One year later player is recovering
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series detailing the recovery story of Aggie lacrosse player Max Allen.
Lying in a hospital bed last December, Max Allen was unsure of where he was and what had happened to him. The Utah State lacrosse player didn’t know the extent of his injuries or even what caused them, all he remembers is the confusion.
“My mom tells me that I would look at her every day like ‘Why am I here? Where am I?'” Allen said. “She would ask if I knew where I was, and I would shake my head because I couldn’t talk. The day that I answered ‘yes’ was the day she stopped asking me.”
What the Cache Valley native didn’t know at the time was that he took the full force of a car crash on his way to work one Friday afternoon.
Coming up to the one-year anniversary of the accident this Dec. 3, Allen still doesn’t remember much about the crash that changed his life. He said his understanding of the accident is through the eyes of others who were there.
“I’ve been told that I was going to work,” Allen said. “We were turning left on 14th North and Second East. The light went yellow, we turned and a truck hit us.”
Allen never made it to work at University 6 movie theater. The truck connected with the front passenger side of the silver Ford Escort he was riding in — exactly where he was sitting — giving him the full impact of the crash.
It’s serious
At home in Cove, Utah, Sheree Allen was settling in for the night. It had been a busy week and the mother of six was looking forward to a relaxing evening at home.
When the phone call came, the voice of a Logan Regional Hospital social worker explained what had happened. Sheree Allen’s 21-year-old son had been in a car accident and from what the social worker was informed, it sounded serious.
At the time of the call, the social worker hadn’t been able to see Max Allen, yet, or speak with his doctor.
“I said ‘How is he?’ I figured he broke his arm or something,” Sheree Allen said. “She said ‘I don’t know, yet. The doctors are (still) working on him. I haven’t been able to get into the room, yet, but from what I understand, it’s serious.'”
Not knowing what she would find when she arrived at the emergency room, Sheree Allen grabbed her coat and made the 30-minute drive south.
As Sheree Allen drove, doctors continued to work on her son. He hadn’t been able to call her himself; he had been too debilitated by the accident to use a phone. Sheree’s only knowledge of her son’s condition came from the social worker, who hadn’t seen her son either.
“By the time I get to the hospital, I’ve decided this is going to be bad,” Sheree Allen said. “The social worker comes over to the front desk and immediately directs us into a private room. I know it’s bad. We’re in the room where they take people they expect to break down — where they give people bad news.”
Life Flight
“We were just there for a couple of minutes when the doctor comes in,” Sheree Allen continued. “He started the conversation off with ‘We are going to Life Flight him.'”
A doctor told the Allen family of Max Allen’s prognosis. He suffered a broken pelvis, a punctured lung and a broken occipital condyle — the bone located where the head connects to the neck.
Along with that, the doctor said he had a traumatic brain injury.
Life Flight took Max Allen to McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden, where doctors kept him in a medically induced coma for 17 days.
There were no guarantees he would wake up when doctors took him off the drugs to release him from his coma. He was unconscious at the scene of the accident and never regained consciousness during those first three weeks.
Max Allen’s lacrosse coach Jon Atwood drove to Ogden soon after hearing the news. After talking with the family, Atwood said, it became clear what a long haul they were in for.
“When I went down there and his parents explained what had happened,” Atwood said, “they were definitely prepared for the worst possible outcome.”
Atwood had known the Allen family for over a decade. He coached at Sky View High School, where Max Allen’s older brother Mitchell played lacrosse for him.
Atwood said his concern for Max Allen was for more than just fearing the loss of a good player.
“I was pretty devastated,” Atwood said.
Waking up
After Max Allen woke up with almost three weeks missing from his life, he said, he was unsure if he could live a normal life again. Whether or not he could return to the lacrosse field was the furthest idea from his mind.
“When I first got there a lot of doctors didn’t think I would live,” Max Allen said. “As the days went by they were like ‘Oh, he’ll live, he’ll be fine.’ But then they thought I would be severely handicapped.”
Sheree Allen was eager for her son to come out of the coma, yet anxious that he might not.
“When he was in the coma I wanted to see his eyes so bad,” Sheree Allen said. “We communicate so much with our eyes, and he’s laying there with his eyes closed.”
When her son finally woke up just before Christmas, Sheree said it was a miracle. The family spent Dec. 25 gathered together around the hospital bed, opening presents and singing carols.
Then Max Allen started to speak. His words were muffled at first, but eventually they became clearer.
“His sense of humor started to come back,” Sheree Allen said. “He joked with us.”
Sheree Allen said she was almost afraid to blink because it was hard to keep up with the rapid improvements.
“One minute he couldn’t sit up and the next he’s in his wheelchair, pushing down the hall,” Sheree Allen said. “Then a minute after that he’s standing, and the very next day he walks 120 feet down the hall.”
When the man who wasn’t expected to survive walked out of the hospital just 32 days after being admitted, he still had a ways to go in the recovery process. He was still uneasy on his feet and his mind was still processing what had happened to him.
“He had a lot of fears,” Sheree Allen said. “He was afraid that someone would bump into him and he would fall and get hurt.”
– meredith.kinney@aggiemail.usu.edu
See the second half of Max Allen’s road to recovery in the next issue of The Utah Statesman Friday, Dec. 2.
USU LACROSSE’S MAX ALLEN was taken to Logan Regional Hospital and then transported by helicopter to McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden. Photo courtesy of Sheree Allen (Sheree Allen)
MAX ALLEN was in a medically-induced coma for 17 days following his car accident in 2010. Photo courtesy of Sheree Allen (Sheree Allen)