Skier recovering after accident

When former East Lewis County resident Jocelyn Judd hit the snow, she knew something was very wrong.

As an acrobatic skier since her early teens, taking huge jumps at high speeds was second nature for the 27-year-old; but the last one she hit in northern Wyoming came under her too fast and caused her to over-rotate her backflip.

On the last day of the season in mid-April, she fell from a two and a half story building and landed on her neck and shoulders, with her legs coming over the top of her head.

Crumpled on the mountainside, her lungs rattling with fluid, she couldn’t feel her body, and inside her neck, the swelling was quickly cutting off the blood supply to her spinal cord.

Doctors said the pressure had to be lifted from the spine within six hours to minimize permanent damage.

“I knew I broke my neck, but I was trying to figure out where,” Judd said.

As a physician’s assistant, she knew the location mattered. It could mean the difference between using her arms again or controlling a wheelchair with a straw for the rest of her life.

A friend stabilized her neck until the ski patrol arrived, and within 20 minutes she was on a helicopter and bound for an Idaho hospital.

Her injuries were a dislocated and fractured hip; broken vertebrae at the base of her neck had to be removed and replaced.

Looking back, she says the neck injury might have been a blessing because it blocked the signals of excruciating pain running from her body toward her brain.

For the first few days, the doctors kept her heavily sedated. She went in and out of consciousness in those days, occasionally seeing people standing near her bed, not always knowing who they were, but through each wave of fog she remembered reading a poster someone hung in her room, “Believe.”

After she came to, it was all she could do to bring a forearm to her chest.

“It’s all she’s going to get,” her young neurosurgeon said to her parents in front of her.

“My dad almost killed him,” Judd said.

Since her spinal cord wasn’t severed, she thought she could get better. She just had to try.

Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado, has one of the best physical therapy units in the country, and one of the few in the West that could handle rehabilitating someone in her condition. But at more than $2,000 per day for the months of inpatient care doctors thought she needed, she needed a miracle to pay for it.

Her hospital social worker who helped her plan her care and reduce expenses told her, “With your insurance, you’re not going to Craig unless you have rich relatives or you win the lottery.”

The Judds fired him.

While the Judds were navigating Jocelyn’s insurance, people in Idaho and Lewis County were donating to coin jars and accounts, hosting a taco feed, silent auctions, a golf tournament, bingo games and a 4-H horse show in her honor.

Local residents raised $25,000, which was matched by the High Fives foundation, an organization dedicated to helping people with spinal injuries caused during snowsports.

It was enough for Judd to go to Craig Hospital.

“Without those two, I wouldn’t have been able to go and I wouldn’t have made this significant of a recovery. I feel like it saved my life,” Judd said.

Her parents have stayed by her side for months. They moved her out of her apartment while she was in the hospital, flew down to Colorado with her and rotated shifts. One would stay with her in the hospital while the other would go home to take care of the horses and dogs.

On April 20, doctors thought she’d never walk again.

Now she’s back on her feet, looking forward to work and hoping to ski this winter. In the meantime, she’s still very weak and has to work on restoring her body’s muscle control. Her legs spasm sometimes, and her hands are still pretty weak. She’ll do about another year’s worth of physical therapy, but no one’s sure how much function she’ll regain. For part of her recovery, her doctors are torturing her with rest.

“They want me to try knitting, which I think sounds horrible,” she said. “I’m usually not sitting down long enough to try something like that.”