By Kathy Chaffin
Salisbury Post
CLEVELAND ó It was because someone donated blood that Regina Shaver is alive today.
She smashed her arm through a window in a drunken rage 15 years ago and lost half the blood in her body. A few years later, a blood transfusion helped save the life of her son after he was severely beaten by her boyfriend.
Shaver thinks about that every time she gives blood. “I just thank God I’m alive,” she says.
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It was Shaver’s sister, Sherry Smith, who persuaded her to share her story. Encouraging people to donate blood is one of Smith’s responsibilities as director of blood services for the Hanford-Dole Chapter of the American Red Cross.
Shaver’s story could also keep young people from making similar mistakes, Smith realized, and offer hope to people who may be so far down the wrong path that they think it’s too late.
At age 39, Shaver is living proof that it’s never too late. “I love my life now,” she says.
Shaver lives with her three children, 16-year-old Desimond, 10-year-old Likia and 8-year-old Destini, in a new doublewide on Silk & Tassel Row in Cleveland. She works at VF Jeanswear in Mocksville and is an assistant minister at Shady Grove Baptist Church in Mount Ulla.
When she tells people about the night she almost died, Shaver says, “they can’t believe someone like me used to live that lifestyle.”
Regina Shaver was a rebellious teenager, living for the day when she could move out on her own and do what she wanted. It wasn’t long, however, before her life spiraled dangerously out of control.
Her son, Desimond, was about a year old when she got into an argument with a friend after a night of heavy drinking at a Salisbury nightclub and smashed through a window with her right arm
It was when she began to pull it back that a jagged piece of glass cut her from the elbow halfway to the wrist, severing her main arteries and muscles.
Shaver says she felt what she thought was water pouring down her body. It turned out to be blood.
She continued to bleed profusely as a friend drove her to the emergency room at Rowan Regional Medical Center. “I fainted when I walked through the door,” she says.
The next thing Shaver remembers is a nurse pulling glass out of her arm. “I knew it was bad,” she says. “I could hear my sister screaming in the background, ‘Is she going to die? Is she going to die?’
“They were trying to stabilize me to get me to the VA Hospital to fly me by helicopter to Baptist.”
Shaver says she found out later that doctors at Rowan Regional had considered amputating her arm.
Surgeons at Baptist were able to stop the bleeding and reconnect the arteries in her arm. It took several transfusions to rebuild her blood supply.
Doctors at Wake Forest University Medical Center in Winston-Salem told her the large quantity of alcohol she had consumed had thinned her blood, causing her to lose almost half of her supply.
“The doctors called me ‘a miracle,’ ” she says. “They said I should have been dead, that there was no way a person of my size who drank that much should have survived that.”
Shaver, who is still petite, weighed only 105 pounds at the time and had been drinking beer and liquor for several hours.
She spent a week in the hospital before being discharged with her arm and hand in a cast. The cast stayed on for almost a year, after which she took physical therapy for six months.
“I had to learn to bend my arm again and use my hand,” she says. Though doctors told her she would be on disability for the rest of her life, Shaver says she recovered fully except for the numbness in her fingertips.
“And praise be to God, I’m working,” she says.
After her brush with death, Shaver stopped drinking for about a year before starting back.
Her low self-esteem led to relationships with the wrong kind of men ó drug dealers, men who wouldn’t work and abusers.
One of her live-in boyfriends kept Desimond while Shaver worked third shift. She had called in to work one night due to icy roads when Desimond, then 4, began running a fever and throwing up.
When she went to give him a bath, she noticed a large bruise on his chest. Concerned about his condition, Shaver called her sister, Sherry Smith, to take them to the emergency room at Rowan Regional.
At first, doctors thought Desimond might be suffering from pancreatitis, but when he began hemorrhaging internally two days later, he was transported by ambulance to Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.
There, doctors found that Desimond had been beaten severely enough to bruise his small and large intestines and split his liver. He received a blood transfusion during surgery to repair the damage.
Shaver’s boyfriend pleaded guilty to felony child abuse and was sentenced to two years and five months to three years and eight months in prison.
It took several years and two failed suicide attempts before Shaver sought help for the depression and migraine headaches that she says caused her to drink.
A doctor diagnosed her as being manic-depressive, and a counselor helped her to realize that a lot of her problems stemmed from not loving herself.
For a long time after her injury, Shaver wore long sleeves ó even in the heat of the summer ó to hide the 4-inch scar that extends around to the other side of her arm. “I was ashamed,” she says, “and I got tired of people asking, ‘What happened to your arm? What happened to your arm?’ ”
Today, Shaver shows people her scar when she shares her testimony. “People say ‘I can’t see you getting mad like that,’ ” she says. “I say, ‘Oh yes, I used to have a bad temper.’ ”
It took her a long time to get to the point where she could talk about her past without feeling ashamed. “But somebody needs to hear it,” she says. “I was spared for a reason. God has a purpose for me.”Contact Kathy Chaffin at 704-797-4249 or kchaffin@salisburypost.com.