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Far left: The port hole for Katrine Enriquez’s ileostomy, a necessity after doctors had to remove nearly 2 feet of her intestines. Left: Enriquez with her father, Phil Stothart.
noticed a Snapchat photo of Enriquez and her mother, who lives in Bulgaria, in the hospital. “I got lucky,” Carrie said. “When I saw the photo of Katrine, she had the oxygen tube in her nose, a nasal cannula, and I remember thinking, ‘If her mom’s there, something bad happened.’ I reached out and was fortunate enough to see her the day before everything shut down in hospitals due to the COVID protocols.” The fallout Most people think someone like Enriquez, who was simply driving home from work and
wrecked by a drunken driver, would easily get a settlement worth a couple million dollars. That’s not the way it worked out for Enriquez. After the wreck, she won a multi-million- dollar settlement from the bar where the drunken driver, then-38-year-old Jessica Garcia of Tolleson, was before the accident. But the settlement was thrown out on appeal, when it was later discovered the driver who parked in the fast lane went to a party after her trip to the bar, making it impossible to ascertain where she got drunk. It was a gut punch.
Homestead resident Lucinda Ashlin had grown close with Enriquez over the past decade prior to the crash, along with her daughter, Helena, who was 4 at the time and had just recovered from a tonsil removal. “While Helena was healing, Kat was constantly by and bringing ice cream and freezer pops,” Ashlin said. “It was devastating to look at Kat and to see what the wreck did to her. “I explained to my daughter, ‘You know your Aunt Kat is not going to be looking like your Aunt Kat. She’s hooked up with tubes.” It gets worse Of all the times to need massive surgeries, 2020 was — without a doubt — the worst. Enriquez’s recovery was seriously hampered by an overworked medical system dealing with a pandemic’s worth of COVID-19 cases. According to Arizona Department of Health data, there were more than 450,000 diagnosed COVID-19 cases and 8,410 deaths in 2020. The COVID-19 tracking project estimates there were nearly 37,000 COVID-related hospitalizations in Arizona in 2020. Visitors to Enriquez during her recovery were limited both in the number and length of time they were allowed to see her. Ashlin recalled the ordeal of simply bringing her daughter in to see Enriquez. “The doctor said that with my daughter being so little, she needed to be masked up, gloved up and gowned up,” Ashlin said. The visits, due to pandemic-era hospital regulations, were brief. Ashlin brought her daughter in, hoping the visit might give Enriquez a little bit of comfort and help her heal faster. “I just wanted her to hear our voice and to know that we were there,” Ashlin said. “The first couple of times we went, Katrine was asleep, and we didn’t know if she heard us. And then there were times when she was awake but couldn’t talk because of the tracheotomy.” Carrie, another longtime friend who asked InMaricopa not to reveal her last name due to an order of protection, said after the crash she
Left: Katrine Enriquez is unresponsive at Chandler Regional Hospital after a 2020 DUI crash on State Route 347. Above: Enriquez’s car, like her body, is totaled. Right: Enriquez’s broken leg is sadly among her least severe injuries.
Highway to Hell How State Route 347 ruined this woman’s life BY JUSTIN GRIFFIN
MEDICAL GLOSSARY
focuses on symptom management and improving quality of life. This can include dietary changes, medications to manage bowel function and pelvic floor therapy. Bucket Handle injuries are a severe intestinal injury following blunt abdominal trauma. For Enriquez, the seatbelt she wore during her wreck was the likely culprit. Bucket Handle injuries involve the mesentery, the tissue connecting the intestines to the abdominal wall, being torn away from the bowel. This disrupts blood supply, leading to ischemia and potential bowel death. These injuries are often challenging to diagnose due to their varied presentation on imaging.
Early surgical intervention is crucial to prevent complications like bowel perforation and sepsis. Crohn’s disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease affecting any part of the gastrointestinal tract. Symptoms vary in severity and location but commonly include abdominal pain, diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss and rectal bleeding. The disease course is characterized by flares of active disease and remission. While there’s no cure, treatment manages symptoms, prevents complications and improves quality of life through medications, dietary changes and surgery.
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Enriquez, a pharmacological technician, had big plans for 2020. She was set to train for a marathon and attend a wedding in Ireland. To afford the trip, she’d taken an additional job, working nights filling prescriptions at an Amazon mail order pharmacy in the Valley. For her day job, Enriquez worked at CVS Omnicare in Chandler. She only worked at the Amazon job one night. The trip home changed the trajectory of her life. ‘She was unrecognizable’ Her injuries were substantial. There were multiple vertebrae fractures, along with a broken leg, a broken back, broken ribs and a bucket handle injury, which required the removal of 20 inches of intestines, a lacerated kidney along with multiple facial fractures and bruises, and many other ailments she still battles to this day. If you knew Enriquez before the crash and you saw her today, chances are high you would not recognize her. She lost 100 pounds during the initial phases of trying to recover from the crash. Due to digestive issues resulting from the crash, she has lost another 45 and now weighs just 98 pounds.
Today, her battered body resembles a warzone — a collection of surgically manipulated body parts, scars from an ileostomy port, a pacemaker and a bucket’s worth of bolts and rods in her hips and legs. Katrine’s husband Joe Enriquez drove around until he found his wife’s car along the highway and then called hospitals until he figured out she was at Chandler Regional Medical Center. Attempts to reach Joe Enriquez, who also lives in Homestead, were unsuccessful. In the wake of the crash, the couple initiated a divorce and Enriquez, who is not a U.S. citizen, complicated her path to citizenship and access to her children due to distance. “When no one heard from Kat, we all started wondering if something happened,” recalled longtime friend Chelsea Casketta. “We all knew it was her first night at the new job.” Casketta said when friends and family members saw Enriquez at Chandler Regional Hospital, she was definitely worse for the wear. “She was unrecognizable,” Casketta said. “She was so bruised. The swelling was so bad. The coloration of her skin made it so hard to recognize her. It was insane.”
FTER A DEVASTATING CRASH on State Route 347 in 2020, it’s a wonder Katrine Enriquez is alive today.
Katrine Enriquez’s injuries and ailments after a 2020 crash on State Route 347 have been extensive. Here are definitions of some less frequently discussed terms. LARS , Low Anterior Resection Syndrome, is a collection of bowel problems likely to occur after removal of portions of the colon. Symptoms include frequent bowel movements, urgency and clustering (having multiple small bowel movements in a short time). It’s estimated up to 4 in 5 of patients experience LARS after intestinal surgery. While there is no known cure, treatment
It’s miraculous. But fortunate? Enriquez isn’t so sure.
“I should have died,” she said. “I actually wish I wouldn’t have survived, but I’m not suicidal. People seem to get that confused.” On her way home to Homestead early one Friday morning, Enriquez found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time while traveling southbound on the only road connecting Maricopa to the Valley. It was Jan. 24 that year, between 4 and 5 a.m., according to published reports, when Enriquez encountered a drunken driver — headlights off — parked in the middle of the fast lane right outside city limits. “There were cars in the right lane, and I couldn’t get over to avoid the stopped car,” Enriquez said. “I ended up hitting the back of her car, which spun me around to hit a car head-on in my lane, which sent me over the median, where I hit another car head-on in the opposite lane, which knocked me back into the median.”
InMaricopa.com | August 2024
August 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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