Lily Whelan’s Long Road To Recovery

A horrific accident, a broken body, and a remarkable comeback

A DyeStat story by Dave Devine

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The nights were the worst.

That’s when the doubts and fears crept from the edges of the hospital ICU room, crowding out hope and optimism. When nothing seemed clear, no outcomes promised. When the uncertain prognosis and haunting brain images merged with chirping sensors and beeping monitors to form a chorus of despair. Those interminable hours after the accident when Lily Whelan still lay in a coma, and her father, Bob, unfurled his frame each evening on a converted sofa bed and attempted to salvage a few hours of sleep.

Crowded against a sixth-floor window overlooking Denver, he would adjust his bedding, shift positions, and contemplate the bustling city below. He’d listen to sirens. Follow traffic patterns. Watch distant airplanes climb or descend on their designated routes. He would try to still a mind racing through a million possibilities.

For years, ever since his wife passed away, it had been just Bob and Lily. Father and daughter. The anesthesiologist and the high school runner. An inseparable team. And here they were again, just the two of them in this room, only now Bob wondered how much of Lily was actually there.

And he felt helpless — despite all his medical training — to assist his broken daughter. He could only watch as Lily, the girl he’d playfully nicknamed “Mowgli” or “Little Britches” from The Jungle Book movie, convulsed and shuddered under a tangle of wires. Her arms and legs, which only days earlier had carried her to a state track meet podium, now twitching randomly, uncontrollably.

There was no way of knowing how all of this would turn out. In those dark hours, sleepless and six stories above Denver, there were only questions:

Will she ever really wake up? Will she walk again? Will she speak?

Will I ever get my sweet Lily back?

Life Flight 

It should have been the conclusion to a celebratory week.

On June 26, 2021, the track and field team from Battle Mountain High in Edwards, Colo., had wrapped up a successful Colorado 4A state meet. The event, typically contested in late May, had been pushed deeper into the summer by COVID delays. Coaches and athletes were eager for a well-earned break.

Lily, then a sophomore, had taken 14th in the 4A 1,600 meters and run a leg on Battle Mountain’s runner-up 4x800 relay. It had been a great, positive weekend, with summer looming. As soon as the meet was over Lily departed with a teammate — ninth-grader Presley Smith — and Smith’s family for a camping trip to Lake Powell, the massive reservoir that straddles the border of Utah and Arizona.

On Wednesday, June 30, while returning from the lake, a car in which Lily and five others were traveling was involved in a rollover accident. Addison Smith, Presley’s older sister and a 2019 graduate of Battle Mountain, died at the scene. Both Lily and Presley were badly injured, with Lily clinging to life on the roadside. She was only saved, according to Bob, by another friend at the accident scene who administered CPR until emergency responders arrived.

The two teammates were then airlifted from the crash site to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Presley’s injuries were significant, eventually requiring reconstructive surgery. Lily’s prognosis was significantly bleaker. She had suffered a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), a fractured femur, a fractured pelvis, broken ribs, a broken scapula, a tension pneumothorax in her lungs, and a host of complications impacting almost every system in her body. 

Hundreds of miles away, Dr. Bob Whelan received the phone call every parent fears: 

Lily has been badly hurt in an accident. She’s being life-flighted to Grand Junction.

Coming Together

Battle Mountain’s head cross country and track and field coach, Rob Parish, received that terrible call, too.

Like his athletes, he’d been eager for summer to start after the protracted outdoor season. When news of the accident reached him, he was vacationing with his wife, children, and parents in Huntington Beach, Calif. 

The coach debated abandoning the trip and returning home immediately, but realized there was little he could accomplish back in Edwards. Instead, he received daily updates and then gathered his team as soon as he was back for the start of Battle Mountain’s summer practices.

Located just off Interstate 70 and nestled along the Eagle River, the high school sits at an elevation 7,500 feet, not far from the Vail ski resort. 

It’s a relatively small high school — “just 900 kids at a public school in the mountains of Colorado,” Parish says — but the team has cemented a reputation as a cross country power in the highly competitive Centennial State prep scene. The Huskies have won five 4A state titles (3 girls, 2 boys), been runners-up six times, and — competing as Vail Valley Running Club — the girls claimed third place at the 2017 Nike Cross Nationals and ninth place in 2018.

Most of Parish’s runners compete for the school’s Nordic ski team in the winter, but some of his biggest distance stars have come over from other sports, drawn by the culture, inclusiveness and success of the Huskies program.

“We’ve made a living on second- and third-choice kids,” Parish says.

Lily, however, was not one of those kids.

When she entered Battle Mountain as a ninth grader she was already a gifted and committed runner.

“She was good from the beginning,” Parish recalls. “It didn’t take her long to make our top seven — of a really good team.”

By the end of her first cross country season, Lily had scaled the roster to become the fifth runner on a Husky squad that took second to Niwot at the Colorado 4A state meet. At the subsequent NXR Southwest Regional, she again held down the five-spot for a Vail Valley club that battled to sixth in the championship race. 

Lily’s success in the sport wasn’t entirely unexpected and at least some of her prowess might be attributed to good genetics. Before his career as an anesthesiologist, Bob Whelan starred at the University of Kentucky, where he was the first Wildcat to break four minutes in the mile and won the 1990 NCAA indoor mile title. When Lily showed promise as a young runner, it was Bob who helped guide her until she joined the Battle Mountain team in the fall of 2019.

Two years later, it was that same Battle Mountain team, still reeling, that gathered at practice to console one another as Lily lay unresponsive in the hospital and Bob held vigil at her bedside.

“Everyone was just very sad, shocked and hurt,” recalls Milaina Almonte, one of Lily’s closest friends. “We all missed her a lot.”

Parish tried to place the emphasis on support and connection.

“It was just good to get together with the team,” he says. “We still ran, did our trail runs and stuff, but the focus was on being together.”

The team received a lift when Presley Smith began returning to practice much earlier than anyone expected. Unable, at first, to join the team on runs, Presley would be there when the girls set off and returned, often hiking in between. Her resilience delivered a measure of healing to the Battle Mountain team, but also made their remaining teammate’s absence all the more apparent.

“It was just a really tough summer,” Parish says. “A hard start to the season.”

Not Without Hope

The day after the accident, Lily endured a lengthy, difficult surgery to repair her fractured pelvis and femur. And then the treatment team at Denver Children’s Hospital — where Lily had been transferred after Grand Junction — turned their attention to the area of greatest concern: 

Lily’s traumatically injured brain. 

“For three days,” Bob remembers, “they really didn’t know what was going on inside her head. They wanted to get an MRI so they could figure out what was happening, and make some decisions about her prognosis.”

The brain scan was ordered for Saturday; Bob understood that at least part of the impetus for the MRI was because the treatment team was weighing a conversation about withdrawal of care.

The images that came back were shattering.

The MRI suggested extensive injury throughout Lily’s entire brain. Almost no area was left untouched by the massive energy she’d absorbed in the crash.

“When I saw those pictures,” Bob says, “I really never thought she would walk again. I thought, at best, Lily would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I truly expected (the team) to come and talk to me about withdrawing care.”

By then, Bob had been joined at the hospital by a friend named Chris Sneed, a neurosurgeon from Indiana. They reviewed the MRI results together. And then Sneed offered a carefully worded assessment that Bob has never forgotten.

“Chris said, ‘Listen, if this was my patient and I was talking to family, I would not describe these pictures as being without hope.’”

Bob clung to those words like a life raft. 

Finding refuge in his friend’s guarded optimism: Not without hope. 

He would need all that optimism in the days ahead.

For three weeks, Lily was largely unresponsive. Her body was healing, she was reaching benchmarks like reduced sedation and decreased ventilator support — progress Bob attributed to the workouts Parish routinely served up — but she was exhibiting few signs of actual consciousness. Bob spent hours by her bedside, asking Lily to squeeze his hand or open her eyes, and would receive nothing in return.

Eventually, she began to show varying signs of wakefulness, but would still slip in and out of coma as fatigue overtook her body. Bob’s life revolved around the rhythms of the hospital. He marked time with familiar routines: breakfast in a courtyard, greeting staff at the front desk, riding elevators, sitting with Lily.

Some days there were minor steps forward, other days regression or decline. 

She started opening her eyes when asked. Looking in a certain direction. But then she had to battle a fever. Fight off a MRSA infection. She could sit in a chair with support, but she couldn’t stabilize her head.

She could squeeze a finger with intention.

“That’s when I knew,” Bob says, “that things were awake inside — that the lights might actually come back on.”

Each evening, whether Lily was wakeful or not, he would gently stroke her hair, give her a kiss on the forehead — Goodnight, Little Britches — and continue his fitful watch on the sofa by the window.

It would be 82 days before they could leave.

Tears on the Line

Looking back now, Parish realizes he might have underestimated how long it would take his team to recover from the trauma of teammates having been in an accident. The first big meet of the 2021 cross country season was Battle Mountain’s own Husky Invitational on Aug. 28. He recalls jogging to the start line to speak with his girls before the gun went off.

“It was just my usual pre-race stuff,” he says, “but I got there, and they were all crying.”

Many of the top runners on the team were juniors, just as Lily would have been if she hadn’t been hurt.

“It just worked out that this team grew up together,” Parish says. “They were young and good early, and we didn’t have a lot of older runners, so they just kind of grew together. I’m sure it struck all of them, when we were about to race, that we didn’t have Lily…she wasn’t on the starting line.”

Back at running camp, the team had started recording workouts and short videos to send to Lily in the hospital. As her condition improved, Lily began responding with videos of her own.

“That was really positive for them,” Parish says, “to see her again, and have that connection.”

Another turning point for the Huskies — and for Lily — came after an early season invite in Colorado Springs, when some of the runners stayed an extra night and visited Lily in the hospital the next morning.

“I remember that really well,” says her friend, Milaina. “I was so excited to finally see Lily.”

The visitors crowded around Lily’s bed, marveled at her progress, laughed and joked and told stories. They snapped photos and promised to send updates. And they smuggled in two of Lily’s favorite foods — Boba tea and mac-and-cheese from Panera — both of which Lily devoured after a steady diet of hospital food.

Heartened by the visit, Lily’s friends gradually found themselves able to focus on competition again.

And so did their coach.

“It was honestly more challenging for me than I expected,” Parish says. “This other girl, that’s still part of our team, was fighting for her life, and here I’m trying to get our team to win a silly high school race. It just seemed kind of trivial.”

Finding Memories

There were so many things Lily had to re-learn.

She had to learn how to swallow again. How to speak. How to hold objects, first with erratic, ungainly gross motor skills, and then with increasingly precise fine motor skills. 

A beach ball. A pillow. A toothbrush. A fork.

A pen.

She had to learn how to write again.

Beginning with that most familiar of words — her own name. Four letters scratched out in the penmanship of a toddler.

These were things she mostly mimicked. Copied or repeated back. A simple word, followed by a gesture toward an item in the room. 

“Lamp,” Bob might say, and point to the lamp. “Your turn…”

And then he’d strain to hear Lily whisper-speak: “Lamp.”

The deeper she and Bob ventured into recovery, the more insight Bob gained into how completely her brain had been impacted by the accident.

“The hardest day of the entire 82 days was clearly the day we looked at her MRI,” he says now. “That’s a day that still — it’s hard to wrap my arms around that one. But the second hardest day is the one when Lily and I were talking, and I asked her if she remembered who I was, and she didn’t know.”

Lily’s whole world had become Room 652.

It was as if her life started anew there — from scratch — and slowly, sometimes glacially, she began to branch outward.

“It sunk in for me that everything was erased,” Bob says. “Or at least, the parts of her brain that were responsible for recalling memories were no longer connected to the parts of her brain that stored the memories. All those pathways — all those neural tracks — they were all broken. And the brain just kind of figured out how to rewire itself.”

Eventually, the milestones started to come more rapidly.

One afternoon Bob went to a nearby Target store and picked up a stack of children’s books and kindergarten workbooks. Together, he and Lily began reading simple directions, attempting addition, three-letter words, practicing penmanship, drawing shapes. Their daily “school work” — harder, at times, than the physical therapy she was also completing — seemed to wake up other parts of Lily’s brain. She began accessing memories from before the accident. Not many, at first, but some. Finding them in the welter of broken connections the crash had created in her head.

Deep into August, Lily continued stacking one good day on top of another. But even as some memories returned, she struggled to hold onto the days that were actually occurring. More than a year later, she remembers very little from the hospital. 

“It’s all just scattered,” Lily says.

Bits and pieces come back, snapshots of a life reassembled.

A toothbrush tumbling from her grasp. The annoyance of those rudimentary workbooks. Forming letters with a shaky marker. Her confusion, at the time, about why she couldn’t use a fork, why her right hand didn’t seem to work. Her dad making her sit on her left hand, so she’d have to use her right again.

She definitely remembers Bob’s nudges, his challenges.

His constant, reassuring presence.

But if most of her hospital memories are hazy, there’s one phrase from those days that remains vivid, even now. It came during an impasse around inserting a camera probe through Lily’s nose to examine her vocal cords. By then, Lily had grown weary of tubes being threaded through her nostrils, particularly her nasogastric feeding tube, which she regularly yanked out. Drawing the line at this latest imposition, she refused to allow her behavioral health specialist to insert the camera.

After a great deal of back and forth, the specialist said, firmly, “Lily…you can do hard things.”

Bob was so struck by the power of the phrase he asked Lily to repeat it aloud herself. 

Lily, you can do hard things.

After echoing the words, Lily nodded her consent and accepted the camera probe, coughing and gagging through the entire, uncomfortable procedure. Shortly after, the phrase went up on the whiteboard in Lily’s hospital room. 

I Can Do Hard Things

She was given a T-shirt with the words silk-screened on front. A Battle Mountain teammate had rubber bracelets made with the saying, selling them to raise money for the Whelans. Runners wore them on their wrists or around their water bottles, until it became their catchphrase, too. 

For Lily, the words became a mantra. An incantation as she moved through one of the final, most arduous phases of rehabilitation before she could be discharged:

Learning to walk again.

It was a painstaking process, advancing from measured shuffling to wincing, six-inch steps. First across her hospital room, then down a hallway. The physical therapy room, and then a courtyard. Each time, the space growing larger, the horizon more distant. 

The first time she was able to cover a stretch that wasn’t limited by the walls of her room, she turned to her father and said she would never return to her wheelchair again. At that, Bob — who was usually the one pushing, encouraging, nudging — remembers thinking, Whoa, slow down here, that was only one day.

“But,” he says, “she never went back to it.”  

On Sept. 22, 2021, Lily and Bob were finally able to leave Denver Children’s Hospital.

As a condition of her discharge she was deemed “hand assist,” which meant she was not allowed to stand and walk across a room unless she was near a wall on which she could place her hand for stability and balance.

“If she walked across an open room, someone had to be there to hold her,” Bob says. “That’s where she’s came from.”

First Strides

It began, as so many things did after the accident, quietly.

With small efforts. Far from the public eye.

Just Bob and Lily, as it had been for so many days in the hospital.

After a successful return to school in late September, an operation to remove remaining surgical hardware from her pelvis in December, and Lily’s continued perseverance with her independent walking, they started to try running last spring.

Bob took Lily to a cluster of turf soccer fields near their home, choosing the site for its smooth and predictable surface. Fewer chances for Lily to fall. There, Bob encouraged her to run the long sidelines, walk the short segments behind the goals. 

One lap, and then maybe two.

“That’s all she could do,” Bob says. “Her heart rate would go to 180, just jogging at 15-minute mile pace.”

Many days, Bob would shuffle alongside Lily, or just behind her. Cheering and encouraging. The former sub-four miler, jogging with his hobbled daughter. One more straightaway.

“We would walk and run,” Lily says. “Walk and run. And we’d do enough of it until there were days I didn’t want to go back the next day, but he’d always encourage me to do that.”

Eventually, those soccer field sessions with Bob flipped a switch in Lily she thought might not come back on.

“I’ve always been competitive,” she says, “and I didn’t know if I still would be after my accident, but there would be times when I would race him. And I don’t know what I was doing, because it was hard for me to even run…hard for me to walk. But I just thought to myself, ‘You can beat him.’”

She’d beaten so many other things by that point — the odds, the expectations, all the cards stacked against her — why not her dad, too, in these soccer field strides?

It was one more step in her return.

That spring she was taking 75  percent of the junior course load and managing straight A’s. She was enrolled in college-level biology. She had refused to use the school elevators, taking only the stairs. A few months earlier she had “graduated” from the caregivers Bob had hired to assist her — much earlier than expected. And in March, around the time she started jogging on those soccer fields, Lily got her driver’s license to go with the hand-me-down F-150 pickup she’d been promised from Bob.

All of it hints at a quality that Parish noticed in Lily well before the accident, but even more so in the months after.

“She doesn’t make excuses for herself,” he says. “Not just from a running standpoint, but from a return-to-life standpoint, everybody has made excuses for her, and there are plenty of excuses available, but she’s chosen not to take any of them for herself.”

That tenacity doesn’t mean that Lily has somehow moved past, or recovered from, the aftermath of the accident.

The traumatic brain injury continues to impact every aspect of Lily’s life. Certain parts of school remain exceptionally challenging. Lily still can’t access some of her memories. She forgets things, struggles to regulate her emotions at times. She has difficulty reading and interpreting social signals.

All of which are common, long-term effects of a severe TBI. 

“We take for granted so much of what we learn from the time we’re 1-year-old to the time we’re 17,” Bob says. “But all of Lily’s social IQ was erased as well. And it took me a long time to appreciate how important that is.”

It made returning to the people who know Lily best — her friends on the cross country and track teams — an essential part of her continued healing.

So, at the end of her junior year, when Lily shared with Parish her hope to rejoin the team for the 2022 season, the coach didn’t know what to expect, but he welcomed her back with open arms. And on the first day of optional summer practice, when Parish pulled into the school to begin setting up, he found a familiar blue Ford pickup waiting in the parking lot.

“I went up a little bit early,” he says, “planning to be there before everybody, but Lily was already there.”

Chasing Lily

These days, speed workouts are the hardest.

The sessions when the Huskies turn over the legs and hit the top gears. That’s when Lily sometimes feels like she’s chasing a ghost. A memory of the runner she used to be.

It’s when she is most aware of the changes. The shift in her gait. The foot that angles inward. The inability to find that additional gear. 

“It’s definitely weird for me to not be able to run as fast as I used to,” she says. “I’m trying to run faster, and it’s not like I’m tired, it’s that I can’t. My feet don’t turn over fast enough…that’s definitely strange.”

She still completes daily physical therapy, grinding through squats, box jumps, single leg drills, all in the service of persuading latent motor tracks and misfiring muscles to wake back up. Her body, Lily says, remembers being fast. Being able to run 32-second 200’s. But that same body will only allow her to run 40 seconds now.

It’s like Lily chasing Lily.

She’ll glance at times she ran her freshman or sophomore year and be amazed.

How could I have ever done that? How can I get back?

“The thing is,” Parish points out, “her whole kinetic chain has changed; she has metal in her back and legs. Her gait has changed, and her hips are off — I say that because it’s not like she’s had a stress fracture or something, and simply wasn’t able to run for a while. She’s had to learn how to run, in a totally different way.”

One positive: distance runs still feel good.

Lily says she can still go as far as she used to, even if she lacks some of the balance she had before the accident. On trails, she struggles to feel the ground underfoot the way other runners do. She’s not able to make the quick adjustments mid-stride that used to be second nature.

But if she does stumble on a run, or if there’s a nagging ache in her hip or knee that flares up, her old friend Milaina is typically there to help. The two have been largely inseparable since freshman year, when Parish dubbed the pair “Milli Vanilli,” a nod to an abbreviation of Milaina’s first name and Lily’s fair skin and blonde hair. For two years, they were close competitors and avid training partners, often separated by a mere handful of seconds in races.  

This season, Milaina is the top runner on Battle Mountain’s girls team. She’s coming off a ninth-place finish at the 4A state championship, eager to lead the Huskies into the NXR Southwest championship race in Arizona. She’d have every reason to focus on her own training, but she’s refused to leave her training partner behind.

“When I got back to running,” Lily recalls, “it was really hard for me, but Milaina would always check on me and make sure I was okay. She’d slow down and stay with me. She’s been a huge part of me being able to run again.” 

But, Lily says, even Milaina can’t help her sprint faster. It’s one more thing in Lily’s life that seems to exist in two spaces: The before and the after.

Before the accident. After the accident.

High school before; high school after. Personal bests before; personal bests after.

How her body felt running before, how her body felt after. 

How it feels now.

“It’s definitely been frustrating,” she acknowledges. “But everyone told me that over time it would get better. It was hard for me to believe that, but it has gotten better. I’m not where I was, but I’m better than when I started.”

Parish has seen all of that improvement. He’s sometimes at a loss for words to describe Lily’s remarkable return.

“It’s all of the adjectives you could use — amazing, astonishing, inspiring…what else? I think all of us were preparing for the worst, that she was not going to make it. Or if she was going to be around, that she’d have such physical and mental injuries that she was going to be a shell of herself.”

Instead, Lily — who previously ran in the mid-18s for 5,000 meters at altitude — has worked her way back to 21:11 this fall. She’s raced in seven invitationals, recording two marks that qualified her for a varsity letter.

“That’s not just us doing her a solid,” Parish emphasizes. “She’s earned the right to be on our post-season team, from a competitive standpoint. For her to be able to run 21 minutes? It’s such a gift.”

And running hasn’t been the only highlight for Lily this fall. 

A few weeks ago, she was voted homecoming queen by the Battle Mountain student body. In early November she received her first college acceptance — to the University of Kentucky. And although she has other applications out, and Bob has encouraged her to wait until she hears from the remaining schools, she’s fairly certain she knows where she’ll attend. If all continues to go well, next summer she’ll depart for college at Bob’s alma mater. 

It’s an outcome that no one could have predicted, even six months ago.  

On November 19, this coming Saturday, Lily will toe the line at the NXR Southwest Regional at Coyote Run Golf Course in Mesa, Ariz. LIVE WEBCAST INFO

It’s a meet she’s been trying to return to since freshman year, when she placed 113th as the fifth runner for Battle Mountain’s Vail Valley club in the championship race. It was, she said, her favorite race she’d ever run. Keenly aware of Battle Mountain’s history of qualifying for the NXN Championship in Portland, she hoped to someday contribute to that legacy. But the meet was cancelled due to COVID when Lily was a sophomore, and she missed her entire junior year of running after the accident.

This time she’ll race the Girls Small School Open race. It’s not the championship section she might have once imagined, but she and everyone else in the Battle Mountain community know how far she’s come, how hard she’s worked, simply to reach the starting line.

“Just for her to be able to participate in a cross country season—” Parish says, before trailing off, taking a moment to appreciate the enormity of it all. “For her to do the things we do, and to participate as an athlete, it really is tremendous.”

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