Thanksgiving is the time of year when everyone looks back and finds reasons to be thankful. The same is true for many of the players on the LPGA Tour and the Symetra Tour (formerly known as the LPGA Futures Tour). So as we all gather together this Thanksgiving, the LPGA is taking time to explore why we are thankful this holiday season. Today is the final piece of our five-part series and next we feature Alexandra Braga.
A True Thanksgiving:
Golf Professional Recovers After Being Crushed By Tree
By Lisa D. Mickey
It should have been a peaceful night under the stars, tucked tight in her sleeping bag beside the American River in Northern California. A mighty oak tree shielded the group of high school juniors on their class camping trip as a drizzling rain fell in the night.
But while then-16-year-old Alexandra Braga contentedly drifted off to sleep surrounded by her classmates, she never dreamed she would awaken to 15 sets of hands feverishly trying to keep her alive. Sometime in the night, the 50-foot, two-ton oak tree crashed to the ground, pinning the teen to the dirt in her sleeping bag.
“I didn’t hear anything and when I awoke, there was an extreme weight on me,” said Braga, now 27, and an LPGA Futures Tour alumna of Los Angeles. “I could feel bones breaking and flesh tearing away.”
A branch of the large oak tree sliced off her entire right buttock and the tree completely shattered her pelvis. The external injuries caused excessive bleeding and her crushed bones rendered a pain she could barely fathom.
“There was a lot of screaming and yelling and it was like a really bad dream,” said Braga’s former classmate Porter Felton of San Francisco. “I was standing on an incline trying to help and my shoes were covered in Allie’s blood. It was awful.”
After three tries, 15 classmates from the Head Royce School in Oakland, Calif., were finally able to lift the tree enough for her to be pulled out – a lifting feat 20 people tried to replicate the next day without success.
Braga was placed on a backboard and carried out of the woods to an ambulance that arrived nearly an hour later. The ambulance then took her to a nearby schoolyard where she was loaded into a helicopter and airlifted to Sutter Roseville Hospital in Roseville, Calif. Emergency workers in the helicopter gave her morphine, and doctors put her in a drug-induced coma for two weeks, knowing the pain would be intolerable.
“I don’t remember a lot of it,” said Braga of the accident that happened 11 autumns ago. “I just remember going into shock and how a guy in the group who was an Eagle Scout kept me awake by shaking me and talking to me.”
“It was an incredibly surreal experience and it was just a huge, angry tree,” added high school classmate Emily Berkman, now a first-year medical resident in Seattle who was on the camping trip that night with her classmates. “It was dark and we couldn’t see what was going on, but some people had nightmares after hearing Allie scream in pain.”
Braga spent three months in the hospital’s intensive care unit. She endured 35 major surgeries to piece her body back together again, including the insertion of three foot-long titanium rods to construct a metal pelvis. The prognosis was not good. Doctors told her the likelihood of walking or playing golf again was slim. They tried to prepare her for the possibility of spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair.
“You don’t ever think something like this is going to
Full Article: LPGA.com News & Entertainment
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