“I called and called, text messages, nothing. Finally decided there’s got to be something wrong, I’m gonna get in my work truck. About 1:30 in the morning. I’m panicking.”
December 23, 2011, it had been a couple of hours since Guy talked to his fiancé Denise. After leaving her son’s house, she had stopped to help a family whose car was stranded on the highway.
Before long, he came to the scene of an accident.
“Her car was spun out in the ditch and the back end of it was smashed. There was a Highway Patrolman there. I pulled over and he’s like ‘This is a – you know, an accident, you need to go on.’ And I was like, ‘Well, that’s my fiancée’s car.’ And he got a funny look on his face, and he said, ‘Well, you need to get to the hospital, she’s been hit by a car and she’s in really bad shape.’”
Guy prayed as he made his way to the hospital. “Let her be okay. You know, let her be alive.” Then he called Denise’ son, Kyle. Just two years earlier, his brother Kody had been killed in a car accident.
Now at the hospital, Guy got to be with Denise. He learned that as she left her car to help the family, and out of control vehicle crashed into her, crushing her from the waste down. Soon they were on a Medivac plane headed to Northwest Hospital in Amarillo. Dr. Toby Risko and his team were waiting when they landed.
“She had multiple long bone injuries that had been basically crushed, she had multiple fractures in her pelvis, all those things you could lose your whole entire blood volume uh pretty quickly with those injuries. In my opinion, she was very near death.”
Denise was placed in a medically induced coma and rushed into surgery. She was still there when Kyle and her parents arrived. They spread the word asking people to pray.
“People flooding her Facebook, ‘We’ll praying for you, our whole family’s praying for you’, you know, it was incredible to see. And that, that did help me make it through that.”
As the night wore on, Guy tried to prepare himself for the worst. At 8 o’clock that morning, they had their first update on Denise’s condition.
“There’s a glimmer of hope, which is more than I had the whole night. He said, ‘We have your mother stabilized. We have her vital signs where we want them.’ He said, ‘By no means is she out of the woods yet.’ He said ‘But the odds are getting better.’”
Christmas day came and went, and Denise continued to get stronger. The doctors had to amputate part of her left leg, but it was soon clear – she would live.
“Thank God that, you know, she’s pulling through. I don’t even care about her foot being gone, I don’t care about anything, all I care about is she’s making it. It’s a big answer to prayer, a big answer to prayer.” Several days later, they brought her out of the coma.
“I walked up to kiss her and there was something different. There was a glow about her. And with tubes still in I leaned over and I just – I told her, ‘You’re different.’”
Denise says that’s because she had seen a vision of heaven. “I saw Kody. And he looked at me and he said, ‘Mom, I love it here and I’m so happy, but you can’t come right now because Kyle needs you.’ God knew what I needed. I needed him to tell me he was okay, now it’s time to get on with it.”
In the weeks that followed, Denise underwent more surgeries to repair the damage to her legs. But as she started the long road of physical therapy, she felt God had put a new purpose on her life.
“He allowed it to happen. And so that I could get the closure I needed and because other people needed me. And so he needed me to be a bolder witness and boy, did he wake me up.”
Denise’s recovery surpassed all the doctor’s expectations. “As a doctor there’s things I can do to stabilize people and get bones in the right place; but God’s the one that heals them, not me. But God. Absolutely. I mean, it’s – He had his hand in every step.”
11 months after the accident, Denise walked down the aisle at her and Guy’s wedding. “Going from, you know, saying a prayer of, ‘Here she is Lord, take her if you need her.’ To God saying, ‘Here’s your bride.’ That was awesome. God is good!”