“They came in for the weekend to
see you,” he said.
“So quick?”
I thought the crash had just hap-
pened and was amazed that my par-
ents had gotten there so fast. In my
mind, hours had passed. Maybe a
day.
“Honey, you’ve been in a coma for
almost a month,” he said.
That stunned me. I started crying.I
n mid-November, with my body
stabilized, I was moved to the
Gaylord Specialty Healthcare fa-
cility in Wallingford, Connecticut,
to begin physical therapy. It was my
next ring of hell. My therapists wanted
me to try to walk with a walker. It was
difficult and painful and, for some-
one who had considered herself an
athlete, disheartening. I just couldn’t
do it.
“Am I ever going to walk normally
again?” I asked.
“We don’t know, but we’re going to
work on it,” the therapist said.
They were so damn honest.
What pulled me out of my funk was
remembering a speech I’d heard by
Nobel Prize laureate Jody Williams. In
it, she said, “Emotion without action
is irrelevant.”
She was right. Screw this, I thought.
There has to be a reason I’m still
alive. All this wasted emotion feel-
ing miserable for myself needed a
direction. The direction I chose was
gratitude.I thought of all the people who had
saved my life. The strangers who ran
to my side after the truck hit me; the
doctors and nurses who brought me
back from death more than once; the
staff at Gaylord who were doggedly
helping me walk again and relearn
basic tasks.
And then there were the strangers
who had donated their life-giving
blood. In order for me to receive
those 78 units of blood, as well as
25 bags of plasma and platelets,
more than 125 people had to donate
theirs.
Suddenly I felt a need to do some-
thing to honor them. I may not have
been able to walk yet, but I could,
from my rehab bed, organize a cycling
tour to raise money for adaptive bikes
for disabled athletes. We ended up
raising more than $10,000.
I then turned inward, concentrating
on my own recovery. One day in De-
cember, Robyn, my physical therapist,
stood behind me holding my catheter
bag in one pocket and my heart rate
monitor in the other, pushing my
wheelchair after me as I slowly inched
step-by-step across the floor with my
walker. My back wounds seeped from
underneath my dressings onto the
floor, and my head started to tingle
with weakness. Down I went, back
into my wheelchair. I heard a tender
voice saying, “You did it, Colleen ...
You did it ... all the way across the
room!” I’d finally taken more than a
step or two.88 may 2019
Reader’s Digest