Lucky to be alive

MAT-SU — Even as she sat in her totaled Jeep Grand Cherokee, Erin Kruse had no idea how her life was about to change.

“My first thought, other than, ‘Erin, breathe. Erin breathe,’ was, ‘This isn’t so bad,’ Kruse said. “’I am alert and oriented, talking and breathing and everything is cool. Maybe I could walk away from this.’”

Far from being able to walk away, Kruse, for the last two months, hasn’t been able to walk at all. Her right leg was crushed in the accident. Doctors have so far advised against putting any weight on it.

Until this past week when she was transferred to St. Elias Specialty Hospital in Anchorage, where she was sent for the tail end of her recovery, Kruse was at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage, where she’s been in and out of surgery.

Kruse, 50, was driving home from work Feb. 23 when a Subaru Forester entered her lane and the two vehicles collided. A third vehicle, a 1999 Mercury Tracer driven by Gabriela Oldie, 18, of Wasilla, then rear-ended the Subaru. The Subaru’s driver, Jennifer VanAusdal, 33, by all accounts a beloved Wasilla High School teacher, eventually succumbed to injuries received in the collision. Everyone was wearing seatbelts, Alaska State Troopers report.

Not once Friday, as she recalled that night more than two months ago, did Kruse put any blame on the other driver. But the collision, she said, was her worst fear coming true.

“These two years [after] we moved out to Houston my greatest fear was having a head-on collision,” Kruse said. She would always try to drive as close to the right-hand edge of the road as she could.

“I came around the corner and the car was in the other lane, came right over the line,” she said. “There was nothing I could do. Nothing. I just smashed, crashed.”

Dennis VanAusdal, Jennifer’s husband, said his whole family was in the car that night. His two boys, Zachary, who is just shy of his 12th birthday, and Timothy, 10, were hospitalized, one at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, the other, eventually, with his mother in Anchorage.

He said his younger boy in the past few weeks has started walking with the help of a walking cast. His older boy is recovering as well. His hope, VanAusdal said, is that by the end of the summer his family will be back to normal. Or as normal as it can be without Jennifer.

Emotionally, the family is recovering as well. VanAusdal said they talk about the accident a lot. He tries to keep communications open.

But there’s a hard road ahead.

“I think Mother’s Day might be a little hard,” he said Friday.

Kruse is optimistic she’ll be out of the hospital by the end of the month. Her sister-in-law, Cindy Hansen, is planning a summer fundraiser to help pay her skyrocketing medical bills. Kruse hopes she can attend.

“This has been a really, really difficult time for me. But I don’t know, you know? It’s all attitude,” Kruse said. “All the doctors say, ‘You have a good attitude, you’re going to be fine.’”

Hansen is less optimistic.

“I’m worried about her being able to walk and about her not having the same quality of life as she had before, and I don’t think that she realizes that,” Hansen said, adding Kruse’s optimism could help in her recovery. “I really want her to be optimistic about everything. And who says? Maybe I might be wrong.”

She said it’s been a rough year for her sister-in-law. Three weeks before the accident, Kruse’s husband, Tim Kruse, died of lung cancer. He’d battled the disease since the summer and got his wish of surviving through another Christmas, but died Jan. 30.

Hansen said the ordeal of his death and her accident has been hard on Kruse’s three grown kids.

“They spent a lot of time with their dad at the hospital and then their mom went in three weeks later,” Hansen said

When her husband got sick, Kruse said they were in the middle of building their home in Houston. People came out of the woodwork to help get the place finished.

“We would have these wonderful work parties during the summer where bunches of friends and family would come from all over,” Kruse said.

Those friends and family have been stopping by the hospital as well. That, coupled with keeping her eye on the light at the end of the tunnel, has gotten her through her hospital stay.

VanAusdal said friends and family have also helped him, almost from the start as he made calls driving from the accident scene to Mat-Su Regional where Jennifer was taken initially.

“Immediately people came to help support me,” he said.

When Jennifer was flown to Anchorage, VanAusdal said his brother stayed with his younger son and VanAusdal went to Anchorage.

“It was an overwhelming experience, but at the same time it was very calm and peaceful experience to be able to be there with Jen as she passed,” VanAusdal said.

The night of the accident, when Jennifer was late coming home, VanAusdal said he went looking for her and braced for the worst. In a way, he said, he was blessed to have prepared himself mentally to see the accident. Since then, he’s reviewed that night many times. He said when he arrived his younger son was choking on food he’d been eating. He thought, at first, that the accident had caused the boy to choke.

His sons don’t remember anything about the accident and he can’t prove it, but VanAusdal said he now thinks the accident and the choking might have happened in reverse order.

“Probably, Tim was choking before the wreck and she turned to look and veered over,” VanAusdal said.

Hansen said she takes a lesson away from her sister-in-law’s accident. A split-second on the highway can change many lives forever. She urges people to “allow extra time, wear your seatbelt and be cautious.”

Kruse hopes to return to work when she’s out of the hospital. She was a home health care nurse’s assistant and said she never minded driving from Houston to Palmer if it meant there was a patient who needed her.

Having realized her worst fear, will she be ready mentally to handle that commute again?

“There are so many flowers and crosses and tributes where accidents have happened going up and down that highway,” Kruse said. “What can I say? But life does go on, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to handle it.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiers-man.com or 352-2270.