Female boxer faces fight of her life

Halfway through the fourth and final round, after Katie had taken well 100 blows to the head, the referee finally stepped in. The fight was over -- but the real battle was about to begin. Stephanie rushed to her sister's aid.

Stephanie Dallam: “Katie looks wobbly to me, I go to the side of the ring and I meet her as she's coming down those stairs. And she doesn't look at me… She's walking on her own. But she's walking like a sleepwalker, you know. She doesn't seem to even see me. I say, ‘Katie, Katie,’ and I touch her, and her arm was pale and really cold and clammy. And I'm thinking, you know, she's in shock. She won't respond to me. And then the next thing I hear she complained of a headache. And then she threw up and passed out in the dressing room, and if there was no one there she'd have died alone in that dressing room.”

As a pediatric intensive care nurse, Stephanie recognized the gravity of the situation immediately. By the time Katie was brought to a local hospital, she was comatose, her brain compressed by massive bleeding in her head. A neurosurgeon rushed her into the operating room.

Stephanie Dallam: “He was very straight with me. It was hard for him to reconcile the injury he was seeing with a boxing match. Because the main vein in her brain was decimated. He couldn't sew it back together.”

The doctor was not hopeful as he emerged from three hours of emergency brain surgery.

Stephanie Dallam: “He's letting me know without saying that her brain can't survive this. He's letting me know that people don't survive those kinds of injuries.”

Stephanie Dallam: “And I spent those three hours in the chapel. And I truly didn't know what to pray for, because I'd seen enough that you just don't pray, please let her live. Because you don't know what you're asking for. You know, you might not get the kind of quality of life that would be meaningful to her. And Katie wasn't a person who was going to want to be comatose in a nursing home for the rest of her life or something like that. So I just said, you know, whatever's best for Katie, let that happen.”

Phillips: “That was your prayer?”

Stephanie Dallam: “That was my prayer.”

Like the boxer in “Million Dollar Baby,” Katie survived. And in the days to follow, she, too, faced the ultimate question of whether her life was worth living. The choice Katie made would be different, but her story about the spirit that guided her decision is every bit as dramatic as the movie that moved millions to tears.

No one will ever know which punch did the damage to Katie Dallam. Some, including her opponent that night, have suggested that Katie might have been injured before she even got in the ring because she and her trainer had been in a car accident the night before.

According to the police report, the trainer was treated for a cut on his head,  but there's no mention of Katie being hurt and she told us she wasn't.

In the ring, she'd taken more than 100 blows to the head and now lay in a Missouri hospital bed, hovering between life and death. 

Stephanie Dallam: “I was just glad that I got to see her, you know, one more time. And I had the camera with me, and so I took a picture, because I didn't think anybody else would see her again until she was in a coffin. And I told her that I understood if she had to go. So I told her, you do what you have to do. I'll live with it.”

Phillips: “In terms of her will to live?”

Stephanie Dallam: “Her survival. I couldn't ask her to live for my sake or for anybody else's. It had to be for her own. If she was going to live, it had to be for her own.”

While her family wondered if she would survive, Katie says her only memory from that time is a powerful vision. Her mother, who had died years earlier of breast cancer, appeared to Katie.

Katie Dallam: “We're sitting somewhere and I don't want to say in the clouds, but it was somewhere high. I don't know. A mountain or something. And I'm telling her, you know, that I'm coming to be with her, that I want to live with her now. And she said, ‘You can't.’ And oh I'm very angry at her. And I remember just sort of turning my head away from her and just feeling like how can she say I can't? You know like that's all I wanted to do at that point.”

Phillips: “And how did end?”

Katie Dallam: “Well she told me it wasn't my time yet. I mean I don't know if this was a dream or what it was, you know? But it was just like I have to-- you have to go back down there, you know? And I really didn't want to, but that was what she said, so that's what I did.”

Shortly after that vision, against all medical odds, Katie awoke from her coma.

Katie Dallam: “I remember my dad standing there and I was saying, where's mom? And then you know they would say, ‘Well, you know, she's dead.’ And then I said, no she's not. I was just talking to her. Where is she?”

Phillips: “It had been that real.”

Katie Dallam: “Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In fact that was more real to me than, you know waking up there was.”

As relieved as her family was to see Katie conscious, it was immediately apparent that she was seriously impaired. The injury had destroyed part of her brain.

Stephanie Dallam: “She didn't know who she was. She didn't have any memory of anything.”

Slowly, Katie would have to relearn how to walk, eat and speak. Still, for all the remarkable progress she would make, she knew she would never be the person she once was. Worst of all, Katie blamed herself for everything that had happened, her decision to box, her injuries, even the mental fog she now lived in.

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