Miracle Clark

One year ago today, Paul G. Blazer student Clark Menshouse’s life changed forever. It’s a night Menshouse himself cannot recall. His memory lies only in his long recovery after he and other students were in a serious car crash. His parents and a passenger help paint the picture.

May 7, 2006

Sarah Lynch / The Independent
 

Ashland — Every day is a miracle, Keith and Debbie Menshouse say.  Every day since one year ago today when they almost lost their only child.  On Saturday, May 7, 2005, Clark Menshouse was in a horrific car accident that almost took his life and has since changed the lives of his friends and family through a recovery that is nothing short of miraculous.

The night started out like most other nights for the 16-year-old. He met some of his Paul G. Blazer High School classmates in the parking lot of a church on Ky. 168 in Ashland. The students had recently formed a car club and Clark fit right in.  “I had a brand new, lightning yellow, Mitsubishi Lancer,” he said on his Web site, 4thmaninthecar.com “It made me feel wonderful to have everybody comment on how great my car looked and how fast they thought it would go.”

Keith and Debbie were aware of the car club and where it met. Still, as parents, they were curious about what the boys might really be doing.  “I was thinking they were probably drinking or doing drugs,” Debbie said.  Keith, who was the pastor at Oakland Avenue Baptist Church at the time, said he went out to the meeting place on Ky. 168 two nights in a row “just driving by to see that Clark was where he said he was and doing what he said he was doing.”  Keith saw nothing suspicious. “They were there every night just kicking tires and looking under hoods,” he said. “The third night, I didn’t go. And that’s when it happened.”

Clark was challenged to a race and he accepted. It was a decision that would change his life forever.  Because he has no memory of events that night, he can only tell the story by what he has been told by witnesses.  “I was going about 80 or 90 miles per hour on the straight stretch of 168, which is about two football fields long,” he said. “I probably was in second place and thought ‘Aw, I gotta beat these guys.’”

Two other Blazer students, Ian Holbrook and Trace Stafford, both 17 at the time, were in the car with him when he lost control while negotiating a turn. The car went spinning out of control until the driver’s side of the car struck a utility pole with such force that it broke in two. The yellow Lancer was wrapped around the pole like a scarf.  “It rattled the teeth in my head,” Holbrook said about the impact with the utility pole.  Holbrook, one of Ashland’s Blazers most accomplished student-athletes and a record-setting quarterback on the Tomcats football team, was sitting in the back seat on the right side. He miraculously suffered only a broken thumb on his passing hand in the wreck. All three teens were wearing seatbelts and tests later showed that neither alcohol nor drugs were a factor.  Speed, however, was a factor — that and “too much testosterone floating around,” Keith said.

Holbrook easily recalls each second of the nightmarish accident.  “I started yelling, ‘Are we dead?’ ‘Are we dead?’” Holbrook said. “When the telephone pole fell on the car, the transformer exploded. I could have barely reached out and touched splinters (on the utility pole).”  Holbrook said Clark’s head actually hit the utility pole and Stafford, who was sitting in the passenger seat, had hairline fractures in his cheekbone suffered from Clark’s head hitting his head. Both Clark and Stafford were knocked unconscious and bleeding.  “So I thought they were both dead,” Holbrook said. “I sat there for a second and decided to get out. My door opened, which is strange because all the others had to be cut off.”

When he got out of the car, Holbrook said people were screaming and running around. The utility pole’s collapse had knocked out electricity for some houses and traffic was already backing up on Ky. 168.  “One guy came out of his house with a medical bag,” Holbrook remembered. “I think he had been a paramedic or something. He yelled at the women who were screaming to shut up and then he got Trace breathing. “Trace woke up about three or four minutes later and wanted to get out of the car and we told him he couldn’t. They told me on the spot that Clark wouldn’t make it.”


At 9:30 that night, Keith and Debbie received a phone call dreaded by every parent.  “It was Chris Spears, a fireman from Catlettsburg,” Keith said. “I could tell from the sound of his voice that he thought Clark would die.”  Debbie said it was strange for her to have been home that night because of her work schedule as a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital in Huntington.

They rushed to the scene of the accident to be with their son, not knowing what to expect. The parents stood by the window of the yellow car trying to get as close as they could to Clark.  Debbie would recall later that Clark hadn’t even asked for a car when he turned 16. “Not even a clunker,” she said.  “When we bought that car for him, I was thinking yellow for safety — like a school bus.”

The noise from the air that was being pumped into Clark’s lungs by an EMT told the mother, an experienced nurse, that he was having problems breathing.  “I was in so much shock, I hardly remember anything,” Debbie said. “I think I told him, ‘You fight, buddy, you fight like you’ve never fought before.’”  It was more than an impassioned plea from a mother. “She threatened him, really,” Keith said.

The scene wasn’t completely foreign to Debbie, who was a former trauma flight nurse in Dayton, Ohio. She had seen a lot of terrible accidents on that job and, because of those experiences, what she saw that night with her son was even more nightmarish.  “The big thing is, of all the wrecks I’d been to as a flight nurse, we never got someone out of a car looking as bad as Clark did that survived,” she said. “I just knew from years of medical training that God had provided someone who could intibate him properly. He would have died otherwise.”

Bill Qualls, a retired paramedic, lives across the street from where the accident occurred and he was one of the first to arrive on the scene.  “He told us that Clark was turning blue when he got there,” Keith said. “Bill cleared out his mouth and helped establish an airway.”  The Menhouses said Boyd County EMS Bill Jackson successfully intibated Clark, which was crucial because it took more than an hour to free Clark’s legs from the twisted wreckage.

While Holbrook and Stafford were being transported to King’s Daughters Medical Center where they were treated for minor injuries and released that night, EMT and emergency rescue crews from the England Hill and Catlettsburg Fire Departments struggled to save Clark’s life.

 

After they were finally able to free him from what was left of his brand new car, Clark was flown by HealthNet Aero helicopter to Cabell Huntington Hospital.  “I couldn’t watch it land,” Debbie said. “I was afraid they’d be doing CPR on him. And I’d been there so many times that I knew, as a flight nurse, you have to be strong for the patient’s family and pacify them by pretending the person was going to be OK.”

A long-time friend of the family, Kristin Rose, was one of the first of Clark’s friends to arrive at the hospital. In an article she wrote for Clark’s Web site, she said she plainly remembers that when the helicopter landed, Keith said ironically, “He used to fly in those all the time before he ever came into this world. Who would’ve ever known?”  The father said later that Debbie worked as a flight nurse up until three weeks before Clark was born. “She even kept a journal for him telling him where they had been each day and what kind of flights they had,” he said.


The Menhouses said they were given little hope in the emergency department that night. “The trauma surgeon told us that among several fractures of his left leg, right hand and pelvis, that his most life-threatening injury was the trauma to his head,” Keith said. “She told us that the CT scan showed the ‘worst bleed’ she had ever seen.”  Clark was in a coma for 10 days in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. There was no movement and no response to neurological checks.  Amazingly, a CT scan taken after just a week after the accident showed that 90 percent of the bleeding in Clark’s brain had been reabsorbed by his body.

“Actually, I wouldn’t even believe it if I hadn’t been there,” Debbie said. “Because of my medical training, I know how impossible it is that he came through this.”  Because a device was inserted into Clark’s head to drain the fluid off his brain, he could not be moved at all and was placed in traction.  “He had bad bed sores,” Debbie said. “Me, being a nurse, I know you do not let people get bed sores. Yet, there was my 16-year-old son … and there was nothing I could do about it.”

On May 25, Keith and Debbie got their first glimmer of hope when Clark gave a “thumbs-up” response to one of his physical therapists and he was moved to a regular room on the pediatric floor. Three days later, after questions started coming up about long-term rehabilitation plans, the Menshouses brought their son home.  “Dr. Ann Craig, a Pediatrician at the Ashland Children’s Clinic, came to our house to coordinate everything,” Debbie said about turning Clark’s bedroom into a hospital room. “They said we were crazy for bringing him home because he still couldn’t respond or even eat, but we didn’t want to put him in a nursing home for what’s called ‘custodial care.’”


Keith resigned from his church and started a business from home in order to stay with his son. And Debbie’s co-workers covered her shift as much as possible so she could help Clark recover. He still hadn’t spoken but was awake.  “In my opinion, you are still out of this world until you can respond to me,” Debbie said. “To get him to talk, I was pushing on his chest going, ‘SAY SOMETHING!’”

On July 3, his dad’s birthday, Clark said, “Happy birthday, dad.” It was the first time he’d spoken since May 7. “When I was trying to get him to talk, I was just going for ‘ha’ or ‘da.’ I needed to hear something … anything! He sounded like a robot when he said it, but that was more than I expected.” 

With the help of his parents, as well as many doctors, physical therapist, friends and family, Clark continues to make improvements every day. He walks, talks, laughs and maybe soon will get behind the wheel of another car. He will even graduate on time with his class this year.

The only remnants of the accident are lack of balance, a weak right hand and a hazy memory. Other than that, he says he is the same guy — but with a new appreciation for life.  “God works in miracles,” Clark said. “If you depend on God, he will help you through.”  “He is a walking miracle!” his father said. “The direct result of a loving God who protected him, sustained him and who continues to heal him.”

Throughout Clark’s recovery, Holbrook would stop by the hospital or the house to check on him.  “He’s a warrior,” Holbrook said. “It’s strange that he almost died and I came out with just a broken thumb.  “It’s pretty amazing,” he said about Clark’s recovery. “I didn’t really even know Clark before the wreck. But when you go through something like that with somebody, you kind of form a bond with them. God sees everybody through.”