Today is the day I complete Lisa's story. It doesn't mean that her story is over. Far from it. I can't tell you how excited I am though that I get to be the one along for the ride, to live with her, love with her, laugh with her, survive with her. I get to catalog life's events as they will happen with her.
It is also the day that Lisa will be delivering this story to her seniors at a rally. In fact, she is probably preparing in her mind the scope of the speech. See, she fashions the whole story around choice. You choose to drink and drive, or drink and not drive. It is all about responsibility and accountability to your decision making process. She is also quick to tell you she loathes the attachment of the word "accident" to DUI crashes. I had never given that a thought until I met her and heard her story.
By assigning the word accident to a DUI, it grammatically absolves the offender and slaps the victim right in the face. Think about it...I got blasted last night, decided I was only three blocks from home, hopped in the car, ran a curb, mowed down your son/daughter and the news reports it as...an accident?! Sure, I didn't mean to kill your kid, but I did make the choice to drive home and the one thing that could have prevented it would have been if I decided not to drive. This is usually where Lisa will add that DUI's are 100% preventable, yet they continue to happen at such a "fashionable" rate...but I digress.
Where we last left Lisa, she was relearning the use of her body. Battling through the recovery of a broken body, signs of nerve life began to again show up in her extremities. If you have had to do any kind of physical rehab work on your body, then you might be able to imagine having to do it with your entire body. A long and excruciating process.
At 22 years old, the collegiate, waitress and aspiring artist had a new full time job, physical therapy. On this road to recovery, it was something fairly ironic. As Lisa was finding her way literally back to her feet after six months in and out of hospitals, surgeries and therapy, her offender was finding his way out of prison for good behavior. He had been sentenced to nine months and had it commuted by three. To his credit, he did not know the extent of Lisa's injuries. See, Lisa never made it to the trial to have her moment in court, when she could stand before her offender and the judge and show them what he did to her, because the district attorney's office provided them the wrong address. By the time they arrived at the correct facility, the judgement had been levied and the only documentation on paper was that a couple had been injured in the crash, one concussion and one broken leg. Lisa's struggle to survive had been reduced to "female with one broken leg". That was the entirety of her representation in that court proceeding.
He did have a civil judgement levied against him, but to enforce that would require Lisa finding him and amazingly, he has fallen off the face of the planet. Go figure. It was up to Lisa to survive, because that's just what she does.
In the years after her initial nights in the hospital, Lisa has had a few more surgeries directly related to her injuries, even as late as about two years ago. It is expected that there are more to come and if asked, Lisa would probably just shrug, admit it sucks, but say that it has to be done. After 15 years of recovery time, Lisa still has physical issues which don't look to ever be alleviated.
-Nerve damage in both her legs has left her with severe drop foot on one side. This requires the shackles of a hard plastic leg brace to hold her foot at a 90 degree angle so she doesn't trip on herself.
-That same nerve damage has left both her legs in a state of "pins and needles". You know when your leg falls asleep and you start to get some sensation back? Yeah, that uncomfortable prickly feeling, picture living with that in both feet, 24/7. Yeah.
-Nerve damage in the legs and right arm have left muscles severely atrophied. Lisa won't be running, climbing or lifting anything heavy for the rest of her life. On one hand that's probably a cool thing, but on the other, imagine the level of dependence it creates when say, you can't even move a case of paper around your classroom and have to wait for a student to do it for you.
Doctors prepared her by saying who quite knows how her body might further break down in the future because of all the past trauma. In fact, at the age of 23, Lisa was being told that her physical body was probably more in tune with that of someone in their 30's. So now in her 30's, Lisa's body is already preparing to take on the likes of arthritis.
Yet she survives.
When she was out of the hospital and trying to find her own path again back in San Jose, Lisa had "earned" a disabled placard. The VIP parking pass that most of us joked would be so cool to have. She used it until someone got in her face, because she was "too young and didn't look like she needed it". It went in the garbage. Lisa went back to parking with the rest of us. To this day Lisa qualifies for a disabled placard, but refuses because of that instance.
And she survives.
And let me tell you something else about her that I've always found mesmorizing. She never holds a grudge against people who drink and drive. She doesn't get mad at people for drinking. Heck, she'll be the first to offer a toast and throw a beer back at a party. She can separate the person from the act and for someone who has endured so much physically, emotionally and even financially around this, I am still amazed that she can separate those aspects. Drinking and driving does not make the person bad, it means they made a bad decision. Hopefully it's one that helps them to realize the error without substantial loss, but still, if there was anyone who could just go ahead and be mad at the world and blame people for their mistakes, it would be her you would think, but no, she doesn't.
She continues to survive.
She focuses what could have been that white-hot anger, the embarressement of those who didn't think she was really disabled and uses it to hone her story. She hopes one teen in that audience today is going to hear it and use it to help themselves. Doesn't matter if they cry or not, doesn't matter if they come talk to her. It only matters that they get the message. Don't make life harder with a stupid decision. Why? Life is hard enough.
And that is the other fascinating thing about Lisa's story. There is no gauge to success. How many people have survived with Lisa because of her story? We don't know, there's no stat tracking lack of crashes. There's no way to know three years from now that a former student on his or her own 21st birthday, living in Chicago, takes the train home after celebrating because they remembered her story. There's no way to know if a family walking home from the Cubs game now survived with Lisa because that 21 year old left their car at the Cubs parking lot. There's just no way.
But as long as Lisa is here, she's here to tell her story and hope that everyone out there who hears it will survive.
So I ask:
Do you have the courage to stand in front of 3,000 high school students and try to persuade them that choosing not to drink is not only the right choice (at their age), but a life saving one also? Do you have the courage to stand in front of a room full of convicted youth, who have been hardened by their gangs, the streets and the society who tells them they are trash and try to convince them, that drugs and alcohol are not a path to success? Do you have the courage to keep an extra $20 in your purse or wallet so that if you decide the drinks are too good to pass up, you still can afford a ride home rather than choosing to "try and just make it home by focusing on the center line real hard"? Do you have the courage to not drink so that your friends, your family can let themselves off the hook for a night and know they can trust their lives to you to get them home safe?
Do you have the courage to save a life?
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