Accident strengthens couple’s bond

Cincinnati Enquirer

CINCINNATI

Tim Delgado looked at the patient’s vital signs on the monitor. The heart rate dropped critically low.

Beep ... beep ... beep.

A nurse squeezed an air bag, pumping 100 percent oxygen into a mask strapped over the woman’s face.

Swish ... swoosh.

Delgado, a University Hospital emergency-medicine resident, flew by Air Care helicopter to Mercy Anderson Hospital. A Jane Doe bicyclist in her 20s wearing a helmet suffered severe head injuries when hit broadside by a car.

The cyclist’s chin smashed into the side mirror, breaking her neck in five places. She fractured her clavicle and sternum and flew over the car’s roof, landing in an unconscious thud on the pavement. She lay choking on her blood.

Delgado, an avid biker, noticed the woman’s Team Hungry uniform shorts and light-blue shirt, the same uniform he wears when he rides.

“That’s my wife,” said Delgado, 30. He did not yell or scream. It was a simple statement of fact.

He walked out of the room, leaving the attending doctor, two emergency nurses and his flight nurse with his wife, Alison Delgado, 27.

A fellow 2009 University of Cincinnati medical school graduate and resident at Cincinnati Children’s, she’d dropped off a burrito at the hospital for him earlier that Saturday afternoon, Oct. 16. She planned a long bike ride.

Tim sat in the passenger seat of the helicopter on the return flight to University.

For the rest of the flight, memories of their short time together flickered through his mind,.

They married May 14 in Covington’s Devou Park. He’d gotten her into cycling. A hypercompetitive overachiever, she took to it naturally.

The helicopter pilot didn’t circle the landing pad atop University Hospital to reduce speed. He went straight in. Tim bolted from the passenger seat.

In the heat of that moment, Tim knew their lives would never be the same, even if Alison cheated death.

What he didn’t know was how the accident would change him.

Alison has no memory of the week before the accident or the two weeks after it.

She broke her jaw in two places. Doctors wired it shut.

She didn’t wake up. One day passed. Then two. Finally, on the fifth day, she opened her eyes.

An angiogram — a mapping of the brain’s blood vessels — revealed an aneurysm in the left front region, the part that controls speech.

Doctors inserted a stent Oct. 25 to prevent that bulge in the blood vessel from rupturing. The sac broke during surgery, forcing doctors to operate again Nov. 2. That procedure, called coiling, is not as invasive as opening the skull and involves filling the aneurysm with steel- wool-like thread to prevent blood flow.

Despite the setback, Alison improved.

Her second brain surgery Nov. 2 was successful. Doctors didn’t have to cut open her skull. Two days later, they transferred her to Drake Center for rehabilitation.

She made a rapid recovery despite the stumbles.

Doctors released her Nov. 17, ordering angiograms at three, six and nine months. Tim grabbed a tracheostomy tube before they left.

On Nov. 20, they went to bed. Tim was awake when he heard her complain she was uncomfortably hot. “Oh, my head,” she screamed. She vomited. She had seized up, her arms flexed and fists locked near her face.

Tim screamed. He knew the aneurysm had ruptured. Alison bled into her brain. He called 911. The doctor in him knew he had to do what the husband tried to resist — poke the tube he’d taken from Drake though the scar tissue on his wife’s neck to allow her to breath.

That week, Alison developed vasospasms, a condition that prevents enough blood from getting to parts of the brain. Doctors operated Dec. 11.

Two days later, Alison went home.

She wants to return to work in April, but June is more realistic, Tim said. Her angiogram revealed an aneurysm unrelated to the crash. Her surgery is scheduled for March.