For graduate, the walk is ‘amazing’
Spring Woods teen who nearly lost legs works her way back to center stage
Zaida Morales remembers staring into the black truck’s headlights as it swerved across the road, near the food truck she had just visited. She remembers being unable to follow her friends as they jumped out of its path, the impact and being dragged several feet before the vehicle left her broken body entangled in a wooden fence.
She remembers preparing to die when she saw the truck’s reverse lights switch on. But death never came. Instead, a stranger pulled a man out of the truck as another ran to the grievously injured 16-year-old and held her in his arms.
“He said everything is going to be OK. Those words are still in my head all the time,” Morales remembers.
A year and a half after doctors told Morales she almost certainly would lose one — if not both — of her legs, the Spring Woods High School senior will walk across the stage at her graduation ceremony Saturday.
Morales is one of thousands of students in Greater Houston who will graduate from high school in the coming weeks. While a few area districts already have held graduation ceremonies, families and friends of most graduating seniors from the area will soon pack football stadiums, auditoriums, performance halls and community centers to watch students move their graduation cap tassels to the left and collect their
diplomas.
But few of those graduating have overcome obstacles as seemingly insurmountable as Morales, though it’s hard to picture the hardships she faced from her warm smile and bubbly personality.
Her legs, scarred by skin grafts and more than a dozen surgeries, tell another story.
Life-changing injuries
While she lay on the pavement that night in January 2016, the stranger told Morales not to look at her legs. She couldn’t help but glance and let out an instinctive scream. The pain began hitting her in waves, and she couldn’t stop screaming.
The next few hours seemed to happen in flashes. Paramedics pulling her from the fence. White walls and bright lights whizzing past as she was wheeled into Ben Taub Hospital. Nurses cutting off her clothes. Another nurse shielding the lower half of her body with a black curtain, so she couldn’t see the damage.
One moment is ingrained in her psyche: A doctor said they would have to amputate her left leg, and that her right leg suffered severe breaks.
“I really didn’t know how to react” to the news, Morales said. “At that moment, a lot of memories were coming to my head: me swimming, me dancing, thinking of me with a fake leg that I was going to wear for the rest of my life.”
She also remembers thinking her fate was no longer up to her or even the doctors who buzzed around her bedside: It was up to God.
Dr. Christopher Perkins, an orthopedic trauma surgeon with Baylor College of Medicine, said Morales’ injuries were among the worst he’d ever seen. Both legs sustained complex fractures around the knees. Blood had almost completely stopped flowing to both legs due to severed arteries and veins.
The general surgeon said it looked as if at least one of the legs would have to go and gave Morales’ parents a grim prediction: There was only a 5 percent chance she would be able to keep both legs.
But Perkins did not want to let that happen.
“She’s a young girl with her whole life ahead of her — her life hasn’t even really started yet,” Perkins said.
A team of doctors reconnected all of the leg’s veins and arteries while Morales was unconscious, removing muscle and skin tissue that had already died. Perkins drilled nails, screws and metal plates into Morales’s shattered bones.
When Morales awoke from that first surgery, she found her parents at the foot of the hospital bed, a memory that brings tears to her eyes.
“I told them I was sorry — sorry for making them go through this pain. I remember my mom telling me it wasn’t my fault,” Morales said as her voice quavered.
“My heart was shattering in a million pieces to see my parents crying. They were trying to be so strong, but I could see it in their eyes.”
She reached down to touch her legs, surprised to find both still there.
Multiple surgeries followed. The threat of infections loomed.
It was about a month before doctors could say with any certainty that Morales would keep both her lower limbs. But with that good news came some bad: It would be at least two years before she would be able to walk again.
“I said, ‘Two years? I don’t have two years,’ ” Morales said. “I thought I’ll do it in a year, maybe, but I did it in seven months.”
Amazing recovery
The first time Morales tried to stand after the accident, she fell back into her wheelchair.
It was July, nearly three months after she left the hospital, and Morales’ legs were practically rigid. She could hardly bend her knees half an inch, and her remaining muscles felt weak under her weight. She was still in a wheelchair when she returned to her Spring Branch ISD school in August, an accessory that garnered stares wherever she went.
Eventually she was able to switch to a walker, then crutches, then a large metal cane as she navigated Spring Woods High’s hallways.
Morales said the care and love she received from Perkins, other doctors, nurses, physical therapists, her family and friends pushed her to heal.
“I’m so, so happy I’m able to swim and walk. God let me keep my leg through the work of my amazing doctors,” Morales said.
Seven months after the accident, she shocked Perkins by walking into his office without assistance. In January, she competed in a swim meet and ended up setting a personal best time in the pool.
“In my practice, it’s one of the most amazing recoveries I’ve seen,” Perkins said. “It’s a longterm recovery that takes motivated patients. She was so determined and resilient to make that level of effort.”
Morales says she has about 60 percent of the strength and mobility she had before the accident, and plans to get back to 100 percent someday soon.
But for now, she’s overwhelmed that she will be able to walk across the stage at graduation like the rest of her classmates.
“Everything has been happening so fast — getting through the accident, recovering from the accident, therapy — so now the thought of me finally graduating is not even there, I still can’t believe it,” Morales said. “I feel like I’m going to start crying, just looking back at all these people who have been there. It will be amazing in that moment.”