Hailey's Story

“I really didn’t have a choice,” Hailey Fox told the audience about her recovery.

“But I wouldn’t be here today without blood donors like you.”

The circumstances that put her on the Partners in Life stage involved a little mystery and a lot of hard facts.

Maybe her foot slipped, or she lost her grip, or the rope swing broke that August night in 2003 – she does-n’t really know. What’s clear is that the 25-foot fall onto the rocky creek bed in Sequim left her with five crushed vertebrae, punctured lungs, a lacerated liver, a fractured skull, several broken ribs and temporary brain damage. After four days in a coma, she awakened in Seattle’s Harborview Hospital, where surgeons inserted titanium rods to hold her spine together.

She also needed blood. The damage to Fox’s liver caused massive internal bleeding. “I wasn’t going to make it if I didn’t get some blood transfusions,” she explains. Thanks to Puget Sound Blood Center donors, Harborview had the four units of blood she needed.

After 10 days, she was transferred to Children’s Hospital where she spent a month paralyzed from the waist down. Fortunately, verbal therapy brought back her cognitive abilities and physical therapy took effect. “I assumed I was paralyzed for good,” she recalls. “Then one day, I started moving one of my toes and thought, ‘I might walk again!’”

Ensuing months saw her progress from wheelchair to walker to crutches to her first steps. Not one to dwell on mishaps, Fox started tutoring learning-disabled children, made up for missed school, and graduated with her high school class.

After a summer in Argentina, she completed a second year at the University of Victoria, majoring in Spanish and Italian. In May she headed to Greece for the summer.

After all she’s been through, Hailey Fox is still on the move.