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Paul Nordmann
Left: Lindsey Dumm Right: Jake Gregory
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Jake Gregory was in Mercy Hospital St. Louis for more than two months. Rehab took a solid year, and she still works through a few lingering after-effects of the trauma.
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Left: Lindsey on the promenade in Cádiz, the oldest city in Europe, with the cathedral behind her. Right: Lindsey, after the accident, in intensive care in Spain.
“Here,” Jake Gregory said, handing her camera to her friend Chelsea Speckert. “I want to climb to the top.” They were already high up on one of the massive cliffs that make Klondike Park look like it’s in the Rockies. They’d ventured, unwittingly, into the no-climb area to photograph the bright orange trumpet flowers vining from crevices in the rock.
Speckert snapped a photo of Gregory as she started to climb and another when she turned halfway up, an elated grin on her face. This hot, clear day—August 12, 2008—would be one of her last days of freedom before she left for Southwest Baptist University. She planned to study other cultures and become a missionary. Exuberant and adventurous, she was determined to do something purposeful with her life.
Speckert, two years younger, looked up at Gregory, silhouetted against blue sky and rock, her figure growing smaller as she neared the cliff top.
A second later, Speckert heard a shrill scream and, in a single streak, saw her friend falling. For one terrifying second, their eyes met.
Gregory landed hard on a rocky outcropping. By the time Speckert reached her, blood was pouring from—Speckert couldn’t tell where. Eyes, nose, ears, mouth? There was so much blood, Gregory couldn’t breathe right. Speckert knew not to move her, but knew she had to. Gently, she eased Gregory to her side. She couldn’t leave her—but she had to call 911, and her phone was in the car.
An elderly German tourist heard screams and called up, “Do you need help?”
“Yes!” Speckert screamed down. He called 911, then climbed the 20 or so feet up to the outcropping to help. Within 12 minutes, volunteer firefighters from Augusta were there; soon after, EMTs from ARCH Air Medical Service climbed up to reach Gregory and airlift her to Mercy Hospital St. Louis. One of those first responders, Sarah McCarthy, picked up Gregory’s cellphone and called the number listed as “Mommy”—Angela Gregory, who’d just gotten back to her office at Contemporary Productions.
Angela missed the first call and tried to call back. When her phone rang again, she answered: “Sweetheart! I’m so glad you called back! I was trying to reach you!”
For a moment, McCarthy couldn’t speak. She steeled herself and gave Angela the news, explaining that Jake had fallen nearly 60 feet. Angela raced to Mercy, where doctors said there wasn’t a part of her daughter’s brain that was uninjured, and she might not live the night. A few days later, a neurosurgeon removed part of her cerebellum to relieve the pressure. Her chances were still about 1 in 100, and even if she survived, she could well be on a feeding tube in a nursing home for the rest of her life. Alone in the hospital chapel, tears streaming, Angela screamed at God: “You can’t have her yet!”
When Caleb Wuertenberg, one of Jake’s best friends, heard she’d made it through the surgery, he passed out at Angela’s feet.
During the two-week Las Fallas festival in Valencia, Spain, giant papier-mâché puppets stuffed with firecrackers are paraded through the streets and then set on fire. Lindsey Dumm, a 26-year-old who’d fulfilled her dream to live in Spain by snagging a job as an au pair, never missed a parade. So on March 16, 2013, she took the bus from Madrid to Valencia with a young woman she’d just met. As they arrived, they met another American, Brian Schatz. The three spent that evening and all of the next day walking through the streets, marveling over the creatures’ temporary magnificence, the Spanish in medieval garb, the heat of the flames, the fireworks exploding one after another as night fell.
When they got back to their hostel, everybody was asleep. The trio climbed six stories up the narrow, circular staircase and sat at the top, talking. “More fireworks!” Dumm exclaimed, hiking one hip up to get a better look out of the window. She lost balance. She tumbled over the low metal railing and fell straight down the center of the stairwell, a 60-foot drop.
In Maryland Heights, at about 11 that evening, Carol Dumm’s cellphone rang. She missed the call, and it went to voicemail. She was surprised to see her daughter’s name; usually they Skyped, to save money.
But it wasn’t Lindsey. It was somebody named Brian, saying Lindsey had fallen six stories and was in the emergency department in Valencia. Shaking, Carol called him. “We won’t leave her side until you get here,” he promised.
Rick Dumm called his boss, who knew about international travel. His boss came over and stayed all night, making arrangements. The embassy was closed for the festival. No one at the hospital spoke English.
The Dumms were in the air by the time Carol could admit the sick fear in her gut: How could anyone fall six stories and be alive?
Jake spent 66 days at Mercy Hospital St. Louis. After 44 weeks of outpatient rehab, she started college. In May 2013, she graduated on the dean’s list at Lindenwood University. She’s headed for a different kind of missionary work now, studying for a graduate degree in occupational therapy. And working as a barista at Starbucks. And all her clothes smell like coffee.
When Angela saw a TV news segment, she told Jake, “A girl fell in Spain—60 feet!”
She didn’t know that a friend of the Dumms had already sent them a link to Jake’s story and that she’d been their first glimpse of a livable future for Lindsey.
Months later, when Lindsey was more stable, Carol sent Jake a friend request on Facebook. Jake immediately messaged Carol, offering to meet. Later she found a message she’d never seen, sent by Carol a month earlier, making the same suggestion.
Jake looked at Lindsey’s Facebook page—the recovery photos, the fundraisers, the weepy friends. It was the same experience in so many ways.
Lindsey’s LinkedIn résumé still said she lived with a Spanish family and taught their children English. “This is an opportunity to step out of my comfort zone,” Lindsey had written, “and experience life from a different viewpoint.”
We meet at Brio Tuscan Grille in Frontenac. While the parents introduce themselves, Lindsey and Jake hug hard. The waiter asks about drinks, and Lindsey turns to Jake: “What are you having?”
“A cappuccino, but you should get what you want,” Jake urges. Lindsey orders peach tea.
I ask her why she so wanted to go to Spain.
“I minored in Spanish, and I wanted to be fluent,” she says, speaking slowly and exaggerating pronunciation because it’s hard to articulate the words. Her voice sounds harsh and strained, forcing the words into shape. “Because of the brain injury, I don’t remember my Spanish. But I practice every day. I have a friend who suggested an app”—Schatz, who’s now running a computer store in London. “He saw me fall.”
The waiter returns and de-scribes the specials. Jake shud-ders at a dish containing something puréed. She and Lindsey have both had their fill of purée.
They were alike even before their accidents: free-spirited. Lindsey went skydiving. She bungee-jumped off a train trestle in Spain. She rode camels in Morocco. “I’ve never been scared of anything,” she says. “That has not changed since my accident.”
I ask if either she or Jake feels at least a little more cautious.
“No,” they answer in unison.
Their mothers sigh.
“It sometimes is concerning to me that Jake is so cavalier about this whole experience,” Ang-ela says. “The neuropsychiatrist said, ‘That’s because she’s the only one who didn’t experience it.’”
“The really early stages of trauma, they don’t remember,” Carol says, nodding. “And they have not been parents yet, either.” Their focus is on winning back as much of their lives as possible.
“I have a question,” Lindsey tells Jake. “Do you have contacts? Did you have trouble with them at first?”
“Oh yeah. My eyes move all the time,” she says. “There are just days when I go, ‘Nope. Glasses today. Not gonna fight the fight.’”
Lindsey looks relieved. “I learned how to do it,” she says, “but now I can’t remember if I’ve put them in!”
Short-term memory’s still a problem. The Dumms hesitate to leave their 27-year-old daughter alone, because she forgets she’s not supposed to do stairs.
“My mom had Jake-sitters,” Jake says, com-miserating. She hates feeling babied. She
knows she’ll always have a bit of blurred vision and less than steel-clamp control over her emotions. But her mom doesn’t even want her to drive on the highway, and she’s 24 years old! “Do you feel babied?” she asks Lindsey, who shakes her head no.
“Not yet,” her mother smiles.
“You’ll get there,” Jake as-sures Lindsey, who grins. Her sense of humor’s coming back. At first, she couldn’t translate sarcasm, and she needed every sentence to be literal and precise. She’s sleeping better, too. She couldn’t get her brain to turn off at bedtime, but Jake recommended listening to mu-sic, and it’s working.
The Dumms describe those weeks in Valencia, which Lindsey doesn’t even remember. All white tile, no place to sit, no air-conditioning, no cafeteria, and a long line every afternoon to talk to the doctor, who spoke no English. People from nearby churches brought them food. Strangers came up as they stood in line and said, “I will translate for you today.” The hostel owner said, “Why don’t you guys sue us? Because she’s going to need money.”
Finally, the hospital gave the OK for Lindsey to fly home—as long as a doctor and two nurses flew with her on a medical plane. The day a nurse with a heavy Alabama drawl walked into the Valencia hospital and said, “Hi, how y’all doin’? We’re here to take our girl home,” Carol burst into tears.
“You think you are alone, but you’re not,” Rick says. “They all still pray for her.”
One of Lindsey’s favorite songs is the band Gungor's Christian rock ballad “Beautiful Things,” which contains the line, “You make me new; you are making me new.” “I feel like I was born a third time after the accident,” she says.
She had no surgeries. The hospital in Va-lencia used a special less-invasive protocol that’s still very new. If the pressure on her brain had gone up even a little more, they would have had to take the top of her skull off—but it stayed level. The tear in her lung healed on its own. They called her milagro, their miracle.
Back in St. Louis, she went to St. Luke’s Hospital and then to Mercy Rehabilitation Hospital St. Louis. Now, while she waits for her brain to heal a little more, she’s doing aquatherapy, because in water she doesn’t have to worry about falling, and hippotherapy at Therapeutic Horsemanship, because when she sits on a horse, her hip bones are right on top of the horse’s, and his natural gait retrains her brain, teaching her how to walk again.
“It’ll seem like no progress and then happen all at once,” Angela tells them. “Jake was in voice therapy, and it took forever, but one day she called me at work, and I hung up and said, ‘Jake’s voice is back.’ It’s like the electricity going out: The appliances come back on one at a time.’”
“Did you ever flat-line?” Jake asks Lindsey. “I flat-lined three times.”
The two families talk about finding each other. Lindsey listens without interrupting (she repeats keywords over and over in her head to remember what she wants to say), then says, “It was kind of interesting for Jake to see where she came from and for me to see where I’m going.”
The sentence glides out unbroken, a hint at fluency to come. Everybody smiles.
“This was something I wanted to do,” Jake says, “not like a charity case, ‘Oh, let me bring hope to this family,’ but just to say that I’ve been in this situation. It helps to remind me. Sometimes I forget that it was my life, because it just feels like a story I heard. I have to remember I’m not invincible. Tried that. Not so much.”
