As 18-year-old Jordan Kirkpatrick was about to take his day-old motorcycle on its maiden voyage, his mom admonished him about the purchase and made him promise he would be careful.
It would be the last time he would be able to speak to her, or anyone in his family, for a couple of grueling months.
Just a few hours after he left his Greeley home last September as he was heading down a main drag in town, an oncoming car made a left turn on a light at an intersection just as Jordan approached it.
The two collided with a terrible impact.
Jordan was involved in a motorcycle crash so deadly that physicians didn’t think he would survive. He would have to be resuscitated more than once and receive countless transfusions.
Jordan’s injuries were so extensive that he would be in an induced coma for weeks. He would also be placed on an advanced form of life support where his blood was taken from his body and passed through a machine that added oxygen before being returned. And his shattered bones and internal organ damage would take months to heal.
“Words cannot describe how bad it was,” said Rebecca, Jordan’s mom. “Some of the doctors thought he might never wake up, or if he did, that he would be in a vegetative state.”
The horrible extent of her son’s injuries was not lost on Rebecca, a nurse, nor on two of her daughters – Jordan’s sisters, who are also nurses. The entire family, including two other sisters as well as his dad, stepdad, friends and Army buddies, kept vigil at Jordan’s bedside as his care team strategized on how to increase his survival odds.
Altogether, Jordan received care for 108 days at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital on the Anschutz Medical Campus. After his discharge, he spent nearly three more months at a rehab hospital for physical, occupational and speech therapy before finally going home to Greeley in late March.
“During the first few days after the accident, his chances appeared quite low and that if he did survive, even lower that he was going to have good function since the extent of his injuries were so severe,” said Dr. Steven Schauer, critical care fellow in the UCHealth Shock-Trauma Intensive Care Unit, who is also an Army lieutenant colonel and a military fellow at the CU Center for COMBAT Research.
“But a big factor in his recovery was his mom and stepdad being there every single day, asking questions and advocating for him. Even when Jordan had setbacks, they didn’t get frustrated, at least not visually, and they were always there for him.”
Jordan graduates early from high school to join the Army, but a horrific motorcycle crash cuts short his soldiering
Just 16 when he graduated early from high school in the spring 2023, Jordan turned 17 a few months later and joined the Army that September. He spent 22 weeks in infantry training at Georgia’s Fort Benning, heading back to Colorado in March 2024, where he was stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs last spring and summer.
“I liked being there. It was close, I could come home on weekends, and I got really physically fit,” Jordan said.
Last Sept. 21, Jordan was home for the weekend when he traded in his old motorcycle for a new one. He had always liked things with wheels – cars and dirt bikes – and was ready to take it out for a ride the next day, a Sunday, while his high school buddies videotaped him from an adjacent car.
The video that his friends took show a terrifying scene – Jordan hitting the car head on and him flying through the air, pieces of the motorcycle scattering through the sky like yard debris in a windstorm. He was wearing a helmet, which saved his life.
“I don’t remember the accident at all,” he said. “I know I was in shock. My friends told me I was trying to stand up, but they pushed me down to wait for help.”
The crash occurred across the street from a UCHealth freestanding Emergency Room. Jordan’s friends alerted the paramedics, who were parked next to the ER, and they resuscitated him as he was near death. He was then transported to the nearby UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland.
After getting a frantic call from Jordan’s friends, Rebecca and her husband raced first to the crash site and then to the hospital.
“I think I was in shock,” she recalled. “I jumped into the car without my shoes. But it was hours before we knew anything or how badly he was hurt.
“When I first saw him … it was horrific.”
Barely alive, Jordan needed 30 units of blood as a result of his internal bleeding. Emergency specialists knew that his injuries necessitated treatment at a Level 1 Trauma Center that could provide the highly sophisticated standard of care he would need to not only save his life, but to handle his complex and severe injuries in the coming weeks and months.
Injuries from motorcycle crash required air transfer to save life
The next day, Jordan was transferred by air to University of Colorado in Aurora. When he arrived that afternoon, his injuries included:
- A broken right femur, tibia and fibula
- A broken radius and ulna
- Broken bones in his face, skull and scalp
- Multiple injuries to his spleen, ribs and pelvis
- Severe shock from extensive internal bleeding and trauma to his brain
- Traumatic cardiac arrest, meaning that his heart had stopped.
In addition, his lungs suffered catastrophic damage. During the accident, they had been torn, pierced and bruised, causing dangerous swelling and bleeding. Jordan also developed a life-threatening condition as air accumulated in the spaces between the lungs and the chest walls.
To increase his chances of surviving, Jordan’s care team said he needed to be placed on ECMO as a last-ditch effort. ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and is a life-saving measure reserved for patients with the highest level of need.
ECMO helps between 60 and 100 UCHealth patients each year coming from Colorado and surrounding states, including Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana and Arizona.
Jordan’s physical survival was reliant upon this external oxygenation system that would support his heart and lungs and buy him the time needed so his lungs could recover and become stronger.
Mechanical breathing machines can injure the lungs of very sick patients with too much pressure as it pumps air into the lungs. By comparison, ECMO allows the lungs to rest as it mimics their function outside the body. Physicians thread tubes through a neck vein into the heart, which then pull blood out of the body. Carbon dioxide is removed from the blood through the ECMO machine and replenished with oxygen, which flows back into the heart.
Jordan was in the hospital’s cardiothoracic surgery service unit, or CTICU, being cared for by a specialized and highly trained multi-disciplinary team assembled for this very type of situation.
He was placed in deep sedation and on ECMO for 23 days.
Long and arduous recovery lies ahead for Jordan and his family
Schauer was part of Jordan’s care team after he finally gained strength and was removed from ECMO and transferred to STICU, or the UCHealth Surgical Trauma Intensive Care Unit. While he was off of ECMO, Jordan remained in very critical condition.
“He had a lot of injuries that had not been addressed yet,” Schauer said.
Jordan’s brain was swollen, and his bruised lungs kept collapsing, as they were healing from more than a dozen pneumothoraxes. This occurs when air leaks into the space between the lungs and chest walls and causes the lungs to collapse. As he slowly improved, he underwent procedures on the parts of his body in his lower extremity where his broken bones needed to be aligned with plates and pins.
“It was challenging seeing his recovery on a day-to-day basis because it was measured in inches and not miles. It was two steps forward and one step back. But then looking at it on a weekly or even monthly basis, we would say, ‘Wow, we really are making headway.’ We were fortunate to see his recovery over several months, and realized it was substantial.
“His age and his health made the difference. When you are 18, your ability to tolerate these injuries is much higher,” Schauer said.
Rebecca and Jordan’s stepdad Jeff slept in his room for the first few weeks of his convalescence, eventually moving for four months to the Fisher House on the Anschutz campus, a housing complex where military families can stay while their loved ones receive care.
At Christmas, the family brought a small tree into Jordan’s room that his sisters helped decorate, along with presents they all opened together. It was a special moment the family treasured and a reminder of how far Jordan had come since the day of the accident.
Months earlier, sisters Alyssa, 25, and Cami 17, had sat on a blanket outside at the Loveland hospital and watched their brother airlifted in a helicopter to Denver. Now, they were making routine commutes from Greeley to the hospital.
“When we heard he had a brain injury, we really didn’t know what to expect,” said Alyssa, a nurse at UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland. I had never seen anyone this beat up.”
Her sister Cami agreed.
“It was like a bad dream,” she said.
Recuperation and rehab would be a long trial for Jordan, full of setbacks, complications and challenges. But family and friends celebrated his victories: when he opened his eyes, when his chest tubes were removed, when the tracheotomy was taken out so could speak, when he began swallowing on his own.
He took pleasures in small moments: sucking on a gummy worm candy he got from a friend when he was still on a liquid diet, remembering the password to his computer, joining friends and relatives who came to pray with him.
Jordan finally left UCHealth in January for inpatient rehab at another hospital, and by the end of February, he was finally eating solid foods (a favorite was buffalo wings). On March 24, six months after his motorcycle crash, he was able to leave the rehab hospital with the assistance of a walker.
Jordan rejoins the Army and renews his plans to get his college degree
Jordan returned to his Greeley home for a few weeks before heading to a soldier rehab and recovery unit in Northern California in mid-April. His dreams of starting online college – he was supposed to start the day after the accident – were wiped out with the crash. But he hopes to pursue his education and obtain a bachelor’s degree in finance.
His long-term memory is solid, though he still has some trouble with short-term issues, but he said that is improving over time and with medication.
He credits his rigorous physical Army training as the reason he was able to make such a quick and full recovery. At 6 feet, 1 inch, Jordan was lean before the motorcycle crash when he weighed 150 pounds. He dropped down to just 92 pounds but has since rebounded to 120. Along with his military background, he credits his faith in helping him survive and recover.
“100%, it was about being in the Army and having Jesus by my side. If I wasn’t in as good a shape as I was, then I probably wouldn’t have survived,” Jordan said.
“There were times when we talked to the doctors and they said what a miracle it was that he was doing so well, and how rare his recovery was,” Rebecca said.
She also recalled a conversation that she and Jordan had shortly before he left on his ill-fated ride that autumn day.
“On the morning of the accident, he had some friends over, and I saw that stupid motorcycle in the garage, and I told him: ‘Jordan, you’re smarter than that. I don’t want you to ride that thing.’
“But he said, ‘Mom, you don’t have to worry about me. You know Jesus is always with me…’ I always hung on to that.”