Dead for 27 Seconds

Serious injury gives man dose of perspective

STORY BY ALEX PETERSON

Taylor Snyder was in shock. It was April 2005 and the 14-year-old’s left hand was limply attached at the wrist. Blood poured from his arm. A day that began as a fun project with his Boy Scout troop at his Mount Vernon home quickly became a life-threatening situation.

Snyder was cutting wood with a table saw to build a birdhouse when the wood bucked and forced his hand into the jagged-edged saw, severing it just below the wrist.

His mother rushed him to the fire station right down the street, where firefighters were washing their ambulance. The second he arrived, they hustled him into the ambulance to take him to the hospital.

With a gaping wound bleeding during the entire ride to Skagit Valley Hospital, Snyder teetered on the edge of life and death. His heart stopped and he was legally dead for 27 seconds on the ride to the hospital, but an adrenaline shot to the heart saved his life.

“It was like ‘Pulp Fiction,’” Snyder says, now a 23-year-old graduate of Western. “There is a good chance that if the circumstances weren’t what they were I could have died, or permanently lost a hand.”

From the moment of the injury to the ambulance ride and the subsequent months of recovery that awaited him, Snyder had experienced a life-changing event. He received treatment from a surgeon with the expertise to reattach his hand, but as Snyder worked toward recovery, his entire outlook on life would change.

“When you’re 14 and forced to confront your own mortality, it can be a little jarring,” Snyder says. “I basically fell into a depression afterwards; it was one of the lowest points of my life.”

Snyder attributes the depression during recovery partially to the heavy doses of pain medication he was taking, and also to the fact that the accident occurred just a couple of weeks before his 15th birthday on May 5, 2006. With his birthday coming so soon after the injury, Snyder was unable to enjoy the experience as much as he had anticipated.

While being bedridden in the early days of his recovery, Snyder immersed himself in history books and watched a lot of History Channel programming.

He attributes that experience with steering him toward the history degree he graduated with in 2013. He recently began studying for his master’s degree in history at Western.

He was still able to go to Disneyland as his family had planned for his birthday, and during the five-month recovery traveled to Europe with them as well. He had to wear a large brace on the trip to Europe to keep his arm in certain positions and stretch his tendons, which caused a few problems at the airport.

“The airport was convinced my cast was a bomb,” he says. “A 15-year-old skinny white kid from Mount Vernon — yeah, I was definitely a security threat.”

He also was on painkillers from time to time following the injury due to Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, which tricks the body into thinking the injury is occurring again. The painkillers depressed his nervous system, but also took taxed him emotionally. The experience with depression gave him a new perspective that helped him realize he wanted to make some changes in his life.

“As I was coming out of this depression, I started to realize that a lot of the things I was concerned about as a 14-year-old kid were really not that important,” Snyder says. “I started to look around as I was getting better and realized that a lot of my friends were getting stressed out about things that could be easily resolved.”

Having trouble connecting with his peers as a freshman at Mount Vernon High School, Snyder poured his time and energy into the things he valued most: family, history, scouting and music.

As a classically trained timpanist, Snyder had to teach himself to play percussion instruments with one hand until his left hand recovered. Because he normally writes with his left hand, Snyder learned to be ambidextrous, but he says the skill has largely worn off now. Brian Anderson, one of Synder’s friends from high school band, was impressed with Synder’s dedication.

“In band for senior projects you had to write a piece of music, and Taylor rewrote our entire cadence for marching band,” Anderson says. “It is a very hard undertaking. He had to write pieces for all the percussion instruments.”

After recovery, Snyder didn’t use his injury to be the center of attention. Both Anderson and Stephen Peterson, another of Snyder’s friends, say they learned of his injury in games of “Never Have I Ever.”

“I had never actually noticed the scar until he pointed it out,” Anderson says. “He probably has a higher threshold for what is a big deal than I do.”

When Peterson found out, Snyder was pretty nonchalant about it, he says.

“He has a fairly cool character about it, those things don’t really seem to phase him,” Peterson says.

Though the accident occurred at a scouting event, Snyder was eager to return to his Boy Scout troop. He pushed himself so much in scouting that he was named an Eagle Scout when he was 16 years old, an honor usually earned when a scout is about 18, he says.

Snyder matured emotionally in a large burst after the near-death experience, and it wasn’t until his junior year of high school before he felt he related to his friends the same way he had before the injury.

“Eventually I realized that other people just have different experiences,” he says. “I don’t think the way I matured is the only way — I’d be very concerned if it was.”

As Snyder reflects back on the time following the injury, he accepts what happened because it shaped his personality. He finds himself judging the importance of an event compared to having his hand severed.

“My frame of reference for being concerned about something is stretched pretty far on the one end,” he says.

With his acceptance and appreciation for how his life was changed, the possibility for a lasting emotional toll is negated. The only scar Snyder wears now is the two-inch surgeon’s cut across the back of his left hand.