

“Literally, every five minutes; wake up, go to the pain pump, go get a few minutes of sleep…I mean, we didn’t sleep for days,” she said. “But at least he could; he needed to sleep, to heal.”

Jennifer said she went into “mom-problem-solving mode,” contacting close family — including the couple’s 20-year-old son, Ben, who was away at college in Whitewater — to let them know what happened, and to try and plan for the possibility that Nick might never walk again.

“We were kind of going in and out of thoughts…I was praying, I just kept saying, ‘He’s alive.’ So if his back is broke, and he’s in a wheelchair, OK, we’ll get the best wheelchair,” she said. “I may have appeared more calm and collected but you feel so helpless when your child is in that much pain, so to kind of feel like you’re doing something, you plan, you make plans.”

Following the surgery, Ryan and Jennifer were given a brief, but much-needed, moment of levity when Nick, still loopy from anesthesia, gave a humorous and over-the-top positive review of the staff as he was being wheeled into a recovery bed.

Though he doesn’t remember that, that’s around the time he remembers being more aware of his surroundings. Two days after his surgery, he was on his feet.

“I first started sitting up, and then later that day they got me up to walk,” he said. “I had a walker and I just walked around the ICU. Each day it was a longer walk. I wanted to get up but I was still in a lot of pain, but I kept thinking, ‘This is going to help me.’ I wanted to just stay in bed but once I got up, it was motivation; I just wanted to keep walking. I wasn’t cocky but I’m thinking, ‘Hey it’s two days after and I’m walking.'”

The pain was still excruciating, and though presenting mainly in his back, the stress and anxiety of the situation made it worse, and he didn’t get more than two hours of sleep at a time for the first week.

“I couldn’t move or anything, I just could not get comfortable,” he said.

Following five days in the intensive care unit and two days in a recovery room, Nick Fox was discharged from the hospital.

Going home

“It was almost like having a newborn baby again. You put them into the backseat real gentle, you try to avoid potholes and any bump on the way home,” Ryan Fox said. “He walked out of that hospital on his own, but it was a tough ride.”

The family also acquired several new pieces of specialized furniture to accommodate Nick’s new, even if temporary, needs. A power bed to help him sit up, a power chair with a stiff back so he could watch television and play video games, a shower chair, and handrails.

He moved into his parents’ bedroom for several weeks so he wouldn’t have to maneuver the stairs to his room in the basement. Nick couldn’t do anything for himself, at first, so his parents took time off work to help him dress, shower, and put on the turtle shell brace he was forced to wear for three months.

And then there was his walker.

“He did not like using that walker,” Jennifer said. “He just refused to use it, and just walked on his own.”

The recovery and comeback

Spending so much time with his parents was nice, Nick said. At first.

“I’m super grateful these two are my parents; the first two months of them caring for me was super needed. I didn’t show it much, how grateful I am, but I felt super connected with them,” he said. “But no matter how much love you have for them, seeing nothing but them for a month straight was, I mean, you love them but you get tired of them.”

He took small breaks from the hovering concern of Ryan and Jennifer, spending a few hours daily playing video games in a home office. He also said he read a book, The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph,” which he said made a profound impact.

“It also made a huge impact to have my own space,” he said. “It wasn’t a step away from my parents; it was a step towards independence.”

And then there were the visitors. Friends and neighbors brought ready-made meals for the family, and Nick’s old teammates from Pacelli even reached out.

“I would say one of the best gifts for me was the whole basketball team at Pacelli wrote all these notes to me, and they made me a jersey and I don’t even go to school there anymore,” he said. “It was just super, I’ll always remember that.”

@nick.fox24night that changed my life…♬ original sound – ひゅがミツト