Life can ladle out setbacks, such as a flatbed truck smashing a flipped car to a third of its size in a 30-vehicle highway crash and dropping a multi-ton load of steel plates on the car driver’s right leg.
But school teacher Artis Selby Jacobsen, 39, has not been deterred.
It happened 20 years ago on a foggy, slushy morning when she was a first-year University of Colorado student driving her ailing mutt, Buddy, northward on Interstate 25 to Fort Collins for chemotherapy.
“It could have been worse,” Jacobsen said Sunday night at a commemoration of the crash, which ranks among the worst in Colorado history. Family and friends from CU who helped her endure gather each year and remind each other not to take easy days for granted.
“I just feel lucky,” Jacobsen said.
For emergency rescuers, extracting her by picking apart her beige 1992 Toyota Camry piece by piece marked a major achievement. This chain-reaction crash, triggered by a person driving too fast for the conditions, killed a man and a woman, injured seven and forced a six-hour closure of northbound I-25.
Few at the scene east of Longmont expected Jacobsen — pinned and losing too much blood too fast — to survive. A helicopter ferried her to the Denver Health Medical Center. When she regained consciousness, doctors said she’d probably lose her leg. Over several years, she repeatedly was confined to a wheelchair. She’s had 27 surgeries and on Sunday was anticipating another knee replacement.
Yet Jacobsen graduated from CU. She became a second-grade teacher, currently at Reunion Elementary in Commerce City. She’s the mother of two boys.
Her husband, Mark, parents and friends surrounding her Sunday remembered days in the hospital when she had an infection that required insertion of a tube into her heart. They remembered how Jacobsen, who grew up in Boulder, struggled to go hiking again.
She went with Alicia Cavallaro to the Great Sand Dunes about three years after the crash. They set out slowly and finally made it up a few ridges, sand slipping back with each stiff step. A lighting storm rolled over them. Others at the dunes high-tailed it. But Jacobsen was trapped. And Cavallaro stayed with her as white-hot bolts popped amid thunder.
“I was thinking, maybe I am really stupid, but I’ve got a friend here,” Cavallaro said.
“You never know what is going to happen tomorrow.”
Jacobsen went with Emily Trede for six months to Australia. And the best friends went as a group to Estes Park. She cried Sunday thinking back. “Every time I was in a wheelchair, they wouldn’t let me miss anything. They would take me places. They were like: ‘Yes, you can.’ It was great. Like, I couldn’t run or hike and they stayed with me and made me feel included.”
The shared experience of dealing with this highway disaster, Katherine Burkhart said, “keeps you in check, as far as not taking your friendships for granted.”
Jacobsen’s father, Rollie, looked on. “It consumed our lives.”
When her students ask about her limp, she tells them. Firefighters who saved her life have stayed in touch. The firefighters are planning to bring their rig to her school for instruction on how best to try to stay safe.
She cannot run, ride a bike or easily navigate stairs.
“I love teaching. I want to teach until I retire. And then I would love to be a volunteer librarian,” she said.
Salmon, chicken and salad sat on the table.
As setbacks go, “it was a pretty big one,” she said. “Everything else has gone pretty smoothly. I have two great kids and a husband. I have a great group of friends. I love my career. I really cannot complain.”
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