Crash Report: Kansas City (Drunk)
Backwage
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Posted on Wed, May. 08, 2002
Motorcycle crash gives man a new life
By ERIK PETERSEN
The Kansas City Star
Shane Kampe did not pray much. But as he lay in St. Luke's Hospital, people
prayed for him. Kampe, 28, lay in the Intensive Care Unit, unconscious and
smelling of alcohol. His wrecked motorcycle had been cleared from a curve on a
midtown side street. He hadn't worn a helmet.
While family and friends cried, Kampe was in a coma with as much chance to die
as to live. Nobody was confused about how this had happened. Kampe worked
hard, sweating on ladders as a house painter. After work, he lived hard. He
knew how to drink all night and still have a paintbrush in his hand the next
morning.
Kampe had lived in midtown about a decade, since shortly after a fairly
anonymous career at Lee's Summit High School. They knew him at the bars along
Main Street and Broadway, at the record stores, at the strip clubs. They knew
him at Davey's Uptown Ramblers Club, where he threw back cans of Old Style with
friends. They knew him across the street at Exile Tattoo, where his friend
Danny Kobzantsev gave him some of Kampe's hundreds of tattoos.
One tattoo read "Old Style Rambler" -- an ode to the bar and the beer. It was
on the inside of his lower lip.
In the early morning hours of Sept. 5, Kampe had been drinking at Davey's. His
motorcycle sat out on the street, and he decided it was time to go.
Earlier that day, he and Kobzantsev had been talking outside the tattoo shop.
"Shane, do you think we're living right?" Kobzantsev asked.
Kampe didn't answer, not exactly.
Instead Kampe, who remembered the Bible of his childhood even if he didn't live
by it, told Kobzantsev the story of the prodigal son, the parable about a man
who must lose everything to return to God.
Hours later, paramedics rolled Shane Kampe into St. Luke's.
The elements of healing
Kampe hung on hour to hour, day to day. He showed no signs of recovery.
Friends and relatives stayed near. Donation buckets appeared at three of his
favorite places in the city -- the Broadway Cafe, Dagwood's Cafe and Recycled
Sounds music store.
Hospital staffers did everything they could. Brain injuries are unpredictable,
and people often recover from them. But in the first crucial hours and days,
nobody could say for sure how Kampe would fare.
His family bonded with a nurse, Theresa Warren, who explained the frightening
machines and answered the repeated questions. She told them medicine was but
one of three elements to healing -- family and friends could provide the
emotional and the spiritual needs.
"She gave us that ray of hope that a person needs to hang onto until the
curtains close," said Carl Kampe, Shane's father.
Warren's job is to describe honestly for families what is going on, she said
later.
"You never take away someone's hope," she said.
About a week after the accident, Kampe's mother, Patricia Rist, refused to
believe her son would be anything but OK. She demanded to know the specifics. A
doctor showed Kampe's CT scans to the family.
Rist, suddenly steeped in knowledge about brain injury, looked at the scan of a
brain flaked with white. The white was where bits of her son's brain were no
longer there.
They had been told he could still recover, but the truth was in front of them:
Kampe was not waking up.
At that point, Carl Kampe sat down with his other son, Troy Kampe, to confront
what nobody had mentioned. Unplugging life support. Donating organs. They did
not know if they could. But if he didn't move, if he didn't wake up...
As a boy, Shane Kampe had sometimes asked his mother to take him to Sunday
school. But as he got older, he had fallen away. Likewise, his family members
were not particularly religious people. But now religion had become more
personal than simply going to church.
"We were doing a lot of praying that night," Troy Kampe said. They asked God to
"just give us any kind of sign."
Kampe had been in a coma for a little more than a week, and they just needed a
little hint. Something from him that said, "I'm still in here. You won't have
to pull any plugs."
Not long afterward, Warren and other St. Luke's staffers were marveling at
Kampe's tattoos. Someone mentioned the "Aloha Monkey" on his lower leg. It was
one of his favorites.
Warren said something about the monkey and looked down at Kampe.
His hand struggled to move.
Thumbs up.
Warren found Kampe's mother.
"You've got to see this," she said.
Life on the inside
They had their sign, but no promise of recovery. After several weeks at St.
Luke's, Kampe spent several more at Truman Medical Center Lakewood. He could
talk -- a little. He could move around a bit.
In early November, his parents took him to the Missouri Rehabilitation Center
in Mount Vernon. He faced the challenges typical of head-trauma recovery. He
grew frustrated. He got mad.
He knew voices but struggled with faces. When people talked to him, he would
recognize them. But if anybody -- even his parents -- stood silently before
him, he would not know who they were.
He would call his mother on the phone, begging to come home.
"It was horrible," she said. "I'd get off the phone feeling like I'd absolutely
deserted him."
He hated being trapped at a hospital far from home. A prison, he thought.
But he would need the skills he learned there -- cognitive skills, balance
exercises, even activities to help reintroduce him to everyday interaction --
later in life, even though he didn't understand at the time why he had to be
there.
The exercises seemed so simple. In some cognitive therapy classes, patients
played card games or Yahtzee.
"I was like, `I can do this with my grandmother. I'm ready to go home,' " he
said.
He knew he was getting better.
A message of hope
One recent week, with winter over and temperatures consistently warm enough to
paint outdoors, a man in paint-stained clothes and a bicycle helmet climbed a
ladder and began applying a white coat to the peeling front of a small midtown
house.
It was just work for his landlord at the house where he lives, but Shane Kampe
was back.
He had come home from Mount Vernon in January. Tube-fed just several months
earlier, he now began calling clients. A new ad for Custom Quality Painting,
his business, appeared in the telephone book.
"The phone started ringing the day I got out of the hospital," he said.
He also changed his business Web site, where his brother had posted medical
updates. He figures clients don't need to know about milestones like going to
the bathroom without help.
Kampe still struggles. At times, he cannot remember people he has known all his
life. His temper can be quick. His threshold for frustration is lower, his
mother said, although that's been better recently.
Kampe sees progress everywhere. It's in big things, such as painting houses.
It's in little things, like the time he fumbled his keys but caught them before
they hit the ground.
There's not too much he takes for granted any more.
"Driving to the grocery store was like, `I'm back,' " he said. " `I'm here.' "
And on Sundays, he's in church.
Shortly after the accident, Kobzantsev stood in a hospital prayer circle and
talked to God with a conviction he never knew he had. After that, he started
going to Maywood Baptist Church in Independence. When Kampe left the hospital,
they went together.
"They're both good Baptists," Pastor Robert Spradling said. "They come Sunday
morning, Sunday evening."
Kampe has told his story to the congregation.
"Shane's story, when he gets up and tells it -- that just fills people up with
hope," Spradling said.
"It gives you a whole different picture of what religion looks like."
Kampe's picture -- and he describes it bluntly -- looks like this: He lived
wrong and made some bad decisions. Did whatever he wanted.
"I lived like that -- real hard -- for a long time," he said.
He took a fall. He slept. He woke up and decided to make some changes. He no
longer considers a bar stool his place.
He remains close to some friends he knew before the accident -- the ones who
stayed near him, stayed with his family, during the worst hours.
But he quit drinking. He works harder at his business now, and nights that once
would have been spent at bars now include reading or working around the house.
People have called him strong for surviving, but he says his own strength has
nothing to do with it. He was asleep, after all.
"I have to give glory to God for saving my life," he said.
Shane Kampe did not pray much. Then, for a time, he lost everything.
Now he has come home. He is awake.
Neil
"Backwage" <back...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20020621005935...@mb-fg.aol.com...
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Posted on Wed, May. 08, 2002
>
> Motorcycle crash gives man a new life
> By ERIK PETERSEN
> The Kansas City Star
>
This is a really sickly sentimental story for an irresponsible drunk - even
if if he did find God!
Like the idea Backwage, but the one about the one's about the police
officers haven't taught me much - except maybe the police cover up their
mistakes as "just one of those things". I'm not sure about the guy how got
side swiped by the old dear on the otherwise empty freeway but as he wasn't
blaming her I reckon he was in the wrong, despoite 35 years without an
accident. And the guy who came off on the hairpin was obviously overcome by
red mist on that particular ride - otherwise the police would have found the
diesel sick or something.
Please don't over do it, but I'd be interested to read the occassional story
if they really do teach us stuff.
Neil
RJ
recovering from leukemia
Neil <neil.ven...@btopenworld.com> wrote in message
news:aeukdv$ccf$1...@knossos.btinternet.com...
J and Jay Corbally
reasons.
While I think it's great that the original poster is providing
material that can give useful informaton regarding potential dangers
(nice going Backwage) I really come to this newsgroup to learn more
about scooters, not to be "preached to" as this story attempted. I'm
here for my interest in Scootering, not to be "saved".
Also, as a non-believer myself, I find the stories about "the guy who
turns his back on God then comes crawling back when he gets his
comeuppance" a bit pathetic and a little offensive. Serious road
accidents occur to all people, not just us "fallen".
So please, just the facts. Facts teach us, and help save lives.
Stay safe out there everyone.
James....
"RJ" <Pelica...@hotmail.com> wrote:
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When responding via email,
please take out the "_no-spam_" in our address.
Jack
airplanes and riding a mountain bike. Then he got divorced at 45,
bought a harley, took to running bar to bar with his new friends. One
night, after getting his drunken face slapped for getting fresh with a
waitress, he heads home, pissed off and drunk. He missed a turn, hit
his head on a large road sign, the bike and his torso, sans head,
continued until the bike fell over in the ditch.
At his funeral, the preacher said he had found god too.
I for one don't think his teenage daughters cared about his new
friend in the clouds any more than the last set of new friends he had.
They just wish dad would be around to see them married, etc. But
yo-de-oh, he was an a$$hole, now he, and his head are in a box.
so????? lesson????? People die, and some a$$holes ask for it until
they get it. So what?
"Neil" <neil.ven...@btopenworld.com> wrote in message news:<aeukdv$ccf$1...@knossos.btinternet.com>...
Backwage
its premises or otherwise support it; it's an article about a crash, you
lugnuts! My headache is coming back again.
By the way, best headache remedy on earth: Cup of strong coffee and an
aspirin. Best way to get headache: Ride into sun without sunglasses, sit in
traffic behind exhaust pipe for a long red light.
Mack
J and Jay Corbally
I never implied I believed you bought into that article, I was simply
expressing the wish that you had taken out of it the pertinent facts
and dumped the sermon bit. I would have been much more interested in
hearing your take on the events than the original authors fire n'
brimstone drama.
I was interested in the facts and your interpretation of them, not the
authors overt religiosity. My apologies if I came across as stating
something else.
James....
back...@aol.com (Backwage) wrote:
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