Paralyzed, Linked to Respirator, Crash Victim Reaches Out to Life : Health care: Kim Patek, now 22, serves as an inspiration to those around her as she battles boredom and the ‘pain on the inside of me.’

Like the highway she was driving that warm July night, life stretched ahead for 20-year-old Kim Patek, a petite and pretty blonde with a new job and a new apartment.

But when her car ran off Interstate 29 and overturned, hurling her onto the hard pavement, that life changed. A split second turned the carefree young woman into a respirator-dependent quadriplegic.

“Sometimes I wish I’d have died, not to go through all this pain and suffering,” she said. “But now, I’m glad I’ve had this time. I’m with God. I know now I’m going to heaven. So I’m thankful for this time.”

Nearly two years have passed since a phone call sent Jerri Patek and her husband, Fred, a former shortstop for the Kansas City Royals, to Heartland East Hospital in St. Joseph, where their daughter lay in critical condition.

A Missouri State Highway Patrol report said that at 3 a.m. on July 21, 1992, Kim lost control of her Ford Probe on the interstate in northwest Missouri’s Buchanan County. The car hit a guardrail, ran off the road and overturned five times.

Kim’s automatic shoulder harness snapped; she hadn’t worn a lap belt that might have saved her from serious injury. The Highway Patrol report listed inattention and drinking as contributing factors to the crash. Kim has no memory of the accident.

The Pateks said doctors at Heartland East told them their daughter had suffered a serious spinal injury. Paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on her own, she might not live through the night.

Kim spent months in hospitals, transferring to the Institute for Rehabilitation and Research in Houston in January, 1993.

The Pateks faced huge medical bills because Kim had no health insurance.

Fred Patek--who came to the big leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1968, joined the Royals in 1971 and moved to the California Angels from 1980-81--had ended his playing career a few years before player salaries soared. He went public with Kim’s story, talking about her injuries and the need to raise money to send her to a rehabilitation center.

Former Royals played charity ballgames for Kim, and people donated more than $100,000.

It was in Houston, the family hoped, where Kim would be weaned from her respirator. But their hopes were dashed by Dr. R. Edward Carter, director of the spinal cord injury program. He walked into Kim’s room one day with the verdict.

“The doctor came in . . . and he just said, ‘Kim, there’s no hope.’ He said I’d never breathe again.”

Her reaction?

“What can you do but cry?”

When the tears stopped, Kim knew what she wanted. The next month, she went home.

Home is a spacious brick house on a quiet lane on the edge of Blue Springs, a Kansas City suburb. The lower story of the Patek home is now the center of Kim’s world.

A hospital bed and recliner dominate the main room. A cot where Jerri Patek sleeps next to Kim each night sits in the back of the room. Beside the hospital bed is the respirator, hissing and clinking quietly every few seconds. A mechanical lift to help turn Kim, keeping her lungs clear, is pushed aside.

A photo shows Kim and her sister, Heather, as toddlers, standing near their mother--a trio of blondes. A portrait of Fred Patek in his Royals uniform is on one wall. Perched high on a shelf is a studio photograph of Kim taken a few months before the accident.

“That’s what she used to look like,” Jerri Patek said matter-of-factly.

“Kim was always the type whose appearance was very important to her,” Jerri Patek said. “She was always so careful about her looks, her room was always just so, her hair was just so.”

That, said Kim, now 22, is why she allows few friends to visit.

“I just don’t want them to see the way I look,” she said.

Her mother and grandmother curl the bangs of her long hair, polish her fingernails and apply her makeup. She wears stylish stirrup pants and oversize shirts decorated with bangles and beads. But the difference between the slim, tanned Kim before the accident and the heavier, paler Kim now is startling.

She leaves home three times a week for services at Hickman Mills Church of Christ but otherwise ventures out only to the doctor and an occasional shopping trip. Tubes, respirators, oxygen tanks, batteries--all of the paraphernalia to keep Kim alive--must be packed in a specially equipped van for outings.

It takes time for Kim to speak freely in front of visitors because “it takes me too long,” she said.

Kim must wait for the respirator to give her a breath before she speaks, and then the breath often ends before her sentence, words trailing away.

She glances up to her mother, giving silent permission for her to finish. Jerri Patek always hesitates.

“I wait to let her finish because I don’t want Kim to think she’s not important enough for people to listen to her,” she said, eyes brimming. “They can wait.”

Kim’s injuries have had little impact on her personality, Heather said.

“She’s wonderful. . . . She’s very pleasant, she’s always been that way,” Heather said.

What is gone is her independence.

Two months before the accident, Kim had moved into her first apartment and had just started working in an office in downtown Kansas City.

“She’s gone from having it all and always being on the go to always having to depend on someone else,” said Wendee Brown, Kim’s best friend, a student at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb.

And she has seen Kim begin to withdraw, Brown said.

Dr. Steven Gialde, the Oak Grove physician who oversees Kim’s routine care, said she suffered a partial severing near the top of the spinal cord.

Her prognosis is uncertain. Carter, the Houston physician, said some people with Kim’s level of injury live for years; others die quickly.

The family knows that, barring a miracle, Kim won’t recover.

“From a medical, scientific standpoint, you have to look at reality that it probably is never going to happen, but from a standpoint of looking from God, I never give up that hope,” Fred Patek said.

Her father is gone much of the year as a coach for the Milwaukee Brewers’ farm team in Stockton, Calif.

He flew home in late May, when Kim’s blood pressure dropped dangerously low. When he arrived, his concern for his family nearly kept him from returning to California.

“I need to be home to help pick up some of the slack, but . . . they keep telling you to go back to work, so I have a lot of guilt feelings about that,” he said.

Unhappy with private nurses, Jerri Patek and her mother, Delma Freeze, do all of Kim’s care. Freeze moved in with the Pateks in 1993.

Kim’s routine care occupies several hours a day. But Jerri Patek spends much of the day watching television by Kim’s side.

Only her eyes betray Jerri Patek’s exhaustion. They close occasionally, almost against her will. She survives on three or four hours of sleep a day, snatched in fragments as Kim naps.

Every day, Kim fights boredom and the pain that medication only partially relieves. She cannot feel a touch on her arm or leg, but “I can feel pain on the inside of me,” she said.

While Kim’s life has narrowed, Heather’s stretches ahead of her. She was married June 18 to Gary Rehkow. Kim was her maid of honor.

“Kim always wanted to get married and have a family, and she used to baby-sit a lot and she loves kids,” Fred Patek said. “Those are things that hurt when I think of them as a dad. I’ll never get a chance to walk her down the aisle, and I’ll never get a chance to hold my grandkids from her.”

Working two jobs and planning a wedding left Heather little time to spend with her sister, who is only 10 months younger than Heather.

Now, Kim relies on Heather for tales of the outside world.

“She is so interested in how your day went, what the weather is, how your drive was,” she said. “Anything you tell her about, she’s interested in . . . because she can’t be out there.”

For the most part, Kim deals with her fate gracefully.

“I’ve gotten used to it,” she said. “I couldn’t do this if I didn’t have God with me. He helps me. I don’t blame anyone for it. I have no one to blame. It was just an accident.”

The Kim Patek Trust fund is established at Boatmen’s Bank, P.O. Box 419038, Kansas City, Mo. 64183.