“Life is a gift, and if you don’t open it, you will never be able to feel all its beauty”
Carol Decker came out of coma after giving birth to her second daughter – Sophia. The woman realized she was now completely blind. And that was not all…Her left arm, ring finger on the right hand and both legs were amputated.
Now, 10 years after this terrible accident, the 42-year-old mother of two children from Washington, USA, is going to publish her book “Unshattered: Overcoming Tragedy and Choosing a Beautiful Life”.
1.In a morning of May, 2008, Decker woke up from a severe pain in her side. Her husband immediately took her to hospital, thinking it was a kidney stone. At that time, the woman was 7,5 months pregnant. Doctors didn’t see any reasons for pain, and sent her home.
2. After 2 weeks, Carol got a temperature under 40 and her labor pains began. After an emergency Caesarean section, doctors found out, that Decker had developed sepsis, presumably because of a streptococcal infection.
Carol was put into a medically induced coma for almost 3 weeks. When blood poisoning began to threaten the organs, doctors performed kidney dialysis on her for three days in a row. This, however, didn’t help…
3. After waking up, the woman realized she was blind, she didn’t have a left arm, a finger on the right hand and both legs.
4. “Doctors thought I wouldn’t survive, so they brought me Sophia, although she was in the department for premature babies weighing only 1.8kg. I couldn’t see her, couldn’t touch her and feel how beautiful she was. Only my husband and my children gave me strength to live on”, tells Carol.
5. The following 5 months, Decker spent in hospital, and only then could she finally return home.
6. “At first, it was very difficult to deal with everything: children, hospital, work. But we set small goals for ourselves, achieved them and gradually managed to go back to normal life”, tells Carol’s husband, Scott.
“Probably the most important factor in Carol’s recovery is that we have a lot of friends who support us. At first, she needed a lot of help, but now she’s 100% independent at home. And our daughters try to help her as much as possible”, he added.
7. The first daughter, Chloe, was only 2 years old when Carol went blind. She still remembers to the smallest detail the moment when she saw her for the last time: Chloe was picking flowers and smelling them.
“Now she’s blond, but back then she had jet-black hair put in a ponytail, and chubby cheeks and deep brown eyes. I’m so grateful for this memory”.
8. But the fact, that Carol would never see her younger daughter, became a cause for her depression, that Decker could barely overcome.
Now Carol Decker gives motivational speeches. She hopes, that her life story will help people find hope to keep fighting.
9. Despite all the suffering, Carol learned to appreciate life, to get to know it through touches and smells, and to discover all its new sides.
10. “Life is a gift, and if you don’t open it, you will never be able to feel all its beauty. I was only able to understand it now”.
