People skydive. They bungee jump. Steve Irwin dangles his baby in front of a 15-foot crocodile. Sure, these thrill-seeking, adrenaline junkies are daring, but have they ever braved Southern California’s 405 Freeway during rush hour?
Though it’s tough to pin down when rush hour actually is on California freeways, the 405 is easy. It’s always one of the state’s busiest thoroughfares. Rare is the day when you can make a commute along the famed freeway without getting absorbed into an endless sea of brake lights—your eyes growing heavy from the clouds of emissions, your gas mileage bottoming out to all time lows.
The starting and stopping is enough to land some people in a straight jacket, but yet the 405 remains—the purest evil any motorist should ever have the misfortune of traversing.
Amber Stachowski, an integral member of the 2003 World and Pan Am water polo champions, found this out the hard way.
DESTINATION: DINNER
It seemed to be a typical Sunday evening. Amber and her teammates Thalia Munro and Maureen Flanagan had lounged around much of the day and were ready for a good dinner to close out the weekend. But the effort it would have taken to prepare something themselves seemed an awful hassle, so the trio opted to drive to UCLA to partake of the Sunday “dorm dinner” where they could get the free food that being Bruins entitled them to.
So they took to the 405, not knowing what the diabolic highway had in store. Driving Thalia’s Volkswagen beetle in the fast lane—Amber resting her head against the window in the front passenger seat, and Maureen belted up in the back—traffic started to come to a grinding halt. Thalia let off of the gas and began braking.
Behind them, the driver of a Ford Taurus (the automobile industry’s answer to the battering ram) was busy picking something up off of his floor, oblivious to the sudden stop ahead. Thalia’s momentum had stopped. In her rear view mirror, she could see the distracted driver speeding towards her bumper. She braced herself against the steering wheel. Also seeing the car out of the rear window, Maureen positioned herself as best as she could to absorb the impact in the already cramped backseat of the VW. Amber sat unaware against the window.
Crash.
The speeding Taurus met their bumper going nearly 45 miles per hour. Thalia, who was hunched over the steering wheel, bracing for the crash, was shaken but okay. Maureen didn’t have far to travel before hitting the back of Amber’s seat. Amber’s head was flung forward into the dashboard. No airbags deployed. Instead, a built-in handle above the glove box was there to meet her brow, scraping skin and drawing blood from the bridge of her nose.
The deafening collision sent glass and fiberglass flying in every direction. Thalia’s VW was sent careening into the stopped car ahead.
Crash.
The three girls were sent flying backward as the VW collided with the rear bumper of the Chevy Tahoe stopped ahead, despite Thalia’s better efforts to avoid it.
Silence.
The girls tried their best to get their bearings about them while the driver who had hit them came out of his car, unharmed, ranting about how it wasn’t his fault because someone had tried to cut him off. No questions about the girls’ well being, no admissions of responsibility. Such is the 405.
THE BURDEN OF BLUR
That was an odd night for Amber. With a trip to team doctor Larry Drum scheduled for the next morning, she gathered herself and hit the sheets. It was one of the worst nights of sleep she’d ever known, going in and out of a deep sleep every 40 minutes or so. She dismissed it as adrenaline and eventually put in a few good hours.
When morning came around, Amber found herself with a massive headache. She got out of bed but nearly collapsed onto the floor from dizziness.
“I couldn’t even really see straight,” she said. “Everything was really blurry.”
She met up with the other two-thirds of her trio and went to see Dr. Drum. Amber had a bump on her head where she had slammed against the handle in the VW, but she was more concerned with something else.
“My nose burned like fire,” she said. “It hurt to touch or move and these blisters sprang up in the next few days.”
Dr. Drum concluded that Amber, a key player on both sides of the ball for Team USA, had sustained a concussion but that she would need some x-rays to determine its severity. X-rays came back normal, but she dealt with the typical concussion symptoms over the next week…headache, sleeplessness, dizzy spells, fatigue, etc. To add injury to injury, whiplash was added to the laundry list of misfortune.
She stayed out of the water for a few weeks, missing the 2003 Holiday Cup in December. She did what she could as far as workouts were concerned, but even light swimming proved to be a challenge for the 2003 World Championship gold medalist. Vomiting wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for a while, but she set herself on pushing through it.
“I’ve sort of learned my whole life to work through pain because it makes you stronger,” Amber said. “But this was different.”
In early January, she returned to the pool for regular practices, but a week before Team USA’s trip to Italy on the 26th, she suffered a relapse.
“I was guarding Ellen Estes and it was full contact,” she said. “She shot and followed through and hit me on the head.”
Amber started to feel dizzy, with her skin standing on edge. Her forehead swelled, again, she pushed through it. That night, a massive headache set in.
“I felt like I was back at square one all of the sudden.”
She still took the trip to Italy, engaging in some light dry-land training, but she still felt a bit “off.” After a few bouts with nausea in Holland (the second leg of the team’s European trip), it was time to get back on the plane. This time, things got scary.
“On the trip back, I got another really bad headache, then I got nauseous, then I got really hot,” said the 6’1”, 21-year-old Rancho Santa Margarita (Calif.) native. “I felt like I was going to throw up. My throat got really dry so I decided I should go and ask for some water. I was standing there drinking it near the galley and that’s when I blacked out.”
THE SPECTATOR DILEMMA
Two months after the accident, she was suffering from what her doctors called post-concussion syndrome.
“Being a spectator has just been horrible for me,” she said. “These girls are like my family and I see them in there working hard to get better and I just have to watch. I feel what they feel and it’s just difficult knowing that they’re doing so much and I can’t do anything.”
If Stachowski’s determination holds up, as it always has, she’ll be back in the pool trading elbows with the best of them in no time. But her injury is surely not one to be rushed. Looming large in the back of Amber’s mind is the fact that there are 14 other players getting better as the June 1 Olympic roster announcement is approaching.
“I don’t want to rush it, but at the same time I want to get back in there.”
