Hope in the aftermath of ‘Patient Disaster Crash’

Following a serious injury and the loss of his right arm, Shaq Chambers wondered if he'd ever play football again.

RAEFORD, N.C. — A cloud of orange dust battered his face. The ATV’s roar clogged his ears. The wind drove chills through his bones. Shaqual Chambers was flying.

He had been on the trail a hundred times before. This time seemed no different.

Chambers accelerated up a hill. He was going about 30 miles per hour. The hill stood too tall to see what was on the other side. But he kept going.

His four best friends were in the ATV with him. They all had taken turns driving the trail before. Each of them was familiar with its curves, dips and bumps, but no one expected what was on the other side of the hill.

A ravine — about six feet deep.

When the ATV hit the ditch, it flipped and rolled. And rolled again. Three times. They all flew out.

Shaq Chambers was really flying now. He extended his right arm in front of him, hoping to catch his fall.

Everything went black.

***
Sheena Chambers called her son right before she left the family’s home to let him know she was on the way to pick him up from his friend George Zwiebel’s house. Their home is in Raeford, North Carolina, which is about a 45-minute drive from Pinecrest High School, where Shaq Chambers goes to school.

Shaq Chambers spent the night at Zwiebel’s house after a Friday night football game. Chambers, a cornerback for the team, wasn’t able to play in the game. Actually, he hadn’t played in two weeks. He was recovering from a concussion and he was anxious to play in the upcoming game next Friday.

When Shaq Chambers didn’t get in the car once she got there, Sheena Chambers honked. She told her son they needed to go back to school shopping after she picked him up. School started on Monday.

She called his phone. No answer. She texted him. No answer. This wasn’t like him.

Sheena Chambers left Zwiebel’s house. She headed to the pharmacy down the road to get her husband’s prescription. She left Shaq Chambers a message on the phone. She said she would be right back. She didn’t think twice about the emergency helicopter she saw in the sky.

Right as she got to the pharmacy, her phone rang. It was her son.

But when she answered, Shaq Chambers’ friend Jaxon Ritter, who didn’t ride the ATV, spoke.

“Shaq is on his way to the hospital,” Ritter said. “We were in an accident.”

“Did he hit his head?” Sheena Chambers asked.

“No, ma’am. But his arm is pretty bad.”

***

Shaq Chambers lay on his stomach. The ATV stood over his body on all four wheels. He had been conscious the whole time.

He felt an atrocious pain in his arm. It hurt so bad it didn’t hurt. The skin on his arm was burned off. Muscle and bone showed. He couldn’t move. He could only stare at what remained of his arm.

Hyde Johnson was the first to regain consciousness. He shook his friends awake. Marcus Horton told Johnson to call an ambulance. Dalyn Barber lay on the ground. He couldn’t move his neck, and his eye was swollen shut.

Zwiebel and Horton focused on helping Shaq Chambers. They moved the ATV off him and tied two shirts around the gushing arm.

“When I was talking to Shaq, I saw his arm and I turned away for a second,” Horton said. “It was bad. I had a little freak-out moment for a second.”

Shaq Chambers felt tired. The blood wouldn’t stop.

“You can’t fall asleep,” Horton told him. “You have to stay with me.”

First responders had to use four-wheel drive vehicles to reach them. The accident was too far from a paved road.

All the friends could do was wait.

“Everything went wrong at the right time,” Zwiebel said.

Both Shaq Chambers and Barber were airlifted to UNC Hospitals. Paramedics thought Barber’s neck was broken, but it ended up being a concussion. Horton and Johnson were taken to the nearest hospital in Pinehurst, North Carolina.

“Whenever we had wrapped his arm up, I had to have Marcus to help me because we had to move it as one,” Zwiebel said. “The arm didn’t have any bone structure to keep it together.”

***

He was known as Patient Disaster Crash to the hospital staff.

He had a young face. Thin dreadlocks stroked the top of his forehead. Braces showed through his smile. He wore a Pinecrest High School football shirt. He was an athlete. But the surgeons didn’t know for how much longer. His right elbow was shattered.

Although he’s 18, Shaq Chambers doesn’t have a license yet. He didn’t have identification with him.

He was in surgery for eight hours. His right arm was held together by a vein and a piece of skin. Surgeons took a vein from his leg and put it in the arm, hoping feeling would kick it.

“The goal was if they could get that vein to work if it could at least work for the arm, then the only thing they would have had to amputate was his hand,” Sheena Chambers said. “He had no nerves or anything working in his hand.”

Feeling never kicked in.

“Finally, the doctors came out and it was one of those things, you know when the doctors take you in the conference room and want to talk with you, you just know something is not right,” Sheena Chambers said. “They did everything they could. I know that.”

Sheena Chambers, who is a nurse, knew what the next option was.

She sat next to the bed where her son lay. He was no longer in his football T-shirt. He wore a light blue hospital gown. His dreadlocks were tied back in a thick ponytail. She held his right hand. It felt like ice.

“He started getting a fever,” she said. “Infection was starting to set in.”

Surgeons told Shaq Chambers his right arm needed to be amputated at the elbow. He agreed.

“I don’t really want to carry dead weight, especially if there’s really not a chance of it working,” Shaq Chambers said later. “I would be better off without it, so I was just like, ‘Yeah, you can.’”

Shaq Chambers expected to start his senior year of high school on Monday, Aug. 27. Instead, he had surgery scheduled to remove part of his right arm.

***

“After a trauma, usually the goal is to salvage as much of the limb as possible,” Dr. William Filer, a physician at the UNC Center for Rehabilitation Care, said. “Sometimes due to poor blood supply, damage or infection, they’ll have to remove part of the limb, or in this case, the arm.”

Filer works with patients in UNC’s Amputee Clinic. He said most patients are able to use a prosthesis within about a month after surgery. Filer did not work on Chambers’ case.

Aside from the pain of amputation and learning to use a prosthesis, Filer said the most challenging aspect for amputee patients is dealing with the psychological impact of limb loss.

“It can be pretty devastating with upper limb amputations,” he said. “Just the day-to-day taking care of yourself, like getting dressed, making food, and using the restroom all of a sudden become very difficult.”

A big aspect of Filer’s work is understanding the patient’s goals. He said if a patient wants to play sports, there are specific movements that need to be considered when looking for a prosthesis. But he said there are custom components to prostheses that can restore the natural motion or activity necessary to compete in a sport.

***

The surgery lasted about four hours. Sheena Chambers waited for her son to wake up. She was prepared to deal with tears and armed herself with encouraging words.

But she never expected her son to come out of the surgery the way he did.

“I just woke up and looked at my phone,” Shaq Chambers said. “I started playing music and dancing. I just remember it was a good song.”

He spent nearly two weeks in the hospital before he was discharged. His friends and teammates were able to visit him about a week after the accident.

“Shaq is a strong person,” Zwiebel said. “We knew he would come up from this. We were just worried about how he was going to take his arm being gone, and I felt like he thought it was going to change him. After we talked to him, we figured out he was still Shaq.”

Shaq Chambers said he’s still learning how to adapt to the change. He said it feels as if he still has his right arm, but it’s tied behind his back and he can’t use it.

“I still do actions where I use my right arm, but I realize I can’t,” he said. “If I try to sit in the sheets, I usually pull it over with my right arm at the same time I’m sitting down. I have to think about using my left arm now.”

But Shaq Chambers said the hardest truth to come to terms with was that football might be over.

“The first thing I said was ‘football is gone,’” he said. “I told Marcus like, “Football is gone.’ I didn’t think I would be playing.”

But football wasn’t gone.

Shaq Chambers played with his teammates on Friday, Oct. 5, against Purnell Swett High School in Pembroke, North Carolina.

Pinecrest football coach Chris Metzger put Shaq Chambers in at the beginning of the fourth quarter. The crowd broke out into cheers as he ran onto the field. Even players for Purnell Swett high-fived and hugged Shaq Chambers.

“We were not sure how the game was going to go,” Metzger said. “It was a tough conference game. Once we got ahead, we realized we had the opportunity to play him and it was just really special.”

Shaq Chambers had been cheering on the sidelines all game. He wasn’t expecting to play, but he was ready.

“(Coach Metzger) just looked at me and he was like, ‘Shaq, you’re about to go in,’” Shaq Chambers said. “He was like, ‘All right. All right. We’re going to put you as receiver. I know you know how to do all of that.’”

Shaq Chambers said he wasn’t concerned about hurting his arm. He just focused on blocking the other team’s cornerback, which helped lead the team to its 58-7 win.

“I wouldn’t say it felt different at all,” he said. “It just felt like I hadn’t been on the field in a long time.”

He’s been on the field ever since at the team’s 5 a.m. morning practices, and he has no plans to stop now. Shaq Chambers said he is set to get a prosthesis in about a month after the burns have completely healed.

***

The group of friends haven’t been back on the trail together since the accident. Zwiebel went back out to clean up a few days later. He said he walked around to try to understand exactly what happened. The ATV still stands out there next to the six-foot-deep rut.

“It brought us together,” Zwiebel said. “We don’t call ourselves a friend group no more. It’s a family. The way we talk to each other, we don’t say, ‘Bye’ to each other no more. It’s really kind of, ‘All right man, be safe.’”