Gilroy
– Mary Bermudez is a strong believer in the power of prayer, and
she says she felt God’s presence distinctly as she prayed her way
through a triple rollover July 7 on U.S. Highway 101.
Gilroy – Mary Bermudez is a strong believer in the power of prayer, and she says she felt God’s presence distinctly as she prayed her way through a triple rollover July 7 on U.S. Highway 101.
The veteran letter carrier had just begun her rural route when a pickup truck rear-ended her Jeep Cherokee and sent it spinning out of control.
“I just kept asking God’s protection each time I hit the ground,” Bermudez said Tuesday in an interview at her northwest Gilroy home. “I just felt like God had cradled me in his arms, and I was going to be OK.”
The wreck ruined Bermudez’s right arm and her 26-year career as a Gilroy letter carrier, but she counts herself blessed.
“I’m just so grateful that all I ended having was this to deal with,” she said, pointing to her sling-bound right arm.
Meanwhile, the California Highway Patrol has hit a dead end in trying to find the driver that hit her. Although three witness described the spectacular rollover to CHP officer David Agredano, none saw any vehicle hit Bermudez’s Jeep. Nevertheless, Agredano said he is convinced that a dent in the Jeep’s rear bumper could have only come from a collision.
Bermudez returned home from Stanford Hospital on Aug. 3. She was flooded with visitors, flowers, cards and calls during the month-long hospital stay, even though she was sedated beyond consciousness for the first two weeks of it.
Nevertheless, she remembers the crash vividly.
She hadn’t yet made it to her first mailbox, in front of a cherry stand on 101. As she merged onto southbound 101 from Monterey Street, she noticed a pickup truck over in the fast lane.
“It reminded me of a landscaper’s truck … that has the railings on the side,” she said. “It caught my eye that it was veering towards the slow lane, and then I thought to myself, ‘Is he going to try and get in back of me?'”
That fear was confirmed immediately.
“I looked in my rear-view mirror, and I could see the hood of this vehicle, … and I say, ‘He’s going to clip me.’ The next thing was that big thud.
“I was aware of each roll that I took.”
That was when she started praying. It worked, she said.
“I remember when it finally stopped, I was facing gravel. … I wasn’t scared. I sort of felt calm, but then I freaked myself out because I didn’t know where I was in the road. The next 10 seconds were almost unbearable because I kept thinking, ‘Oh, a truck or a semi is going to come around and nail right into me.’
“And then all of a sudden I heard footsteps.”
The face that peered into the Jeep, which was perched on side in the middle of the highway, was that of Mary Foraker, a helicopter flight nurse with CALSTAR who had just left work in Gilroy and was heading home. Bermudez didn’t find out Foraker’s name until recently, but she said, “I know that it was God’s intervention. She just made me feel so peaceful and calm.”
Foraker said she was one of about five drivers, including an off-duty firefighter, who stopped to help Bermudez. They immediately divided the labor. Some directed traffic, some picked up the scattered mail, one called 9-1-1 from a cell phone, and Foraker tended to Bermudez, applying direct pressure with bare hands to the patient’s heavily bleeding arm until firefighters arrived.
“It was really cool,” Foraker said. “Everybody was very calm and really wanting to help this person. It was kind of a neat experience to be on the other side of it, the civilian side.”
“She told me, ‘You’re going to be OK. You’ve got a bad injury to your arm, and you’re losing a lot of blood,'” Bermudez said of Foraker. “I asked her, ‘Do you think I’m going to lose it?’ and she said, ‘Well, if anybody can save your arm, Stanford can.'”
As it happened, CALSTAR’s local helicopter was temporarily out of service, and it was a Stanford Life Flight chopper that landed in the highway.
“When they put me in the helicopter, they were having trouble connecting an IV, and when they finally did, I just heard them say ‘ETA (estimated time of arrival), 23 minutes.’ … I don’t remember nothing else until the 21st of July.”
During those 14 days of sedation, doctors completed a skin graft on Bermudez’s arm. She was moved out of the intensive care unit on the July 19, but she still wasn’t lucid that day or the next.
When she woke up on the 21st, her husband Ron pointed to a calendar in the hospital room and asked her what day it was. After looking at it for a long time, she answered correctly.
“He goes, ‘Well, what is that day?’ and I looked at him and I go, ‘It’s our anniversary. It’s our 36th anniversary.’
“He says that’s when he knew I really was back, because up until that point I was not making sense. I was coming out of all that drugs and everything, and I was talking gibberish.”
Meanwhile, Ron said, the outpouring of support from family, friends and co-workers was overwhelming the hospital ward. Hospital staff asked people to stagger their visits, and their phone lines got so jammed that the Bermudezes’ youngest daughter set up a toll-free voice mailbox for people to call and get daily updates on Mary’s condition.
There were “a ton” of cards, and nurses were comparing her room to a florist shop, Ron said. Before she left, she donated the blooms to patients who had none.
“She was so inundated with flowers that at the end, when they released her, there was no way we could (take them home),” Ron said.
Now, Mary says her doctors hope she will regain at least 50 percent of her former arm strength.
If she ever returns to work at the post office again, she figures she would have to find other duties.
“They probably could find something else for me to do, but as a rural carrier? I don’t think so,” she said. “I have to use both arms to lift up 40-pound tubs of mail.
“Nothing is impossible, though. I’ve come to realize it.”
