Marissa Labate went from a trauma nurse to a trauma patient \u2014 in the very same Sharp Hospital unit in which she worked. She was barely able to move for six months. It took her almost a year to get back to work. But she refused to slip into despair.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery day, I would tell myself you\u2019re going to look back on this and you\u2019re going to be OK,\u201d Labate recalled. \u201cI would focus on the positive, because there was so much <\/em>negative.\u201d<\/p>\n Now 16 months after her accident, the San Carlos resident is back working in the intensive care unit. She continues the blog started in the middle of her recovery, Lipstick and Lifesaving, as a way to share her journey and connect with other nurses and survivors.<\/p>\n Trauma and tragedy<\/strong><\/p>\n Labate came to Sharp Hospital straight out of nursing school. She was one of 18 applicants chosen out of 1,200, and got one of three spots for the surgical intensive care unit (ICU). The ICU was the self-called adrenaline junkie\u2019s personal request.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the most difficult floor you can work on \u2014 we get the sickest patients in the hospital,\u201d Labate said, laughing, \u201cI never liked anything easy!\u201d<\/p>\n That attitude carried over into her hobbies as well. Why go on a casual hike when you can take on a challenging one? That was one of the reasons Labate and one of her coworkers set out for the graffitied and off-limits Adobe Falls in June 2016.<\/p>\n They actually ended up above the waterfall, near a dropoff, instead of at the bottom. As they looked for a way to climb down, Labate slipped and started to slide headfirst on her back down almost 20 feet of rock.<\/p>\n \u201cI made eye contact with my coworker just as I was falling back. I thought I was going to die,\u201d Labate recalled. \u201cAll of a sudden, I\u2019m on the ground. I couldn\u2019t see anything and there was blood everywhere. My right leg was lodged under the left. I went to pick it up and it just caved. Then it kicked in \u2014 the worst pain of my life. I just started screaming.\u201d<\/p>\n Labate had split her browbone open, broken her left wrist, and shattered her right leg into 15 separate pieces, including a crushed tibial plateau. She had to wait 10 minutes for a helicopter to come and get her \u2014 what Labate refers to as a muy<\/em> long 10 minutes \u2014 and take her to the same place where she clocked in every night.<\/p>\n On the other end<\/strong><\/p>\n Labate didn\u2019t get from the bottom of the cliff to the top of Burj Khalifa (where her latest celebration travel took her) without the help of her roommate, best friend and fellow Sharp nurse Danae Mucher.<\/p>\n Mucher was at home the day Labate fell. She received a call from Labate\u2019s mother, who lives in northern California.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought, \u2018why is she calling me<\/em>?\u2019 I had a weird feeling and knew it was not good,\u201d Mucher said. \u201cAfter being told [Labate was being care-flighted], I just started shaking.\u201d<\/p>\n Mucher called her own mother to drive her to the hospital, and walked into \u201ccrazy chaos.\u201d Labate had reached the hospital by about 3 p.m., had surgery about 8 p.m., and woke up with a metal bar in her leg and incredible pain from nerve damage. She calls herself \u201cprobably their worst patient\u201d because Labate knew the protocols, and being jacked up on pain meds, had no filter for telling anyone how they were or weren\u2019t doing their job.<\/p>\n She spent eight days in the hospital, with two surgeries and an external fixation. Labate experienced allergic reactions to the metal and antibiotics used to combat an infection from one of her incisions. She had an IV for six weeks, and was prescribed meds with a strict time schedule. A third surgery was necessary, and there was a nonunion of the bone and possible bone graft.<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t an easy course,\u201d Mucher said.<\/p>\n The next six months Labate spent in a wheelchair. Labate\u2019s mom moved in for the first three months, and her dad lived with them for the last three months. She couldn\u2019t move anywhere without \u201cintense pain,\u201d and had to have help to do just about anything \u2013 from make a meal to get to the commode.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pain was the worst part,\u201d Labate said. \u201cThe second was the loss of complete control. It made me so emotional and angry.\u201d<\/p>\n Labate is not a sedentary person by nature. To just \u201cexist\u201d in a day was an unknown reality to her. She learned that she had virtually no control over her day, but she could control was her mind.<\/p>\n \u201cYour mind is so powerful,\u201d Labate said. \u201cIt was so important to not let it wander. I would think, \u2018alright, I can\u2019t move anything. But I\u2019m no<\/em> going to have a bad day today.\u201d<\/p>\n The blog arose out of a need to focus on something other than her pain or lack of activity. It was an idea from a friend from school, and picked up 75,000 readers within the first four months. Labate wrote about her injury, her time as a night nurse, and her other passion \u2014 cosmetics.<\/p>\n \u201cThe blog was a release for me,\u201d she said. \u201cIt meant so much, connecting with people who had gone through the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Now the blog serves as a travel journal as well. Once Labate was able to walk, and then drive, she wanted to travel. A year after her accident, she took her first trip to Nashville, Tennessee, for the Country Music Award festival. Since then, she has been to Lake Tahoe, Phoenix, Portland, Hawaii, Egypt and Dubai.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to take advantage of the time I have,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n A new outlook<\/strong><\/p>\n Both Mucher and Labate note how the last year has changed their perspective towards their patients (side note \u2014 Mucher now works in the same unit as Labate after being around them so much through her accident).<\/p>\n \u201cWe work with sick patients all the time, but we never had to go home with them,\u201d Mucher said. \u201cYou don\u2019t think about [the recovery process].\u201d<\/p>\n Labate agrees, saying she now has a whole new empathy for her patients.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me as a nurse, it gave me a reality check,\u201d she shared. \u201cI have huge increased compassion and increased advocacy for them. Trauma is still my passion.\u201d<\/p>\n Read other musings of Labate on her blog at lipstickandlifesaving.com<\/a>. You can also follow her and her travels on Instagram @marissalabate<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014La escritora independiente Joyell Nevins puede ser contactada en joyellc@gmail.com<\/a>. You can also follow her blog at swbgblog.wordpress.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Por Joyell Nevins<\/p>","protected":false},"author":826,"featured_media":229809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11558","_seopress_titles_title":"Lipstick and lifesaving","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11547,11558,11551,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-mission-times-courier","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/826"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Lipstick](\"https:\/\/missiontimescourier.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/recover.jpg\")
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