I remember every detail of that night in the hospital, right up until the moment they stuffed me into the MRI tube. I have always been mildly claustrophobic, and those long minutes of being pinned in my van had already begun to tamper with my psyche. That, combined with the fact that MRI machines are small and I am big, made it the perfect recipe for a complete and total meltdown of epic proportions.

They drugged the hell out of me. Prior to that, they had me on Dilauded; it took a large dose of Versed to knock me out enough to get me through an MRI on the second attempt. My only clear memory after that is of a lovely red-haired nurse named Elizabeth who stood beside me and kept a reassuring grip on my right foot.

It was nearly three a.m. by that point, and Ken had arrived. He sat in the waiting room with my sister and her husband and waited. I remember seeing him later, outlined against the window of what must have been my room in the Trauma Care Unit; I remember telling him to call my boss and the babysitter and a few of my friends and getting frustrated because I couldn't hold onto a train of thought.

Most of all, I remember pain. Everywhere.

It was Wednesday by then. The surgeon fused my spine from C-5 to T-2 and sent me back to the Trauma Care unit to be awakened every few hours by people poking at me and asking "sharp or smooth?"

By Thursday, I could focus again. They insisted that I had to eat, so I agreed to a peach smoothie; it tasted good but sucking on the straw was just too much work.

I know they made me use a walker to take a few steps to a chair, and I know they let me have visitors about that time. I'm just not sure which event took place first. I really hope I was upright when people saw me. Childhood friends Deb and Holly were there. One of them even put her own chapstick on my parched lips. Lisa, one of my newer friends, and Carl and his wife Tammy showed up as well. Even Dave, the fire chief, showed up.

"The guys sent flowers," he told me. "But I had to leave them at the desk. I guess they don't allow flowers in Trauma Care."

On Friday, they sent me home as soon as I showed them that I could climb three steps. I didn't want to go home yet, but it never crossed my mind that perhaps I should have given less than 100% effort. I just kept humming "Gimmee Three Steps" and the nurses all thought I was trying to be funny.

Ken took his new role as caretaker very seriously. He brought the spare bed downstairs and set it up in the office just off the living room. It was crowded in there, but he knew I would never make it all the way upstairs to our bedroom.

He was very precise about my pain meds. I am the type of person who would rather take them on an "as needed" basis, but he was a firm believer in taking them on a prescribed schedule to keep the pain from ever getting the upper hand. He made little notes on the label of each bottle. "1" was for basic pain control. "2" was for pain that "1" didn't take care of, and I never knew what he was supposed to do with the one he labeled "poop." I'm just glad I never needed it.

I was afraid to go to bed that first night. I liked being upright in my chair. Getting to that bed took Herculean effort, and poor Ken had to scramble to get the pillows propped around me just exactly right. But then he lay down beside me and rested his hand on my hip, and for just a moment the world righted itself again.

"Why are you crying?" he whispered. "Am I hurting you?"

"I'm not crying," I sobbed. "Why are you crying?"

"I'm not crying, either," he sniffed.

And we laughed and pretended that we weren't crying together and finally drifted off for a few hours until the pain woke me up and we had to start the whole process again.

I couldn't eat. For the next few days, food lodged in my throat, no matter how much I chewed. It felt like there was a ledge halfway down; food would land there and I would want to cough, but I was afraid that coughing might jar my neck. I would start to panic and the food would come right back up.

I drank ice water. Juice. Milk. I leaned to take tiny bites of food with a drink, and then clench my entire body in a determined effort to fight off the panic long enough to force the food down. My sister brought my favorite bagels and flavored cream cheeses; neighbors brought casseroles and cakes and slow cookers full of food. I was starving, and it all tasted delicious, but eating exhausted me. My days stretched into a pattern of eating and sleeping and dreading the long walk to the bathroom.

There is a science to getting up on a walker. Because the surgeon had cut through the muscles in my neck and shoulders to get to my shattered spine, I couldn't use my arms to pull myself up. I had to keep the right hand on the arm of my chair while dragging my nearly useless left hand up to the walker. Then I had to brace both feet firmly on the floor and push myself up with my thigh muscles. Which were pretty much nonexistent.

Ten minutes later, I'd made it down the hallway and to the toilet, where Ken would untie my hospital gown and try not to let me see the expression on his face while I pretended not to be mortified. Afterward, it would take another fifteen minutes to return to my chair for another nap.

On the third day, I veered to the right instead of settling back into my chair.

"Where the hell are you going?" he demanded.

"Victory lap," I panted, and made one slow circle around the living room before sitting down.

Soon, it was two laps, and three. After a few more days, his family brought the kids home. I held it together and didn't embarrass the older ones, although seeing my older son intact with just a small bandage on his shoulder nearly pushed me over the edge into relieved hysterics. Then I saw my little one.

He was afraid of my brace, and of me in general. I couldn't blame him; my face was red and puffy and my hair still had blood in it, and I'm sure I was a terrifying site. I couldn't pick him up. I couldn't lift him. But I had to hold him, so I held out my arms and begged them to give him to me, draping a towel over the rough edges of the brace.

Then I held him in my arms and rocked side to side and howled my baby, my baby until my throat burned and he struggled to get away.

My mother-in-law gave me an e-reader that day because she knew how much I loved to read, and she worried about my being bored out of my mind while I recovered. Until that moment, I hadn't thought about being bored. I hadn't thought of anything but pain and eating and how much I hated needing help in the bathroom. I hadn't even taken time to realize how much I missed my kids. My baby, my baby.

I look back on that day as the day I started waking up. That's the day I began to do more than merely survive. I wasn't just crying for my baby, my baby; I was crying about all of the pain and fear and self-pity and gratitude and . . . everything that I hadn't allowed myself to feel since that damn tree killed a part of me. It all poured out of me then, and I didn't know what do to first: start reading or beg them to give me my baby again.

So I did neither. I just kept crying.

My baby, my baby.