DES MOINES, Iowa — Kelsey Cummings was driving home one night in early March. She wasn't paying attention. She was thinking about getting home to the kids before 11 p.m. so her partner could get to his third-shift job in the factory. She was a few blocks from home in Cedar Rapids when it happened.
Her car veered across the center line. She thinks it slid. There was freezing rain that day. The car crossed the opposite lane and hit an open gate to a golf course. She felt no pain.
Cummings, 27, saw that her mobile phone had kicked to the floor of the car's passenger side, leaning precariously against the door. She reached over to get it and felt pressure. A big pipe pressed against her inner thigh. She couldn't move. What in the world?
She looked for any item in the car that would help her push the phone toward her.
She looked in the back seat. She saw something long in the darkness that she could use. What was it?
"That's when I realized the pole went through my body," she said. "I felt like passing out."
A 2-inch-wide hollow galvanized pole from the gate had pushed through the car's grill, through the radiator, the battery and firewall, and through Kelsey's inner thigh, ripping out the head of her femur and hip socket, before exiting near her tailbone and going through the back of her seat and into the back seat.
She told herself to calm down and think.
"I watch survivor (television) shows. Hey, use what you can. Twine or supplies. Use those and be creative," she said. "The only thing I had was a floor mat. So I used it."
Cummings is alive to tell this story about what occurred over the next two hours and about why she believes she is also alive for a reason.
Cummings was a stripper. She has no shame in saying it because it got her off the streets. She enjoyed the job. But it too often meant a wild lifestyle and late nights and travel that kept her from her family and three little kids who needed her.
They were just blocks away, tucked in bed. "I felt like I was going to die, and all I wanted to do was get home and spend time with my family. I was on the same street I lived on with my family. I was on one end, and they were on the other. I'm just right down the street. I didn't want to die."
The cellphone began to ring again and again, and she couldn't reach it.
Cummings ran away from home as a young teen and grew up in juvenile facilities before roaming about, homeless, asking friends for a place to sleep.
"I was just carrying my bags around, staying where I could," she said.
She got pregnant at 17 and gave up her child for adoption. At her lowest point, she had no place left to live and carried a garbage bag of clothes. A human services agency helped her. She started working through the anger from her troubled family life.
"I let it go. I realized I had to be responsible for myself. I just found peace, and it got better," she said. "I could get in trouble and get locked up or worse. Or I could live a normal life and have stability. And I wanted stability.
"I was 18. I just needed some money. So I started dancing. It was easy money. I made money every day I worked. It became my comfort zone."
She had to be tough in that kind of life. And that helped her.
The only thing that Cummings could find in the car was the hard rubber floor mat. If she could slide it under the cellphone and inch it toward her, she might be able to make a telephone call.
One car passed right away. She honked but it didn't stop. She pushed the floor mat, maneuvering it as best she could while pinned to her seat. Minutes passed, then a half hour. The phone kept ringing.
She knew it was Antoine Starks, her partner. She had met him at 19, and they had three children together, now ages 8, 5 and 7 months. She knew he was frantic, that he had to get to his factory job in Amana.
Cummings caught the phone's edge with the stiff mat and slowly worked it toward her. The calls encouraged her to not give up. She was going to survive this for her family. But she could only inch it so far, until it rested near the console on the passenger side.
An hour had passed, she figures. She fought passing out. The phone rang again. She was desperate to get it. And this is the only time her voice quivered in recounting that night.
"I had to reach for it. I had to push myself into the pole. I had to push myself far enough so I could reach the phone."
She gritted her teeth, leaned over to grab it and answered.
"I've been in an accident," she told Starks. "I'm down the street by the park. There is a pole going through my body. Call for help or I'm going to die."
She hung up and called 911.
"Please help me," she told the dispatcher. "My body's starting to shake."
Her stage name was Mercedes. She danced a lot at Lumberyard 2 in Cedar Rapids but also traveled to Waterloo and clubs in Illinois, Missouri, Nevada and Colorado.
She liked the job.
"After a while, it's just a job like any other job. I get on stage and dance. It's easy, and it's normal," she said. "I made money like anybody else. I'm a professional. It may not be the ideal profession for a lot of people, but it paid my bills."
She didn't feel exploited, and learned to stay clear of "creepy people" she could spot from a mile away. A lot of "normal people" were just coming in for parties or a night out.
Just weeks before the accident, though, she began to have thoughts of quitting.
"But my boys were getting older," she said. "I didn't want them to see me lead that lifestyle. I just needed to explore other avenues."
She was going to start a business with another woman, renting out space for events, and had been at a meeting about it the night she tried to drive home and never got there.
When Capt. Craig Dirks of the Cedar Rapids Fire Department got to the scene, he realized he was facing a "once-in-a-career incident," an accident police say is still under investigation.
Compounding the oddity of the impalement was what Dirks noticed right away. The car didn't even look damaged, other than the pole going through the grill. The woman inside was conscious and alert and appeared steady.
They knew they had more time. Somehow the pole had missed nearby major arteries, and there wasn't much blood loss, aided by the cold temperatures. A police officer gave her bear hugs to warm her up, until blankets were piled on.
Rescue workers knew they would have to cut the pole in front of her and in back and let surgeons take out the remaining few feet in the hospital, he said. They first cut off the car's top and doors and dismantled her seat.
"I was trying to make light of the situation," Cummings said when a frantic Starks arrived. "I'm sorry I crashed your car," she told him.
"I always wanted a drop top," Starks said.
When rescue workers finally cut the pole with large shears and pulled it from the back seat, clinging to the hollow opening was the ball-shaped head of Cummings' femur.
After more than an hour had passed, her hands were literally pried from the steering wheel because she had gripped it so hard, imagining the pole would pierce her more. At University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, two surgeries extracted the pole and made initial repairs of her pelvis.
Cummings discovered just how lucky and unlucky she had been.
The pole had missed major arteries but ripped out her right hip joint, broke apart her pelvis and caused severe nerve damage that has left her with paralysis of her right leg, said Stan Mathew, medical director at St. Luke's Hospital's rehabilitation unit in Cedar Rapids, where Cummings began doing three hours of physical therapy every day.
The nerves may repair themselves, or she may never have use of her leg again. First, doctors need to finish rebuilding her pelvis and perform a hip replacement, which could take more than a year.
"It's going to be a long-term solution," he said. "But she is determined to get back to her family and get back to her children."
Other healing took place, too. A new focus emerged in her suffering.
"Stuff has always happened in my life, kind of off-beat," Cummings said from her hospital bed a couple of days before returning home March 27. "But I've just always been a fighter, just always had to fight for everything."
Her father saw her for the first time in more than a decade while she was recovering. And her mother, Tania Drinkwater, stood at her side, admiring her grit.
"I only saw her cry in pain once," she said. "There is no feeling sorry for herself. She understands, no matter what, nobody deserves this kind of tragedy."
Something else happened, too, in those long hospital days.
"She's always been either very courageous or foolhardy. It's in her nature," Drinkwater said. "So right away when she said she had to make changes, that was a good thing."
The future for Cummings is difficult, and she will not sugarcoat it. She can't take care of her children right now. Starks has taken six weeks of medical leave to care for her at home, rising in the middle of the night to help her to her portable toilet, bathing her in her bed.
Friends come over now and watch her struggle in her wheelchair.
"They look sad. And it makes me sad," Cummings said.
She looks at old photos and sees herself always "dressed to impress," and "so confident and pretty" and wishes she could be normal again.
Then there is financial survival, paying rent, raising children. She has health insurance and gets some disability payments, but they figure the bills will be high.
Sure, she wishes the many men who tossed her money to take off her clothes would help her out: "Where are they now? I wish I had their numbers," she joked. But she said she refuses to go to dark places, instead focusing on what good has come of it.
She marvels at the people who have already given money to a GoFundMe account set up for her, and at others who have reached out in support.
"I have so many (Facebook) friend requests. I probably have 100 friend requests. There are people I don't even know that care," she said. "So I just have a lot of motivation.
"It's changed my whole life. I want to spend time with my kids, maybe work from home, be like a soccer mom, you know? I guess the life I used to have was kind of wild and unstable. Now I just want to be there for my kids. I hug everyone a lot more because I almost lost them.
"It happened for a reason, a lesson to learn in life to slow down. So now I gotta start from scratch. I got to rely on my family to help me get through this. I just want to be there for them when I get better."
