It was a windy and rainy Sunday afternoon early last month when Jessica Dicks heard a birch tree snap.
The 27-year-old mother said she had been camping with family, including her three young daughters and a 7-year-old niece, who were playing and napping together in their tent near a lake in western Canada.
Suddenly, she said, the towering tree broke several feet up. The top of the tree, a piece maybe 25 feet or longer, was now barreling toward the children.
“It was coming, flying down,” Dicks recounted in an interview with The Washington Post.
As the tree fell, she said, “I went hurling toward the tent.”
Dicks’s memory of that July day is hazy, she said in an interview from a hospital in Edmonton, Alberta; but she thinks she screamed at her oldest daughter, who is 6, to run to the back of the tent.
“Get the kids the hell out of the way,” she said she remembers thinking.
Then, it all went dark.
Family members believe the tree may have struck Dicks on the head and knocked her down before it pinned her legs to the ground; they also believe that her body may have diverted the massive section of falling birch and kept it from landing on the children.
Relatives said she wound up with a large gash on top of her head that took 20 staples to close and also suffered broken teeth and broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a crushed sternum and fractures to her spine – including one to her T5 vertebrae that paralyzed her from the breasts down.
Weeks later, when she woke up from a drug-induced coma, she told her uncle: “I saved my babies.”
Officials in Alberta said Friday that they were aware of “an unfortunate incident” that occurred last month at the Lawrence Lake Provincial Recreation Area near Edmonton.
“We extend our deepest sympathies to Ms. Jennifer Dicks and her family,” a provincial government spokesperson said in a statement to The Post. “As this matter is currently under investigation, we cannot comment further at this time.”
On July 3, Dicks was camping with her brother, her 7-year-old niece and her three daughters, who were 6, 4 and less than a year old at the time. Her spouse, Jason Lewis, was working nearby, she said.
Dicks said the family – from Athabasca, a tiny town in Alberta – had spent days fishing, swimming and sitting around the campfire.
That afternoon, it started to drizzle – and that’s when she heard a loud crack.
Dicks said she remembers nothing after that moment. But Lewis said the scene was “horrific.”
Lewis said he was working on a construction project nearby when his father-in-law, who was right beside him, got the call. Lewis rushed to the scene, dialing 911 along the way, he said.
When he arrived at the Lawrence Lake campground, the rain was coming down and Dicks’s brother was holding a tarp over her to keep her dry.
Their children were still in the tent, asking if their mother was okay.
Lewis said Dicks drifted in and out – sometimes answering questions from paramedics correctly, other times unable to do so.
When they called for an air ambulance, he said, he knew it was bad.
Shortly after the accident, Dicks’s uncle, Monty Major, started a Facebook group called “Help For Jess” to keep family and friends updated on her recovery.
On July 26, more than three weeks after the accident, he posted:
“Since the incident, Jess has been receiving care in the intensive care neurology ward at the University of Alberta Hospital. It took 11 days for the doctors and nurses to stabilize her enough to allow neurosurgeons to perform surgery which entailed installing rods and screws to support the T5 vertebrae and help alleviate the pain. She had her surgery on Thursday, July 14, 2016. Her lungs and respiratory issues are still a factor and the fractures to the C spine vertebrae remain a concern. At the time of writing this, it is too early to tell how successful the surgery went to helping repair the damage, or if Jess will ever regain feeling in her lower body.
“There is a very long and difficult emotional, physical and financial road ahead for this young family of 5 and our hero.”
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Dicks said she was put into a drug-induced coma – eating through a tube and breathing with help from a machine.
She said it took 11 days for doctors to get her stable enough to operate on her back.
During a five-hour surgery, she said, doctors used two metal rods and eight screws to hold her spine in place.
“They didn’t know if I would make it or not,” she said.
Even so, she added: “Doctors say I won’t walk again.”
“It was very hard and very bizarre to comprehend at first because I don’t remember any of it,” she said. “Now it’s sunk in that this is my reality.”
Although her broken bones are healing, she said, there are more difficulties ahead: Her family had to give up their home because it no longer meets her needs, she said, and she needs a wheelchair – and a new vehicle to carry it.
“I mostly worry about chasing after the girls in a wheelchair,” Dicks said about her future. “I’m sure it will get easier but it will be difficult at first.”
Her uncle has launched a crowdfunding campaign for medical expenses; so far, family members have raised more than $48,000 of a $50,000 goal.
But Dicks said she had no regrets.
“I definitely wish we went camping somewhere else, but I don’t regret what I did,” she said.
She would, she said, “rather be paralyzed for the rest of my life” than to see her children hurt.
“I get really sad something because I miss my life and the way things were,” she said. “The first week or so, there was a lot of sadness and misunderstanding, but now it’s just determination to get out of here, to get back to my kids and mother them.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Lindsey Bever
