[tabs][tab title=”Part 1: A Series of Coincidences”] [heading style=”1″]Part 1: A Series of Coincidences[/heading]

[dropcap style=”2″ size=”3″]O[/dropcap]n the afternoon of Nov. 30, 2012, junior Breta Phillips and her friend junior Joanna Zhang stared out over a rocky ledge. It was a nice day: mild temperatures, lots of sunshine. Surrounding them were the trees and crevices of Rock Bridge State Park, the leaves transformed into the reds and purples of late autumn. Beneath them was the crevice of Devil’s Ice Box.
They stood for a while, just enjoying one of the last warm days before winter would creep in. They leaned over the railing and looked at the churning water below, chatting about survival and the people who had previously fallen around the Ice Box. They talked about adventure, about being daredevils, about being brave. They talked about risks and the act of taking them.
“I always want to think I’m brave enough to do whatever,” Breta said to Joanna, and hooked her leg over the wooden railing.
A few feet down was a small rock ledge above the entrance to the cave. It was about a foot and a half feet wide, covered in leaves, and to Breta, it looked like a challenge. Climbing over the railing, she did successive pull-ups down to the ledge.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I am really impressed with her upper-body strength right now. I could not be doing this,’” Joanna said.
Joanna watched Breta maneuver her way down to the ledge, keeping an eye on her sneakers as they dropped down onto the rock. A split second passed in a blur, as Breta landed and tried to steady herself.
Then she slipped.
Immediately, her shoes slid on the leaves. Joanna lurched for her, trying to grab onto her hand. Instead, she toppled over, scraping her knee and hitting the ground. Breta fell from the ledge, dropping approximately 30 feet into the cave crevice.
Joanna immediately began to scream. She shouted Breta’s name, begging for an answer but heard no response. There was nothing but silence.
“I was just on my knees screaming,” Joanna said. “I could not believe what had just happened.”
Nearby, two hikers, Mark Bowles and Marquis Brookins, happened to be standing on an overlook and chatting. They’d been there for a while, and had frequently tried to walk somewhere else.  Butt every time they did, an important tug in the conversation would bring them back to the landing.
By complete and utter chance, they were close enough to hear Joanna screaming.
When she first yelled, they didn’t think much of it. Perhaps she was just a kid having too much fun with her best friend. Perhaps she was even laughing. But after she yelled again, and her voice sounded desperate, Bowles and Brookins realized something was terribly wrong.
By the time Joanna had shouted three times, both of them were sprinting.
“On the way there, there was plenty of time as we were running. We had plenty of time to imagine what we were gonna find,” Bowles said. “… I was so afraid of the scene that we would come across. In my mind, I kinda knew it was gonna be bad.”
As soon as they arrived at Devil’s Ice Box, they went around the steps to where Joanna was. Breta was lying on the ground, unconscious, breathing heavily. Her eyes were ever-so-slightly open, and she was completely unresponsive. She was moving about a bit, clutching at the places where she felt the most pain, but when Bowles and Brookins asked her questions she wouldn’t reply.
But she was alive. They couldn’t see any broken bones. They could measure her pulse. They could hear her labored breathing. By some miracle, she’d landed in a pile of leaves around four to five feet deep, which had significantly cushioned her fall.

“She landed in the best place possible,” Brookins said. “She landed hard, of course, but I think she struck more her head. She landed in a pile of leaves … which is significant. If she’d been just to the right or just to the left, [she would have hit] all rocks.”
Brookins, who knew a few things about safety measures, wrapped Breta in a couple jackets, knowing that it was getting cold and Breta could easily get hypothermia with a head injury. Bowles ran back up to the top of the cleft, where he could get cell phone reception and call 911.
Joanna took one look at Breta’s badly scraped thigh and burst into tears.
Brookins immediately came over to comfort her. He sat next to her and let her cry, saying, “Tell me a story. Tell me anything. Try to calm yourself.” Joanna, overwhelmed, couldn’t come up with anything. So he told her his own stories. He told her about his family. He told her about his young children who were learning to make pancakes from mix. He told her about his job.
“Marquis was amazing,” Joanna said. “ … I was just thinking at the time, ‘I can’t believe I’m having this conversation about [his] toddler children making pancakes when my best friend is lying unconscious on the ground.”
Yet Brookins managed to help her. He gently teased her when she looked too distraught, laughing and saying, “Next time you come here, you might want to go somewhere else.”
Meanwhile, Bowles ran to the parking lot to meet the firefighters and EMTs. He brought them back to the crevice, where Breta was lying, and the EMTs got Breta onto a board. A few minutes later, Breta was carried into a helicopter and airlifted to the University Hospital ICU.
Joanna wanted to drive to the hospital, but no one would let her in the state she was in. So she climbed into her car to call senior Clara Phillips, Breta’s sister, and found several text messages from her boyfriend – she’d completely forgotten that the two of them were supposed to have dinner with her parents for the first time that night. Hitching a ride to the hospital with one of the firefighters at the scene, Joanna called her boyfriend to let him know the situation. She tried her best to keep from sobbing.
While Joanna was riding to the hospital, the rest of Breta’s family heard the news. Breta’s mother, Charlotte Phillips, was walking into her office at the University of Missouri when she received a call from her church’s youth pastor, telling her the situation. Clara discovered Joanna’s texts while taking a break from her swim practice. Both of them rushed to the emergency room as soon as they could, while Mrs. Phillips notified her husband.
“I thought ‘She’s got to be alive,’” Mrs. Phillips said. “And that’s when you realize what you believe in, because you are totally not in control. I’m a person of faith, and I realized, ‘she’s in God’s hands. There’s nothing I can do. I’m going to go to the hospital, and I totally trust that whatever happens, God’s going to be a part of it, and he’s going to look after my baby.’ And I continued to pray, called my husband, and started driving.”
Mrs. Phillips, Mr. Phillips and Joanna met at the hospital waiting room and waited to see Breta. That night, Breta’s family members were admitted, but Joanna was sent away. To see her best friend, she had to wait until the next morning.
“I couldn’t sleep [that night],” Joanna said. “I [kept thinking] about everything I should’ve done and I felt like a terrible friend.”
Joanna was plagued by guilt. She felt it was unfair, that Breta was in the ICU and Joanna’d escaped without much more than a scrape on her knee. She felt she should have done something more for her friend, that she shouldn’t have been so upset, that she should have taken action like Bowles and Brookins.
However, Bowles and Brookins didn’t see themselves as saviors. In fact, Bowles said, it was only after a significant amount of time passed that the two of them really reflected on their involvement in the emergency. It took them a while to realize how crazy it was, that they’d been in the perfect place at the perfect moment. They might have saved Breta’s life.
“The thing I’ve marveled at is the coincidences that actually put us close there,” Bowles said. “I have deep spiritual beliefs so it has been an experience of Providence in action, having help nearby when it was needed. And that’s a very humbling feeling, but a good one. I’m not sure how it would have played out if we had not been there. It’s an awesome feeling to know we might have contributed to that situation.”
[/tab][tab title=”Part 2: Philippians 4:13″] [heading style=”1″]Part 2: Philippians 4:13
[dropcap style=”2″ size=”3″]T[/dropcap]hat night, Breta wavered in and out of consciousness. Her eyelids fluttered open and closed, giving her brief snapshots of the spinning world around her. At one point, she discovered four separate IVs stuck into the veins of her arms. She remembers thinking, distractedly, Well, I’m certainly glad I wasn’t awake when they put those in.
At first, when she regained full consciousness, Breta believed she had been in a bus accident. In her delirium, she started asking where everyone else was, if they were okay, if there had been many injuries. She described herself as “freaking out,”  under the impression that many of her close friends were hurt. Eventually, her parents told her the truth.
“I don’t remember getting upset when they told me what had actually happened,” Breta said. “I don’t remember getting mad or anything like that, just thinking ‘Well, that was stupid.’”
Throughout that first night, Breta didn’t say anything. Even when doctors relieved sedation and they tried to awaken her, Breta was unresponsive.
But over the next few days, she would periodically awaken and her mother would catch her mumbling the famous Bible verse, Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” She would say little else, and could remember very little of the accident. But she knew something was wrong. She was scared and anxious. She felt alone and afraid. The verses tumbled out of her mouth without her even being totally aware of them.
“When you find out that was something you were doing, that I kept repeating, that it was one of the few things I would say … it was really nice to know,” Breta said. “Because you often wonder what you would do in that situation, a hard situation … It was really comfortable to know that even when I’m not fully there, even when I’m partially out of it, I will still look to Christ.”
The verses comforted and astounded her family members. They tried fruitlessly to talk to her, to converse, but some of the only things they could get out of her were Bible verses.
“I didn’t even know she had those verses down in there,” Ms. Phillips said, “where she couldn’t remember what had happened; she couldn’t remember very much at all, but [when] she  was down in the pits, she would start reciting these verses, and we would all start crying, because we knew she was in a really good place at that time, and that she was going to be fine, because when you have that kind of hope, it really helps everyone else.”
As Breta struggled to regain consciousness, the doctors tied her hands and feet to the bed, ensuring she wouldn’t try and pull out her intubation tube. From that point forward, the doctors checked on her every hour, worried about paralysis and brain trauma. They pinched her toes, poked her legs, and had Ms. Phillips yell at Breta to open her eyes, hoping a familiar voice might illicit a response. This continued throughout the first night.
But in the morning, Breta proved she could breathe on her own. She started responding to doctor’s voices and even participating in some small conversation. Eventually, she was allowed to have visitors.
Joanna drove to the hospital as soon as she could. She was terrified to see what state Breta might be in, connected to tubes and IV poles. But as soon as she entered the room, the first thing Breta said was, “I was so worried about you!”
Perplexed, Joanna asked her why.
“I couldn’t remember if you had gotten hurt too,” Breta replied.
Her words broke Joanna’s heart, and she struggled not to cry again. The two of them sat together, Breta in a hospital bed, Joanna in a chair beside her, and told each other they’d always be best friends. Breta said she knew Joanna would always come back for her, that they would always watch out for one another, and Joanna lost it. She started tearing up, sitting with her injured best friend, less than 24 hours after they’d been aimlessly wandering about Rock Bridge State Park, talking about the trivial.
They talked for a while, though Breta was exhausted. During a lull in the conversation, Breta glanced down at the bandages covering her leg, and told Joanna her thigh was really “messed up.”
“Joanna, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to use this leg,” she said. “But that’s okay, because I can do one-legged squats.”
Joanna replied that Breta should probably get out of intensive care first.

***

[dropcap style=”2″ size=”3″]T[/dropcap]he following morning, Clara dragged herself out of bed and into a green skirt, slipping a strand of twinkling Christmas lights around her neck. The rest of her friends were excited for the annual RBHS fundraiser Breakfast with Santa, but she was worried about her little sister, who was still resting in the ICU.

She put on a poker face throughout the entire morning. She smiled when she sang carols with the children, she laughed when they laughed, she helped them paste pinecones and glitter together for Christmas decorations. But, as her classmates comforted her and asked how Breta was doing, she found it difficult to not be distracted.
“I wasn’t worried about [Breta] not living,” Clara said. “I was worried about her not being the same person.”

Clara’s times at the hospital were bittersweet. Seeing Breta alive and recovering was a comfort, but seeing her struggle was a test in faith. Breta “wasn’t ever like herself,” Clara said. Although the doctors told the family that their youngest daughter would make a full recovery, Clara said it didn’t seem like the truth.
“I didn’t really believe it,” Clara said. “I didn’t seem like she would [make a full recovery], just because she was acting so different, and I didn’t see how that could happen.”
But she remained by Breta’s side, staying as strong as she could. At least two or three times an hour, Breta would ask, “I’m going to get better, right?” and, time and time again, Clara would have to answer “yes”. But, truthfully, she wasn’t sure. No one in the family was completely sure.
Listen to a podcast of Clara talking about the difficulties of the situation here.
Friends and family flooded Breta with attention and affection. Her teammates and coaches brought cards, her classmates brought stuffed animals, her family friends brought meals. Breta thanked all of them, but the next day she wouldn’t be able to remember who brought which stuffed tiger or which bouquet of daisies. She couldn’t even remember who’d been there the previous evening. It was an infuriating struggle against amnesia, and Breta spent much of her free time in the hospital just “trying to remember things.”
Students at RBHS sent out text messages en masse, asking for prayers for Breta’s speedy recovery. KOMU reported on her fall, alerting the rest of Columbia to the accident. Breta’s Facebook wall was covered in posts, wishing her well at Rusk Rehabilitation Center.
“It was good to know that people are there for you and care about you, and that they were praying for you,” Breta said. “To know you have that kind of foundation behind you, regardless of how unintelligent your actions are, how big your mistakes are … you’re always going to have people to back you up.”
But the concern was “also distressing.” Breta couldn’t help but feel guilty for her actions, for the fear and pain she’d caused the people around her. At first, the guilt weighed her down. She felt personally responsible, and the world and its problems felt “really trivial,” Breta said.
Her family wasn’t having any of that. Whenever Breta began to feel pessimistic, whenever a sardonic comment entered her speech, her mother or sister or father would quickly ask her, “Who’s in charge?”
And Breta would immediately answer, “God. God’s in charge.”
She always felt better after saying that.
[/tab][tab title=”Part 3: Stronger”] [heading style=”1″]Part 3: Stronger[/heading] [dropcap style=”2″ size=”3″]A[/dropcap]s soon as Breta transitioned to Rusk Rehabilitation Center, it became clear she wasn’t giving up easily. Her competitive spirit and inquisitive nature fueled her accelerated recovery, and before long, the therapists hardly knew what to do with her.
They ran her through the typical therapy types: occupational, speech and physical. They had her perform procedural tasks to ensure her implicit memory hadn’t been impaired; she cooked food and vacuumed the floor like a housemaid. They tested her language skills in everyday conversation. They gave her rapid IQ tests, which she found “really fun.”
“It got to be this race between the speech therapist and Breta to finish all these tests,” Ms. Phillips said. “I think that probably helped boost Breta a little, when she could see her own progress. The physical therapy probably was the slowest, and that’s probably because of the nerve damage, and the muscle and the swelling.”
Breta breezed through each challenge, unless it dealt with physical therapy. She was consistently frustrated with her physical state, referring to her right leg as her “subordinate leg.” In the accident, she’d nearly crushed her right side. She had abrasions across her right quadricep, where the rock had scraped six square inches of her skin off. There were scrapes and a laceration across her left leg, while her right arm was also marked with scratches. But her right leg had taken the most damage. The muscles were destroyed to the point that they broke and “bounced back.” A large bump rose on Breta’s thigh, where the accumulated muscle fibers had curled around themselves.
“If I would jog or run, it would feel like every step you took, your whole leg would jar and someone was repeatedly hitting a bruise,” Breta said. “I could not run, which was probably one of the worst things. I got to finally sprint for the first time during Christmas break, which was about a month later. And it felt really good, but it was one of those things where it’s like, ‘I can’t believe I’ve lost this,’ because it’s such a basic [thing]. You never would’ve thought you would lose the ability to do something that’s such a part of your life. But you get through it.”
While Breta quickly conquered cognitive tests and wrestled through physical tests while she was conscious, her subconscious battled against her. Throughout her recovery at Rusk, she suffered from vivid nightmares. While some dreams focused around the accident, others threw Breta’s worst fears at her. Breta told Joanna about her awful nights, and Joanna felt horrible being unable to do anything for her. She could only be at Breta’s side and listen to her. So instead, Joanna improvised for words of advice.
“Sometimes I felt like I didn’t have good enough words to say to her,” Joanna said, “and I remember when she had all the nightmares and stuff, I wrote down a bunch of quotes and Bible verses and brought them to her, because I was like, ‘You know, sometimes, I don’t know what to say, and there’s nothing I can physically do except be encouragement for you.’ I wish I could’ve fought the battle with her recovery, but I guess that was something she had to do on her own.”
Even with all the positive encouragement, it was difficult for Breta to keep a positive outlook. She felt small. She felt trapped. But, above all, she felt weak.
On their drives together, Clara would attempt to lighten Breta’s mood with Kelly Clarkson’s hit single, “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)”. She would crank up the music and watch as Breta’s eyes narrowed, unhappy with the choice of song.

“I didn’t think it was true. I’m not stronger. [I’m] weaker than I was before. I have muscle damage; I’m physically weaker,” Breta said. “It took a while to realize that, no, I’m going to prove that that song can be true. … I guess I got really determined that I wasn’t going to let this consume me.”
After four days at Rusk, Breta left the inpatient services and headed home with doctors’ blessings. She was in the hospital and rehabilitation for eight days total.
But her recovery was far from over.
For the next two to three weeks, Breta returned to Rusk for outpatient therapy. There she ran through the same exercises, worked with the same “subordinate leg,” and watched herself make slow, slow progress. She hated visiting the rehabilitation center; she wanted to be stronger again, to have control over her life once more.  But every time she went, she left with a returned sense of spirit and thankfulness.
“Whenever I’d go, I’d see in the waiting room people who were in so much worse condition,” Breta said. “Lots of them are in permanent conditions that they won’t be able to heal from … Even what happened to me, in comparison to what has happened to other people … it was trivial. If it were a book, it’d only be a couple pages.”
Watching the drastically changed lives of the patients around her, Breta was able to come to terms with her own accident. She realized her split-second, daredevil decision could have “affected my life in a very negative way.”
“They say once you fall 15 feet, you have a fifty-fifty chance of living. I fell 30, and the fact that I didn’t die … I should have at least been paralyzed,” Breta said. “If I wasn’t paralyzed, I should at least have broken a few bones. … I didn’t have any of those things.”
What Breta did have was mood swings. Due to her concussion and the resulting spiked hormone levels, her attitude inexplicably shifted from ecstatic to depressed in a matter of minutes. It was almost as if she’d acquired manic depressive disorder. One moment, she’d be optimistic about her recovery, and then the next she’d be cursing her injured right leg.
But unusually, Breta could actually recognize when she was having a mood swing, Mrs. Phillips said. She would know that nothing had significantly changed in a few minutes, but she still felt negative and down. Together, Breta and her family would find ways to cope with them and work through it. Above all, the family would ask Breta, “Who’s in charge?”
And, again, she’d always have an answer.
That answer – Breta’s faith – helped her through the tough times at home. Her teachers gave her a reprieve from finals, accepting the grade she’d had before the accident. Her classmates brought her schoolwork to keep her busy. She continued to exercise her injuries, getting “better every day,” Clara said.
In time, just as cabin fever was taking hold, Breta’s doctors cleared her to go to Florida for a family vacation, which provided some much needed rest and relaxation with extended family.

***

[dropcap style=”2″ size=”3″]W[/dropcap]hen Breta returned to school, she and Joanna received a pleasant surprise. Unbeknownst to Breta, the substitute in her Civil Engineering class at the Career Center was none other than Mark Bowles. She, flitting between states of consciousness at their first meeting, did not recognize him, which was fine with Bowles. He could see everything he needed to know; Breta appeared to be fully recovered and was doing fine, so he saw no need to talk with her.
Then Joanna walked in.
“Joanna was basically screaming, she was so excited,” Breta said. “We were just really, really happy for getting to finally see him, and for me, it was like finally being able to know who it was that had made such a big impact on what happened to me.”
Bowles and Brookins had mainly stayed out of Breta’s business since the accident, not wishing to intrude on the family. But seeing Breta alive and well, walking on her own two legs, quelled all of Bowles’ fears that she might not have made a full recovery. He immediately sent a text to Brookins, who had since moved out of town.
Brookins was totally elated that she was recovered. It was like reading an ongoing story with a victorious feeling, Brookins said. He realized after-the-fact that the rescue truly was miraculous.
Since Breta’s fall, Brookins has decided to pursue a medical career as an emergency medical technician and is currently in training. Bowles said he fits the job description perfectly.
“I hate it when people feel helpless. It bothers me. I heard her friend Joanna calling her, and I didn’t hear Breta responding to her, and I knew that both of them needed help,” Brookins said. “It was important for us to be of assistance. … By no means were Mark and I professionals, we were just friendly individuals, and we just responded.”
[/tab][tab title=”Part 4: Ever After”] [heading style=”1″]Part 4: Ever After[/heading] [dropcap style=”2″ size=”3″]I[/dropcap]t is now May, and Breta’s made a long climb back to health. On the surface, Breta seems completely recovered from the fall, and for the most part, she is. She can walk, talk and act like nothing ever happened. She’s back in school, back with her friends, and even back to taking the occasional stroll through Rock Bridge State Park. But even with months separating her accident and the present day, a few things are still slightly off.
Before the fall, Breta could juggle a soccer ball around 400 times in a row. She worked every single day after school in her garage or driveway from her eighth grade year through her tenth grade year. It was a huge triumph for her, a matter of pride and of hard work. Now, all that work has disappeared. She consistently hits 40-50 juggles in a row and is consistently frustrated.
Her vision post-accident changed too. While optometrists told her she had 20/20 vision, Breta knew that something was off with her eyesight. She sometimes has trouble reading the board in her classes, a problem considering the gauntlet of difficult classes she takes. She plans on picking up some non-prescription glasses to augment her vision.
Despite being a daredevil at heart, Breta’s acquired an element of caution since her accident. She’s more hesitant to try daring stunts and activities, she said, and heights now give her minute glimpses of her fall; flashbacks that flood her, momentarily, with emotion.
“I went back to [Rock Bridge State Park] to see if I would get flashbacks like they do in movies, because I didn’t think those were true, but it turns out that you really do get flashbacks,” Breta said. “So I went back to see if that would happen, and it did, but for the actual falling part, I only got flashbacks of the emotion, not what I’d actually seen. I could only feel fear and stuff. But it’s okay, I kind of wish I could remember the whole thing.”
The hesitancy is slightly jarring to Breta, who is used to taking leaps and bounds on a regular basis. It bothers her that she was bested by the cliff, and she wants to “beat it” again, albeit in a safe way. Breta has learned more about risk-management through the ordeal, and the whole experience has built her up as a person, Mrs. Phillips said.
“I’m convinced Breta is a lot stronger person than she thought she was. And I think she’s going to be a lot more insightful,” Mrs. Phillips said. “And I hope that, maybe because it happened to her, someone else might think twice about climbing over that railing.”

***

[dropcap style=”2″ size=”3″]I[/dropcap]t was a few weeks after the accident, when Ms. Phillips was going through some of Breta’s old things, that she stumbled across a rather perplexing piece of paper. After reading the first few lines, she realized she’d found Breta’s bucket list. Scrawled across the page were all the things Breta wished to try, all the places she wished to go, all the sights she wished to see.
One of those wishes? Ride in a helicopter. Another? Visit the ER.
“I was thinking, ‘You have the ER on your bucket list?’” Mrs. Phillips said. Breta replied “‘Well, not to be a patient there. I was just going to go see it.’”
[vsw id=”66107554″ source=”vimeo” width=”600″ height=”485″ autoplay=”no”] Thanks to her accident, Breta’s now seen an ER and flown in a helicopter, even though she can’t remember the ride. In fact, it took her days to remember the accident itself. For one of the first times in her life, Breta was completely out of control of her life. In the end, it taught her to relish every moment with her loved ones, to be careful with her fragile life, and to trust in her faith.
“You realize how powerless you are. No matter how much you want something to change, no matter how much you’re willing to try. For me, I didn’t deal well with not [being in] control,” Breta said. “Whenever I’ve had something that I couldn’t do, I’ve worked for it. When I couldn’t juggle, I juggled every day because I wanted to be able to do it, and it paid off. So not being able to do something and not being able to do anything about it was something that was definitely a really hard point for me. And my faith was definitely helping with that, because I realized I just had to ‘give it over.’”
[/tab][/tabs] By Lauren Puckett and Atreyo Ghosh