My mother’s wedding ring and some of her other personal valuables were in my purse. Happy and grateful that my mother had come through heart surgery successfully, I was going to the hospital to pick her up. Carey, my happy-go-lucky two-year-old son, was with me in the car as I maneuvered through Houston’s busiest freeway exchange. Then something happened that marked 1976 as the year that changed my life―a terrifying explosion. I remember it with every breath I take―literally.
Traffic came to a riveting halt. Stunned by the sudden shock of it all, I jumped out of the car with Carey right behind me. A strange stench choked me and stung my eyes, and then a huge cloud of toxic fumes enveloped Carey and me. I grabbed Carey and darted back into the car and closed the door. All the while, Carey was screaming, “Help me, Mommy. I hurt!” Frantic, I wrapped Carey in my suit jacket and lay on top of him, trying to protect him from the deadly fumes. Between passing out and throwing up, I tried to honk the horn in desperate hopes that someone would hear it and rescue us. Finally, after I hit the windshield wipers, someone pointed rescuers our way.
Later we found out that the highway holocaust had been caused by a truck pulling a large tank of anhydrous ammonia. The hitch broke, causing the trailer and tank to fall off the upper freeway and onto the lower freeway where I was driving. Fourteen people were killed instantly, and more than two hundred hospitalized. Carey and I were the only two survivors in the area where the explosion had ripped the freeway apart.
After the accident, Carey spent two-and-a-half months in the hospital, and I was there for more than a year. After that, live-in nurses stayed in my home for about two-and-a-half years. Carey and I both received around-the-clock love and attention from my husband. Before the accident, we all enjoyed a wonderful life. We climbed mountains, we went on trips and family outings together, and we even enjoyed our routine workaday life. But in 1976, all that changed. I was an invalid, blind, unable to breathe on my own and certainly not able to care for my two-year-old, my other children, nor my husband.
After a couple of years, I began getting better even though I still took antibiotics every day and breathing treatments three or four times daily. Then I’d suffer setbacks so serious the doctors would call all my family in to be with me while I died. But each time I miraculously rallied.
Different parts of my body gave out at different times. For example, I was blind a great deal of the time until I had a two-cornea transplant. Coping with blindness when I had enjoyed such an active life before the accident was an agonizing struggle, but my lungs―damaged from breathing the toxic fumes―posed the most life-threatening challenges.
The time had come when there was no longer a choice. I simply could not breathe on my own anymore. I was in the hospital for two months on a ventilator, but the doctors said they couldn’t consider me for a lung transplant because I was in such poor condition.
I refused to give up hope. Too many people were praying for me. God had already worked numerous miracles in my life―just to be alive was the greatest one.
As I lay in the hospital teetering on a tightrope between life and death, I was told that a donor had been found.
I asked my husband Don to call our minister for me to talk to before I went into the operating room. My husband could not find our minister, so I asked him to find John Morgan, my brother’s minister. When John came into my room, he said to me, “You are not going to believe this! Something has happened that I’m not going to tell you about until you wake up after your surgery.” I was curious, of course, but I was simply too weak to interrogate him. John prayed with me that I would make it through surgery even though I was in critical condition.
After the surgery, when it looked like I was going to survive, my husband explained to me the miracle John had alluded to. “Last Sunday when we prayed in church for you, a young man and his family were there. His name was Jason. Later that day, Jason was shot and killed in a tragic act of violence. Jason is your donor.”
Don filled in more details. “Jason’s parents would not have even thought about Jason’s being a donor if John had not prayed specifically for you that morning in church and mentioned your name.” My husband continued, “Numerous people were on the waiting list―some for over a year. But Jason was the right size for you and the right blood type and had all the other technical compatibilities. Mickey, you were the only one right for Jason’s lungs.”
One day when I was still in the hospital recuperating from the transplant, a man came into my intensive care room and asked Don, “Is Mickey Johnson your wife?”
Of course, my husband responded, “Yes.” The man explained, “My father is in the hospital here, too, and I have come to see him.” He then said, slowly and deliberately, “I was also Jason’s schoolteacher.” He continued, “I brought all these letters Jason’s classmates wrote to your wife.”
I cried as I read each letter. They were the most beautiful testimony to a teenager―or anybody―I had ever read. They talked about what a fine young man Jason was and how thrilled he would be that he was able to give life to me if he had to die. My heart almost broke with sadness for Jason’s family. How could I ever thank him and his family for the joy that my own life had been extended because of his priceless gift?
I later found out that Jason was born in 1976, the same year as that freeway explosion. The same year that changed my life gave me life.
As a grandmother, I still have aches and pains, but they are merely reminders of the privilege of growing older. Like George Burns once said, “Growing older is not always golden, but it sure beats the alternative.”
A Matter of Life and Death From Chicken Soup for the Soul: Older and Wiser
BY: Mickey Mann Johnson
