I sat in my wheelchair in the front row of the audience at the very rainy 250th Commencement of the University of Pennsylvania. Occasionally my eyes met those of Jodie Foster, who bravely endured the rain, and talked of her acting as “telling stories.” I fantasized about writing a story that would turn into a movie with Jodie Foster playing me.

Certainly I am no Clarice. That May morning under my umbrella, I did not know how my journey from brain-damaged accident victim to completion of my Ph.D. degree at the University of Pennsylvania would finally end. I had put myself on the list for graduation and then marched in the graduation processional and sat in my wheelchair, all without the final okay on my dissertation. I marched in order to honor the students I had just finished teaching; half of them, I was sure, would be well-known in their fields within ten years of graduation.

I marched, or rolled, too, because the University of Pennsylvania has almost no standing faculty with visible impairments, such as using a wheelchair for mobility, or living with a damaged eye. Yet I was not, and never will be, standing faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, or anywhere else.

There was quite a contrast: the honored guests on the podium represented extraordinary diversity. Amy Gutmann, Penn’s President, was the third woman president of an Ivy League University. Judith Rodin had become, in 1995, the first woman president of an Ivy League School, here at the University of Pennsylvania.

I saw great contrast between the diversity of the assembled honored guests, including people with visible disabilities, and the old men and younger women who were introduced to confer degrees on the graduates, from the Graduate School of Education to the School of Nursing to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to Wharton School.

Among the watchers, I know now, were two friends from the Student Disabilities Office, Alice Nagle and Troy Odom, who had endured the downpour that preceded the ceremony to arrange chairs so there would be spaces for those people in wheelchairs who come to watch someone graduate. When my wheelchair wasn’t in the expected place—I had marched part of the way, and rested in a different chair during the procession of graduates, and needed a chair again to sit through the ceremonies—a marshal had known to go and find Alice or Troy.

And there was Jodie Foster, slightly smiling through what had turned from downpour to drizzle and mist. Although there was a canopy that covered part of the stage, she was not under it, and got wet with the rest of us.

Contrast 1

It is a bright bright sunshiny day, but cold; Thursday January the 12th before a Friday the 13th. We had been having snowfalls every other day; this was a day free of snow, but there was fresh snow covering the mounds of plowed snow. I am meeting at what my shaky memory says is an outdoor café, where with a group of friends, a havurah, we enjoy the camaraderie, and anticipating the successful execution of an event we are jointly planning.

The meeting breaks up; I board a bus for home. I remember that on the bus I had the chance to get off and deliver a job application, and decided to skip it. That is the last thing I remember–the rest is reconstruction: I got home and discovered that we (my college-student daughter Alyssa and I) were out of cat food. I went out again, on my way to a convenience store some four blocks away. I never got there.

As I approached the larger street halfway to the store, as the bright sunshine turned to dusk, a woman named Carla Martinez was leaving work, three blocks away from the school zone where I planned to cross. She was in a hurry; her windshield was covered with frost, but she thought she didn’t have to clear away the frost—it would soon be gone as the car warmed up. I begin to cross the road as she got up to speed. She hit me going 30 or 40 miles an hour. And stopped. As I reconstruct what happened next, she dissolved in hysterics. A passing motorist stopped, tried to calm her, determined I needed an ambulance, and left to find a phone to call 911. I very very dimly think I remember the flashing lights and people asking me questions. What’s your name? Where do you live? What country? What year is this? Who is the President? I knew my first name. I said I lived in Philadelphia, in Canada (I think). The year was 1989—but odds are I could not answer the question. I didn’t know who was the President. Throughout the confusion that followed, and that I don’t remember, I kept hearing “Sigrid” and being confused; were they calling me? what was I supposed to do? Did they mean me, or somebody else named Sigrid? Where was this, anyway? Was that pain that I felt mine? Was somebody still hurting me? Why was everything so dark?

They had asked me how old I was; I had no idea. That puzzled me as much as anything. If I was I, I should know how old I was, shouldn’t I?

There are two moments of clarity from that very very long night. I came too, more or less, and remember thinking “My body is broken. I will never be the same again. AND I WILL RECOVER! What I’ll do is write a book, lose weight, and go on TV to publicize it.” That was one moment of clarity. My daughter Alyssa tells me that when she arrived at the ER and was able to see me, I told her “The cats need to be fed.” I thought I was in Philadelphia, where I had never been, didn’t know the year, thought the name Sigrid might belong to someone else, and yet I knew our two cats had not been fed. Though Alyssa remembers it, not I, that was the second moment of clarity.

Alyssa had just turned 19; throughout that night she had the presence of mind to contact my mother in Rhode Island, and to run after the doctors who were going to do a CAT scan to tell them I am fatally allergic to the contrast dye they used for the scans. That was the first time she saved my life.

The book I was going to write was one of those victorious over adversity sorts of tales, like conquering Everest though only having one foot, or winning the Tour de France eight times after nearly dying from cancer. It would have been about conquering the fear of HIV/AIDS in a city and state that religiously feared and abhorred homosexuality, associated the HIV/AIDS virus with homosexuals, and ostrich-like, refused to deal with the need to prevent the disease.

Just before the accident that had put me on my back in the hospital, we had learned that we (the Salt Lake Aids Coalition) had won the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson grant for AIDS/HIV Prevention; I hoped that once funds were disbursed, I would join the Salt Lake Aids Foundation as their Coordinator of Development. That would be the book I would write: I would write about David, and David’s Year. It was the year that he founded the People With Aids Chapter in Salt Lake City, the year we gave him a roast for all he had done, and the year that his mind faded from AIDS dementia. The book would also be about Ben Barr, who put together the Coalition, dealt with the conflicts of personalities, represented the problems that AIDS/HIV posed to the community, tried to life his own life and be involved in the lives of his children, and would just put his head down at the end of the day and say, “My brain is fried.” Once, one of the people he had to talk down from personality conflicts was me, self-involved as well as intellectually involved in writing the grant proposal.

Now it was my brain that was fried, truly fried. I had a Ph.D. in Counseling/Clinical Psychology from the University of Utah, and knew the effects of brain injuries. My brain was now injured; I was in a light coma for four days. I couldn’t remember the accident, I didn’t know who was President, until I “surfaced” as my daughter and I call it, on the day of the Inauguration of the first President Bush. Later that day, when asked who was President, I could answer that it was George Bush. My name seemed to belong to me again; I recognized my daughter, Alyssa, who was home on break from her first year at Grinnell College in Iowa. I knew I was in Salt Lake City, but could not answer the curious question of the doctor about Philadelphia. Why had I said I lived in Philadelphia? I had no idea.

As I went through that process of coming to consciousness in the Hospital’s Intensive Care Ward, I began to learn the extent of my injuries. I had damaged the Third Cranial Nerve, which supplies the nerves used by the muscles that control the eye. I had double vision as a result, one side of my face drooped, and swallowing was somewhat affected. They said it would heal—the doctors said. In the meantime, I wore an eye patch.

I had had laparoscopic surgery the night of the accident to repair my bladder, which had burst. Now that I was conscious, though my short-term memory did not work, a wonderful orthopedic surgeon, who put the skiers of Utah back together after falls, told me that of my two knees, the left one, on a scale of 1 to 3 measuring the extent to which it didn’t hold together any more, was at 3+, and they would have to operate the next opening he had in his schedule, which was later that week. He said that the other knee was at 2+, which normally indicated an operation, but that they would treat that knee conservatively for the time being, in order to focus on the left knee.

My pelvis was fractured symmetrically in eight places (or was it four—I’m not really sure, now). My right hip blade separated from my spine—the ligament holding hip blade to spine shredded. One of my feet was very painful from a road burn; as that began to heal, I had problems with the nerves in the other foot.

And I could not breathe. I think I inhaled some Nicorette gum I had been chewing. I had pneumonia from atelactasis. (That’s the technical word for inhaling something that gums up the lungs.)

That was the second time my daughter saved my life. She sat by my bedside and told me to breathe, to remember how good it felt to breathe, the good moments of life, the time I had told her about “seeing fire in the sky.” After some marvelous moments of psychological intimacy with a man I loved, we had parted and I drove through the University toward the mountains, and saw the sun setting in the west light on fire the crystallized snow on the mountains in the east. As Alyssa told me to remember, and live, I got a bit annoyed with her because she didn’t describe the events exactly right. She hadn’t been there, after all. I had to live, so she would know how to tell the story.
It seems odd that I would recall that little bit of annoyance with my daughter, who pushed me to decide to live, when I know that a great deal of the time I was simply furious with everything in that hospital.

That fury is one of the ways in which brain-injured people react to their injury; somehow it is a good sign, though families find it hard to take. It is the passive reaction to brain injury that is less likely to lead to a good recovery.

Somehow in that fury I managed to choose a doctor to manage my care—the marvelous Kristen Ries, an specialist in infectious diseases who treated people with HIV/AIDS and older women. As an internist, at least at that time and that place, she did have the capacity to manage my care—but to have her as my doctor, I would have to transfer to Holy Cross Hospital, which had the first HIV/AIDS treatment ward in the city. By a lucky coincidence, that ward was adjacent to the Neurological Rehabilitation Wing, so she was able to check on me before or after visiting people hospitalized with HIV/AIDS. Also, I learned as I was about to shift from Intensive Care at the first hospital, that my colleagues and friends from AIDS Project Utah had practically been camped in the waiting room for intensive care, but had not been able to see me, because they were not relatives. I spent a few days in a less intensive treatment area of the hospital, getting angrier and angrier over little things; but my friends and colleagues could now visit.

That was very important, because my daughter’s winter break from college was now over. She had been a critical part of my survival, and now that I had survived, I needed to be able to let her go back to school, and she needed to be a college student once more. I think. By then my mother had arrived, and was involved in “doing things,” in order to do something with her feelings of loss and despair over the condition I was in. Looking at me, and talking to the doctors, she did not think I would be able to return to our apartment, which was up one flight of stairs in a house dating back to polygamy days, that had been converted to apartments.

Both Alyssa and I loved it, though; we loved the beautiful view of the mountains out of the octagonal bay window, and the 1940s retro feel to the huge kitchen. What we have saved of that place is pieces of cloth; I have a prayer shawl made from one panel of window hangings that were not quite drapes and not quite curtains. She has the unusual print that she had chosen to be her bedspread. The synagogue found temporary places for the cats. And helped my mother clear out the apartment and put everything in storage.

Notes for further stuff:

Holy Cross hospital, first up on my feet, parallel bars. Intensive therapy, being psychic.