Madison Kay Harber turned 23 on October 17. She loves playing with her pooches – Beamer and Rocket. She and boyfriend Zach Dunlap started dating in the 8th grade at Gresham Middle School and on November 16 will celebrate nine years together.
Without Eric Bradshaw, none of this would be her reality today.
Madison should be dead. Or so they say.
Fire/Paramedic Eric Bradshaw and his band of brothers at Rural Metro remain amazed she did not die in a gruesome two-car, T-bone crash on April 15, 2021, on East Emory Road and Fox Glenn Boulevard at 8:15 a.m. Madison was the bone. Part of the T was impaled through her car door and into her right leg, hip and pelvic area.
Bradshaw, working out of Station 34, saved her life. The team worked together to make this happen, but Bradshaw was the man in the car with her for 45 minutes and for the ambulance ride to the UT Medical Center Emergency Department. It was Bradshaw – in the back of a bumpy and speeding ambulance – who discovered her femoral artery had been nicked and was the source of the bleeding.
Madison Harber with Rural Metro’s Lt. Randy Wilson (left) and Eric Bradshaw
The Knox County Sheriff’s Office investigated the accident and deemed Madison was at fault. She says she never saw the red SUV “until a second or so” before the impact as she turned onto East Emory Road going to work.
She is a Fountain City native and a Central High graduate, Class of 2017. In her last two years as a Bobcat, she was the captain of the band’s color guard.
On October 22, Madison walked out of her grandmother’s home, using a cane, to meet, greet, thank, cry and hug Bradshaw and her rescue team and pin Phoenix Medals on all eight of them. She spent three months at UT Medical Center, then a few weeks in a rehabilitation center before coming home to her grandmother’s house in early August.
She says it took 20 screws and a plate or two to repair her pelvis. She has a titanium rod from her hip through her knee to stabilize the leg. It’s permanent. She’s endured three days a week of physical therapy, CRPS (Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome), and is facing plastic surgery on the left leg. Her colon was injured and her next surgery is Nov. 30 to reverse her colostomy.
“It was amazing to see her come walking out of the house,” Bradshaw said. “What means the most to me, the real reason I do what I do, was to see her alive and walking. I didn’t cry but I was really choked up inside. It’s very rare in this business that you get to see an outcome like this.”
Bradshaw, 26, and with Rural Metro for three years, will tell you this straight up – even if she lived, he thought she’d lose her leg.
The major trauma wound, Bradshaw said, was caused by the car’s frame rail piercing the door and then Madison. It was not her only injury. Her pelvis and hip bones were shattered; her femur had a major spiral break; the sacrum between her hip bones and pelvis was shattered; her colon was damaged; and she broke her left big toe, which has been very troubling to repair.
What was left of Madison Harber’s Honda
Madison remembers a hood being placed over her head so she would not get hit by debris from the firefighters cutting the door off. “The guy in the car with me (Bradshaw) was very calming, but he told me to pray, that I had a really bad injury and they were doing the best they could. He was very honest with me. He was on a mission. I felt very comfortable in his hands. I could tell how urgent it was, but they handled it so well.”
In the car Bradshaw literally tried using his arm atop the wound to slow the bleeding and put his hand down into the wound to clean it out as best as he could. “I was getting car parts of metal, plastic and dirt and debris out and I was down in the wound up to my wrist,” he says. “And because her blood pressure was so low (her systolic number was in the 70s) we could not give her any pain meds.” The wound was too high between her leg and pelvis for a tourniquet. “I kept packing it with gauze to stop the bleeding. We had to stop the blood and time was getting short.”
Lt. Randy Wilson was the on-scene commander coordinating the vehicle rescue operation. Bradshaw told him what he needed from the ambulance to use on Madison. “I’d say Eric saved her life, yes,” Wilson said. “Without what he did I doubt she would have made it. He said he needed the TXA Quick Clot gauze.”
The week before this accident Bradshaw and other firefighters, paramedics and EMTs had the new “Stop the Bleed” training. They learned about and were given supplies of Tranexamic Acid (TXA), a special clotting gauze that contains the clotting agent.
Bradshaw says the Quick Clot gauze is what saved her life, shutting down the femoral artery bleed. But it was Bradshaw who found the source of the bleeding in the back of the ambulance and knew exactly what to do.
He stayed calm in the car, but knew time was running out. “I needed her in the ambulance to really work on her. It took about 45 minutes to get her out,” he remembers. “When we got her loaded in the ambulance, I told her I was sorry but I had to open up the wound again with my hand and she just nodded. She was in shock. I told her it was going to hurt. I opened it up and really examined it and that’s when I saw her femoral artery was bleeding. That can be a pretty grave situation. I put the Quick Clot gauze on the artery and we used every pack of gauze we had in the truck to pack the wound channel and finally the bleeding stopped.”
“Hey, I’m just glad I was there for her when she needed me,” Bradshaw said. “I’m glad it was me and my brothers who were there for her. When we saw her, she didn’t have to say much of anything to us. We knew how she felt and it was special for all of us too.”
Tom King has served at newspapers in Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and California and was the editor of two newspapers. Suggest future stories at tking535@gmail.comor call him at 865-659-3562.