Cassandra

Yes.

Thank you. They are by an indigenous artist named Joe Big Mountain. He did the quill work for Lily Gladstone's Oscar dress.

So I am currently located in Salt Lake City.

No. Born and raised in Montana.

That's true.

This takes place August 29th, 2001. I am 19 at the time, and I am supposed to be starting my freshman year of college in a week. I grew up in a rural town called Phillipsburg, Montana, and outside of town, there was a sapphire mine. Summer job, I worked at the Sapphire Mine.

Two parts to it, you could, as a tourist, go pay for a five gallon bucket of dirt and sift it down, or you could go up and dig your own dirt if you were more intense, and that's where I worked. Happened to be my last day on the job before I was done for this season.

And at the beginning of the season for this particular fee dig site, a backhoe had gone in, created a pretty big trench, about 20, 25 feet wide. So there were these two walls that people could then dig into. Fast forward, end of the season here, one of the walls got to be pretty tall. We're talking about 8 to 10 feet. And a large overhang started to develop. Okay. Okay. Uh-oh.

I'm sitting out away from this wall and I hear a crack. Everything goes black. I am completely buried.

We're talking two to three tons just on me. No.

So there's customers up there. Sad part of this story is there was another customer, Rockhound from Idaho, loved to spend his vacation time at their digging stones. And he was further underneath and he died on impact.

Huge. Imagine 10 feet tall, 15 feet long, just falling down. It crashes down on me. I think, oh, this is going to be like an avalanche. Let me try and get my hands up to my face, create an air pocket. I try and turn away and everything goes black. I am not my body. I am immediately just in the universe having a conversation. There is no sense of time. My body does not exist.

I have all the time in the world to decide whether I want to live or die. It was just this really comforting place to be. There was no panic. There was just, oh, here's a decision I get to make. Wow. And so I'm having this conversation with the universe. Other people talk about white lights and life reviews and their near-death experiences. I didn't get any of that.

It was just me saying, yeah, I don't think I'm quite done yet. I've got some things I'd like to do. There was one particular sentence that I said, which was, I haven't been a judge yet. At the time, I was political science, pre-law. And the minute I said that sentence... I was back in my body and it was just like instantaneous. It felt like I was in that space for like 10, 15 minutes.

In actuality, I was maybe a minute to a minute and a half. I can hear them saying my name. I'm aware of what's happening. I'm aware I'm completely buried.

Completely cemented in.

I'm trying to spit some dirt out of my mouth. And one of the guys who'd been up there a lot that summer, so I'd gotten to know him really well, he sees this little bit of dirt move and he starts to uncover my face. My eyes are just caked with dirt. So I actually can't see anything. And I wear contacts. I really can't see anything. They start to get my body uncovered.

In the meantime, this is 2001, rural Montana. There's no cell phone service. And our radios were not working. So one of the other customers jumped in their private vehicle and drove like the 15 minutes down the mountain back to the base to call 911 and say we need help. There's been a cave-in at the Sapphire Mine and people are buried. Oh, my God.

As they're starting to get me uncovered and they get my torso uncovered first and free up my arms, they get this pretty big boulder off my chest. And when they removed that weight, blood started moving everywhere and I could tell that I was bleeding inside. I'm like spitting into my hand asking one of the other customers up there, hey, what color is this? I need to know.

And he's like, well, why do you need to know? And I'm like, well, I need to know if I'm spitting up blood yet. And that kind of cued them into like, oh, she might know other things that's wrong with her. So it's like, yeah, my neck feels funny. My back feels funny. My pelvis feels funny. These are the areas that I can tell are probably broken.

They continued getting me unburied, and there was a boulder that fell next to my head so close that it pinned my hair down. It was so big they couldn't move it, so they had to just cut my hair to get my head away from it. It took about an hour to dig me out. Volunteer ambulance shows up because that's what we have. The closest hospital that I need to get to is over 90 minutes away.

This very comforting conversation that I just had with the universe was, nope, here's my new contract. I'm going to live. And so pretty calm about the whole thing. I get loaded up on volunteer ambulance, backboard, neck brace. We're going down the mountain. I'm really starting to go into shock. Emergency life support from Missoula had gotten the call. They rushed out to meet up with me.

We do a transfer on the side of the road. They are working on me. They realized I got pretty much no blood in me. They tried IVs in my feet, my neck, nothing was sticking. They put a big like stint into my left lung to get me some air. Finally, they load me up into that ambulance. We take off again. About 15 minutes later, a helicopter finally makes it to us.

Transferred again on the side of the road. They're working on me again on the side of the road before they get me up in the air. Whole time, haven't lost consciousness. Still there, still talking. Finally, we land at the hospital on top of the roof and they get me out of the helicopter. I just see white coats everywhere and get me into the elevator.

Those doors close and it was this very conscious moment. All right, I'm out. I pass out. I wake up in the emergency room to my mom and one of the nurses stitching up my hand. So they did emergency chest tubes and gave me a little over four units of blood. They stabilized me. And then the next day they flew me out to Seattle Harborview.

because I was a trauma one and I needed massive teams of doctors. My pelvis was broken in four different spots and my left SI joint was totally hinged open towards the back and then rolled back forward. So they thought they were going to have to put a rod like in and out of my pelvis area to stabilize it. They told my parents I'd be out in Harborview for four to six weeks.

So I flew out there August 30th, 2001, spent three days in the ICU, then got moved to my own room. About September 8th, they removed the chest tubes and we said, okay, we're going to discharge on September 10th.

Yeah. The only way for me to get home comfortably was by air. I was not going to do a 10-hour ambulance ride in my condition. So we chartered a flight to come to Seattle, pick me up, and fly me back to Montana. It's pretty late in the afternoon on September 10th. My pulmonologist is like, eh, what's one more day? And my mom was like, we're getting home tonight. The flight is here. The plane's here.

We're leaving. I don't care what time. So we land in Montana. It's still a little light out, but the sun's starting to set. And then I get to a rehab facility. And then the next day, September 11th, an air traffic shuts down.

Mom's intuition. That's why you can't say what's one more day. So I started my freshman year of college in a neck brace, my left arm in a sling, a leg brace, and a wheelchair. I broke C7 and T1 at the spinous process. my third and fourth left rib, my left clavicle, both my lungs burst, my kidney and spleen bled out, major trauma to my left thigh. It's still numb to this day.

Major trauma to my right knee, lots of broken teeth, fractures in my feet. I was told I would never ski again. I walked at six weeks. I skied at Christmas. Wow.

And are you a judge?

Just about. I'm not a judge. Random life events led me into social work. And I am a therapist. I specialize in religious trauma. Oh, wow. My goodness. Buried alive.

Honestly, it's interesting. I've never had any nightmares. There's been no PTSD about that. It's my story. I wouldn't change it. What a story.

Thank you. You're very welcome. Side note, as a therapist, both of you, thank you for all the work you guys do with mental health and Dax for being a vulnerable white man. That's really important to everyone. Thank you.

What are you talking about? Santa's clearly a woman.

Go to bed so I can do the thing. Remember when we talked at the mall?

I asked for an LOL doll.

My parents are getting a divorce, and instead of an LOL doll, I want them to stay together.