He Learned the Importance of Caring

RIALTO — If it had not been for a disastrous plane flight on Sept. 8, 1974, Steve Meyering, then 23, very likely would still be loading packages onto United Parcel Service trucks in San Bernardino.

Instead, he is a physician.

On that warm, fall afternoon almost 11 years ago, the breeze felt especially good to Meyering as his friend Dave Williamson gunned the single-engined plane along the runway at the tiny Rialto Airport.

Meyering relaxed, enjoying the sensation of his 6-foot-1-inch frame being pressed back in the passenger seat as the Piper Comanche gained speed and climbed above the tract houses built on desert sand just west of San Bernardino.

The young men banked northeast over San Bernardino National Forest and decided to check out Lake Arrowhead. Then they headed east to have a look at Deep Creek.

Williamson, then a steelworker in his late 20s, spotted Deep Creek, turned north and flew placidly above the glistening thread of water.

He dipped down for a closer look, and found himself flying inside the canyon. It was early evening, the light was exquisitely soft on the canyon walls.

Suddenly, without warning and for no apparent reason, the engine died. It simply stopped in midair. Later it was determined that a fuel valve may have jammed.

Meyering folded his arms across his chest. “I didn’t want to grab the wheel and interfere with what little control Dave had of the plane,” he said.

Frantic Midair Effort

Williamson struggled frantically and fruitlessly to start the motor. Then, just before flying straight into the rocky canyon wall, he pulled the plane’s nose up sharply and pancaked into a tiny clearing.

Meyering broke his jaw in five places, had his nose half-torn from his face, smashed his right foot, broke his back, suffered third-degree burns over the front and sides of both legs and was paralyzed below the waist. Williamson had similar injuries, though he was not burned, and he miraculously escaped paralysis despite his broken back.

Williamson crawled over his friend’s unconscious body and fell from the plane. Two hours later he had enough strength to pull Meyering out.

That night Meyering regained consciousness and tried to talk, but Williamson couldn’t understand him.

The nights were crisp, the days were hot and the rocks were hard.

After the second night, Williamson labored for eight horribly painful hours, crawling 200 yards down the canyon for water. Unlike the canyon walls, the creek was lined with dry brush. Figuring it was his only chance to attract attention--and to survive--Williamson threw a lighted match into the brush.

It took only a few minutes for the liquid-dropping bombers to arrive. Shortly after that, firefighters leaped from a helicopter and found Williamson covered with bright orange borate fire retardant and half suffocated by it.

Williamson told his rescuers his friend was with the plane. One of them climbed to the aircraft, and radioed back three words: “This one’s dead.” When Williamson heard that he said, “He wasn’t dead eight hours ago. Check again.” The radio crackled once more to say Meyering was alive after all.

Rescuers airlifted both men out of the mountains by helicopter. Williamson ended up at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Fontana. His friend, Jay Smith, a Bloomington insurance adjuster, said Williamson has moved to Lee Vining, and has recovered from the accident except for continuing severe lower back pain and a crushed right foot that causes him to limp.

After the crash, Meyering spent five months hospitalized at the San Bernardino County Medical Center. They were months that changed his life.

His jaw was wired shut, 18% to 20% of his body was burned. He couldn’t move his legs and doctors at first were not sure if he’d live.

Meyering said there was one thing they did seem sure of: he would not walk again.

As Meyering remembers it, Dr. Donald Brecht delivered that devastating message a few days after Meyering got to the hospital’s burn ward. Brecht then pulled the curtains around Meyering’s bed and left the room. Harsh as the act sounds in the telling, Meyering felt a consummate tenderness and concern from the doctor. But he also felt gut-wrenching fear.

“I was terrified for the first time that this was not a game,” Meyering recalled. “In about two hours I went through all six stages of grieving (shock and denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance, hope). Then I can remember taking it on as a challenge, and thinking, ‘By God, I’m going to beat it.’ ”

Meyering made another momentous, dramatic decision in those two hours: He would become a physician.

“It was an immediate decision to become a doctor,” said the young man who had quit Cal State San Bernardino in the middle of his sophomore year, not quite four years before his accident.

A Shift of Consciousness

The reasons for his decision to enter medicine were as uncomplicated as they were dramatic. Meyering had learned two facts for the first time: life hangs by a thin thread and therefore it can be extraordinarily important to help another human.

While he recognizes that it may sound corny, he knows that brush with death changed his life. From a young man who had quit college because he saw no future in it, a man whose principal interests were courting girls, riding his Harley Davidson motorcycle and racing his ’55 Chevy, he became a man dedicated to helping others as he had been helped.

“Overnight,” he said, “I became a person thrust into consciousness that there is more to life than the everyday earning of a living and enjoying creature comforts . . . there was an enlightenment, a realization that other people had problems and perhaps I could help. Being a physician seemed the logical way to do that.”

The compassionate attitudes of his doctors and nurses on the burn ward strongly influenced Meyering’s decision. “They really cared,” he said. “They hurt when I hurt, they allowed themselves to feel my pain, and they were very competent.”

Meyering adopted a few doctors as role models. One of them was Donald Brecht, who recently expressed surprise at his impact on his patient’s determination to enter medicine.

“He didn’t seem to be the kind of boy that was so determined. I’m surprised at that,” said the doctor, who has a family practice in Omak, Wash., 50 miles south of the Canadian border.

Brecht remembers Meyering’s recovery as “very difficult.” So does Meyering.

Besides being immobilized on his back, only moving when nurses moved him, Meyering endured excruciatingly painful daily sessions with nurses and doctors picking bits of dead flesh from his legs, and daily whirlpool baths that hurt so much they took his breath away so he couldn’t scream. From the physical standpoint, about the only blessing Meyering could count was that his paralysis prevented the pain in his legs from being even worse.

A Time of Reflection

For a month and a half he was alone in a six-bed burn ward. “It gave me time to reflect and build determination,” Meyering said.

Much of his time during the remaining 3 1/2 months in the hospital was spent talking with burn victims and their families. “I got a lot of positive feedback from nurses and doctors who asked me to talk with people,” Meyering said. “The biggest thing to come out of all this was that today I carry to my patients an ability to feel what they feel.”

In February, 1975, Meyering’s mother drove him home to the three-bedroom house where he lived alone except for Nomad and Lady, his two Alaskan malamutes.

A week or so before going home to the house where he still lives, Meyering had gotten out of bed and into a wheelchair for the first time since his accident.

At home he constantly exercised, moving his legs less than an inch at first. He cooked dinners prepared and frozen by his mother and grandmother, and within a couple of weeks was walking in the 30-foot pool in his back yard.

A little more than two months after leaving the hospital, Meyering got leg braces that attached to a metal band above his waist.

The first thing he did after getting home with the braces was to get out his screwdriver and remove the waist band.

Then he began to walk with crutches--just a few steps at first, then across a room, and within a couple of weeks he could make his way around the house one or two times before becoming “totally exhausted.”

His Walking Improves

As his walking improved, he shortened his leg braces with a hacksaw. A year and a half after he left the hospital, the braces reached barely above Meyering’s knees. He was swimming 200 laps a day in his pool, and could walk a couple of hundred yards at a time, although it was “very, very tiring.” He had the upper body of a weight lifter.

Seven months after leaving the hospital, Meyering had gone back to Cal State San Bernardino.

“I really got into school work,” he said. “I was one of the top students in all my classes. I got straight A’s, up from C’s five years before when I had done all my homework at the beginning of the lectures, hoping no one would ask for it till the end of class.”

In October, 1976, Meyering took time from his studies for a back operation at Loma Linda University Medical Center to ease the constant pain he’d felt since the accident--pain that had been aggravated by a fall from his wheelchair several months before. The operation was successful. Ella Wyatt, a nurse who had a patient in the same ward with Meyering, remembers being attracted to him because “he was very pleasant, down to earth and gutsy.”

The following year Wyatt and Meyering sat across from one another in an organic chemistry lab. They both swear the situation was a coincidence. They have been married almost two years.

Meyering was graduated from college June 16, 1979 with a degree in biology. He took an extra year to get a second degree in chemistry. In the fall of 1980 he enrolled in the USC School of Medicine.

Above Average Attitude

While he got average grades in medical school, Meyering had an above average attitude. In his “Confidential Summary of Performance,” Associate Dean G. June Marshall wrote, “In the first year of Introduction to Clinical Medicine, Steven brilliantly filled the personal and professional goals and requirements of the ICM program . . . he developed the capacity to listen to his patients carefully and empathetically . . . he was able to help his patients deal with the emotional aspects of their illnesses . . . his instructor felt he would succeed in any aspect of medicine which he chose to follow.”

Marshall’s evaluation of Meyering’s second-year performance was equally flattering.

The third and fourth years of medical school are largely spent working in clinics, which is Meyering’s forte. Associate Dean William Nerlich said, “Steve’s performance in the clinical years blossomed. He clearly did above average work in his clinical rotations.”

Meyering graduated in June, 1984, and less than a month later began his internship at Loma Linda University Medical Center, where he was born, where he underwent back surgery and where he works today.

In their free time--what there is of it--the Meyerings tour with their 13-foot travel trailer, Steve practices amateur astronomy, has recently taken up cabinet making and revels in inventing things to make life easier around the house. For example, when he got an estimate of “$2,000 to $3,000” for an electric driveway gate opener, he built one himself for less than $150, using an ordinary electric garage-door opener.

Ella, who walks with crutches due to a cartilage problem called chondromalacia, spends her time working around the house, handles all the family finances, is an expert seamstress and makes Steve’s clothing. Numerous embroidered pictures that she has made decorate the walls. Every picture has won a ribbon, either at the Los Angeles County Fair or the Orange Show in San Bernardino.

The Meyerings expect to go into business when Steve completes his residency in 1987. “Ella is both a registered nurse and a medical technologist,” Steve said. “I’ll be a doctor. What better combination can you think of to run a medical practice?”

Just what kind of practice it will be remains undecided. “I’m leaning toward general internal medicine or a subspecialty such as neurology,” Steve said. “In either case, it will offer us the opportunity to care for people, and that’s the important thing. That’s what I want to do.”