Jason Priestley (20 page)

By this time, I was halfway through the racing season, driving the Kelley racing entry in the Infiniti Pro Series, and everything was going quite well; I was in third place overall and had been consistently running up front. I had to fly east for a race, so I looked around the empty house and told Naomi, “I'm just going to this race in Kentucky. When I get back, hopefully everything we shipped should be here, and we'll deal with this empty house. See you on Sunday night, after the race.”

T
he air was heavy and damp on that humid day in the middle of summer 2002 in the South. At the halfway point in the official season, I was third in line for the championship. I was driving my Infiniti Pro Series car, which is basically a 200 mph open wheel oval car, for the Kelley Racing Team. It looked like an Indy car but was a little bit smaller and a little bit slower.

We drivers took our regular warm-up laps, very standard, when somebody blew an engine. As usual, workers ran out and put down something called Quick Dry on the track. It soaked up all the oils and antifreeze and fluids. Usually, it zapped any moisture and blew away in an instant. Because of the weather that day, the Quick Dry didn't blow away immediately.

Practice time was almost over; I'm not sure why they even sent us back out for more laps. Still, we returned to the track, and as I was coming out of turn one, a wheel touched the Quick Dry. I mean, barely touched it, and boom, I was in the wall at 187 miles an hour. It was over in an instant. The curtain came down, and I woke up three weeks later.

Although I was awake and talking during much of the next twenty days, I have absolutely no memory of it. Three weeks of my life were gone, and I will never get them back. Of course, I certainly heard plenty about them from friends and family.

AFTER THE WRECK,
I was airlifted to the University of Kentucky Medical Center to be stabilized. I was bleeding out so fast that medical staff met the helicopter on the roof of the hospital with bags of O negative and immediately made transfusions to keep me alive. The seat belt that crossed my neck had sliced my carotid artery, so I was blowing blood seven feet in the air. There was a real danger of me bleeding to death before they could get me inside.

Jim Freudenberg, the Kelley Racing team manager, called my father in Canada from the hospital and said, “You need to get here, now.” He hung up and made the same call to Naomi, who was unpacking boxes in our new house. They were freaking out; the first reports on the news erroneously stated that I had died, causing a media sensation. My mother had seen my death announced on a news crawl across the television as she sipped her morning coffee and was devastated as she frantically called my sister in New York. There was general panic among my family members as they all scrambled to catch flights from their various locations.

The two days were incredibly tense as doctors and nurses worked around the clock to stabilize me. As the staff worked heroically on me, there were two moments when I died on the table. Literally, flatlined. There was some concern I would have to have excess fluid drained from my brain, but fortunately that turned out to be unnecessary. A tube was installed to drain excess fluid from my lungs. I had a separate oxygen tube down my throat at all times to sustain me. Unconscious and with a broken back, I was fed intravenously from a bag of white goo packed full of nutrients to keep me alive.

Naomi, carrying Swifty, had been the first to arrive on a flight from Los Angeles. She was horrified when I emerged from intensive care. My eyes were protruding like tennis balls, and my nose was literally ripped off my face. They had pulled it back and tacked it down temporarily, but it looked monstrous. She tiptoed around to sit at my bedside, gently holding my hand and saying my name. I didn't stir.

Luke Perry happened to be working in Nashville when the news broke about my accident. He was the next to arrive. When Luke came in my room, he got right in my face and said, “Who am I? What's my name?” Everyone waited for a response. “Who am I? What's my name?” he repeated a little louder this time. I finally responded. “Coy L. Perry,” I whispered. My throat was dry and had been damaged by the breathing tube they had used to resuscitate me.

The doctors and nurses all looked confused, until Luke informed them that Coy was indeed his name . . . his real name. . . .

They then all looked more than a little relieved, as this was more brain function than I had shown in the previous two days. I was starting to show signs of stabilizing. It wouldn't be long before I would be moving on to the doctors who would be tasked with putting my broken body back together.

I
was unloaded from another helicopter, once again put in intensive care, and prepped for back surgery. Dr. Terry Trammell, renowned surgeon and now retired, was probably the best in the world at putting race car drivers back together again. He was a genius, and he's the one who undertook the delicate operation to put my spine back together. Two rods plus twelve screws in the back; the surgery was absolutely brutal. It was also quite dangerous, as he had cautioned my father and Naomi beforehand. There were no guarantees but, fortunately, it was determined that I had come through with flying colors—no paralysis. I was one of the lucky ones.

Very shortly after the surgery, I woke up in the middle of the night, calling for Naomi. She and my sister, Justine, rushed to my side to ask how I felt. I looked at them and said very clearly, “I saw the devil.” “And what happened?” they asked. “I embraced him,” I said. “Then I pushed him away.” The words were so eerie and cryptic from someone who had pretty much awoken from the dead that they completely freaked out. They called the doctors and wrote down the phrase to ask me about later; but it was my deep unconscious responding.

After ten days in the hospital, I was moved to the Rehabilitation Hospital of Indiana. RHI is the phenomenal facility where I was faced with major rehab. They have many of the finest surgeons and physical therapists in the world on staff. At some point after my arrival, I woke up one day and asked where I was. Naomi patiently explained where I was and what had happened to me, for probably the tenth time. I'd asked and been told the details many times and had held full conversations with several people. However, I hadn't been present for those. This time I was really awake for good. I was back from dreamland, and I was one hurting guy.

I was on some major heavy-duty painkillers, and I could feel them slowing down my mind. A few days later I called Dr. Scheid and Dr. Trammell to my bedside and said to them, “I am on so many drugs, guys, I don't know how I'm really doing. I've got to get off all these painkillers.”

“That's not a good idea, Jason,” they said.

“Just take me off everything . . . and then we can establish a baseline of exactly where I'm at. I'm not even sure what really hurts!” I said. Somehow, I talked them into it, and the drugs were slowly withdrawn over the next four hours. Once they were out of my system, I wanted them back. Quick! That was a very uncomfortable hour, particularly for my back. My feet, though wrecked, were completely bound up in casts, so that wasn't the worst, but my back—the pain was excruciating.

I was sweating and in complete agony when they resumed painkillers, though at a greatly reduced dose. They slapped a transdermal patch on me, and in a few minutes the relief flooded through my body. I had established a baseline all right! It hurt like hell! My brain was still scrambled from the concussion, but now it wasn't also clouded by so many drugs. I felt much better on lower doses. I was ready to start the healing process.

The day of my accident had been a bad day all round for the Kelley Racing Team. One of the guys from our team got run over in the pits, broke his pelvis, and wound up in the same rehab facility as I did. As I got stronger, I used to laboriously get out of bed, get myself situated in my wheelchair, and roll over to visit him, to see how he was doing and talk about racing.

I was highly motivated and trying hard to get out of the hospital. My day was filled to the brim. I'd wake up in the morning and have breakfast. Then a physical therapist would come and we'd head to the gym for exercises and therapy. Next I had speech therapy, which I very much needed. I couldn't speak clearly; in fact, I was slurring my words like the victim of a minor stroke. Patiently, laboriously, we worked on my speech and pronunciation every day.

In the afternoons, I had intensive cognitive therapy. My therapist would ask me to remember three words—say,
cat, hat,
and
red
. Then we would speak for two minutes. When the two minutes were up, she would say, “What are the three words I asked you to remember?” Try as I might, for a good while I could not even recall one of them. She spent a great deal of time encouraging me, explaining how my brain was capable of amazing feats. It would remap itself. My brain would search out and find new routes to take to bypass the damaged parts. I needed to read, and do logic problems, and play memorization games, but besides that, all I could do was wait and let my brain heal.

I had never been much good at waiting. I had a heart-to-heart one day with Dr. Trammell. “What kind of healing process should I be expecting?” I asked him.

“If you stop smoking right now, your spine—and the other bones—will heal in one year. Your bones should be as hard and sturdy as they were before the accident. If you resume smoking when you leave the hospital, you can expect the entire healing cycle to take three years—oh, and your bones will never be the same.”

“Guess I just quit smoking,” I told him. Actually, I had “quit” the moment I hit the wall. I never started again. I was an actor in the 1990s so of course I smoked, we all did. But I never picked up another butt. It just wasn't worth it. Hell, I'd already died twice now, and coming back to life wasn't much fun.

Thank God Naomi and I were both young and somewhat naive; she never doubted I would make a full recovery. After a few dark nights of the soul, neither did I. I swore to myself that I would return to 100 percent of what I had been before the accident. Knowing me so well and how to best motivate me, Naomi was behind me the whole way, encouraging and pushing when needed. “Come on now, get with it, let's go,” she would say in my rare moments of balking. It wasn't whether or not I would get better, but when.

My cognitive therapist was simply fantastic, though I have to say everybody on staff at RHI was amazing. As I improved, she got her hands on some scripts and read scenes with me every day. She was looking ahead, helping me relearn how to memorize dialogue, so I could hopefully resume my regular life and job one day. It was looking a bit more hopeful as the weeks passed.

A
fter a month of living at RHI, Naomi and I moved into my team manager's home. Jim and his wife, Cindy, put us up in Indianapolis while I continued my rehab. It was a tremendous relief to be out of the hospital setting and the discharge did wonders for my mood. I was still back and forth every day to RHI for physical therapy, but the simple pleasure of actually living in a house again was amazing. Jim was absolutely great, every frustrating step of the way. He was rock solid the entire time of my recovery. A true friend.

I had plenty of time to ponder during this time. My overriding feeling the first few months after the accident was surprise. Like all race car drivers, I honestly never dreamed I could get hurt racing. Oh, I'd had some minor injuries here and there . . . but in a million years I wouldn't have imagined this could happen to me. I felt safer in a race car than I did in my regular car driving home from the track. One minute I was a thirty-two-year-old race car driver, happy as can be, and the next, I was . . . dead, and then slowly brought back to life again. I had just . . . never . . . thought.

Still, there must have been something tiny nagging at the back of my mind going into that season. Running the Infiniti Pro series, I had known I was going to be racing on ovals. Oval racing is inherently more dangerous than any other kind, and of course I was aware of that. For the first time in my life, I had bought extra supplemental race car driver insurance. In all my previous years of driving, I had never felt the need for it. For whatever reason, that year I bought the extra policy. Thank God I did. Needless to say, the hospital bills were staggering. Much later, going through the bills, we were shocked to see my daily bag of food, the white goo, cost a thousand dollars a day!

I was not allowed to leave until the screws were taken out of my feet. Man, did they hurt when those came out! I was limping, skinny, and weak. But I had my dog and my girl by my side. It was not quite the return to L.A. my agents and I had envisioned, but we were coming home.

My wreck and recovery were big news in the entertainment and racing media, and I was deluged with interview requests once I was out of the hospital and throughout my recovery. “How did this experience change you?” was the main question from reporters. I usually answered that it hadn't, because on the outside nothing had changed. Thankfully, my body was healing, and I looked the same on the outside. I didn't drive any more slowly, I wasn't any more careful, I would absolutely consider racing again . . . outwardly, to the public eye, nothing had changed. Internally, everything had.

One very painful aspect of the accident to me was some subtle and not-so-subtle references in the press to my “party” reputation, my DUI charge, and speculations about what, exactly, had caused me to wreck . . . a hangover, maybe? That was ridiculous, not to mention ironic, as I had never been as stone-cold sober as I was in my current lifestyle. The accident caused another seismic shift inside me, in the overall way I looked at life.