LISA BLACK: My name is Lisa Black, and I am a hospital teacher here at the University of Virginia Children's Hospital. On October 3rd, I was involved in a car accident. I had just left work here at the hospital. And I was headed home to pick up my children. I was hit head-on by a drunk driver.
WINSTON GWATHMEY, MD: My chief resident called me and said we had a car accident. And this person has been brought to our emergency room with multiple injuries.
LISA BLACK: Four fractures in my neck, two in my back. My lung had collapsed, and I had multiple broken ribs. And my collarbone was broken. I had multiple broken bones in my hand. I had a dissected artery, which alone could have killed me. My femur was broken. Also, my knees, they were just crushed.
GWATHMEY: As the orthopedic surgeon on call, what you try to do is you try to identify the most severe injuries, those that need to be stabilized immediately. We ended up putting a titanium rod into her let femur, emergently, in order to stabilize that long bone. And we placed a metal frame on her right knee after cleaning out the debris from the accident out of her knee. So we put her into a frame.
DAVID WEISS, MD: Then she had another surgery to take off the external fixators and put some plates and screws, first in her right leg. And then she had a ligament reconstruction on her left leg by Dr. Gwathmey. So that was two major surgeries.
LISA BLACK: Every morning, they would come in and touch the bottom of my feet and ask me if I could feel it. And for a long time, I could not feel it.
GWATHMEY: She told me from the get-go that she wanted to run again. And we wondered about that goal, and whether we would be able to achieve that. She couldn't walk for eight weeks, because she was not able to bear weight on either leg. And we're talking about running. This seems like such a distant hope. But at the same time, as an orthopedic surgeon, there's no reason not to establish the highest possible goals for our patients.
WEISS: She was just very determined to get better. She wanted to get back to running. And she works as a teacher with kids who are not able to get around very much. And her life just involved a lot of activities. And she wasn't going to let this set of injuries keep her down.
LISA BLACK: I had therapy five days a week, for two to three hours at a time, because they were working on both legs. So it was intense. You have to bend your legs quite a bit to get back into the chairs and work with the children on their level. And I worked every day with my therapist at physical therapy so that I knew that I could come back here to serve the patients.
I'm back. I'm teaching now. I'm in the small chairs. I'm with the kids here that I love. I'm running again, and taking care of my own family, my kids, doing the things that I love with them.
GWATHMEY: This is the reason why orthopedic surgeons go into orthopedic surgery is Lisa Black. And this is why people become doctors. A split second before her accident, she was just doing everything she wanted to do. And then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, her life is taken away from her. When you meet her, you know that she's going to be the type of person who's going to achieve what she sets out to do, because she is so optimistic.
LISA BLACK: I still fight with pain on a daily basis. But it's like I tell myself, I'm not going to sit on the sidelines. I'm going to get back in the game. And that's what I did.
I have partnered with MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. And I am working with them, speaking against drunk driving. I share my story with the police officers to try to encourage them to get out there and get these people off the roads. Looking back on it, I think, what a blessing that this hospital is right here in my backyard.
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