“Am I going to be able to walk down the aisle?" Rachel Maples' Story

The Mapleses now with 2-year-old Zeke and in 2001 (inset).

While at St. John’s Hospital recovering from severe injuries sustained in a head-on collision May 17, 2000 – less than two months before she was to marry her high school sweetheart – a lot of thoughts crossed Rachel Maples’ mind.

With lacerations to her liver and vena cava (a vein that returns blood from the body to the heart), a collarbone fracture and severely broken leg, Rachel worried about being able to walk down the aisle at her wedding, missing her honeymoon and being able to have children one day. She even wondered if the accident was a sign that she shouldn’t marry her fiancé, Clell Maples.

“It was really depressing. It got really hard when I got out of intensive care and was in bed for so long. I wanted to go outside so badly,” Rachel said when she first spoke with Healthy People in the spring of 2001.

Fortunately, Rachel was able to walk down the aisle on July 15 as planned, with the help of a crutch. She and Clell made it to Mexico for their honeymoon, albeit a year later. And two years ago, the couple became the proud parents of baby Ezekiel, whom they call Zeke. Rachel stays home with Zeke while Clell works at Alltel Communications. The couple plans to add to their family in the future.

“The accident and my recovery really made me aware of what I have, and thankful for it. No one thinks about dying or being disabled when they’re 18 years old. I’m so thankful for my family and my husband. They all took care of me after the accident. Whenever it was time for my medicine in the hospital, my mom was at the nurses’ desk bugging them,” Rachel says. “I had a lot of people praying for me,” she adds.

The Mapleses credit their faith and the quick treatment she received at the accident scene and at St. John’s for her recovery.

“It was amazing how everything came together at the scene,” Clell says now. “I got there right after the first responders arrived and it was literally just seconds later that the helicopter came and took her to St. John’s, where Dr. Huckfeldt was waiting to operate on her.”

Coincidentally, Clell came over the same hill in his car just moments after the wreck and was shocked to find his fiancée’s car smashed and her lying in the ditch. He knew her leg was broken and she had a cut above her eye, but neither he nor Rachel knew that she was within minutes of bleeding to death had she not had emergency surgery.

Time Was of the Essence

Because St. John’s is a state-designated Level 1 Emergency Trauma Center, a trauma surgeon is present in the ER 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When St. John’s trauma surgeon Roger Huckfeldt, M.D., received the page about Rachel that day, he was 30 seconds away from St. John’s ER.

“She would have died if she didn’t get right to an operating room,” Huckfeldt said in 2001. “Time was of the essence. Within just a few minutes, Rachel’s condition deteriorated to the point of massive bleeding from her lacerated liver.”

During Rachel’s two-week hospital stay, she required three surgeries and 57 units of blood products. Because her condition was so critical upon arrival at St. John’s, Huckfeldt performed what surgeons call “damage control” surgery, in which the surgeon performs only minimal, life-saving repairs at first.
Clell said Huckfelt was very supportive to him and Rachel’s family during the ordeal.
“He explained what was going on in ways we could understand. He was confident and calm,” Clell said in 2001.

With her liver repaired and other injuries on the mend, Rachel went home to her parents’ house two weeks after the accident to continue her recovery.

After the July 15, 2000 wedding, Rachel returned to work at Carol Jones Realtors’ Ozark branch and had physical therapy for her broken leg. She says the rod in her leg is still tender, but other than that, she has had no lasting effects from the accident that nearly took her life.