Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [142]
Some of those calling for Gabby’s resignation had online names I recognized from the roughest rhetoric of past campaigns. It’s ironic. They were the same people who disagreed with Gabby’s votes and decisions while she was in office. You’d think they’d be happy if she missed votes, since they wouldn’t like how she voted anyway.
Both Gabby and I understood why her inability to work would be a matter of public discussion. If she knew for sure she wouldn’t progress well enough to do her job, she would step down. But we just didn’t know yet.
So what was our timetable?
In May of 2012, by state law, Gabby would need to file for reelection. Certainly, a decision would need to be made by then, which would be sixteen months after the shooting. It was possible Gabby would be able to decide earlier. But that was the time frame we were looking at.
As I saw how hard Gabby was working to get back to her job, how hard her staff was working, I didn’t think it was fair to anyone—including all the people who had elected Gabby to that seat, and wanted her to represent them—to rush the decision.
As I told Gabby, “The time will come when you’ll know what the right decision is. It’ll be clear to you. Until then, you just keep getting better.”
People who had recovered well from brain injuries often wrote to Gabby, or offered to visit so they could give her pep talks. A cellist with the Houston Symphony suffered a traumatic brain injury in a 2009 motorcycle accident, but was able to return to the orchestra after eleven months. He said he’d be happy to give us a private concert to inspire us. We thanked him, and said that maybe some night up the road, we’d be honored to take him up on his kind offer.
We also heard from Mike Segal, a social worker in Houston who counsels brain-injury patients. He offered to come over and tell Gabby his story.
On February 18, 1981, when Mike was a nineteen-year-old premed student at the University of Texas at Austin, he spent the evening studying organic chemistry with his girlfriend. As he drove her back to her dorm, he saw he was low on gas, so he pulled into a convenience store parking lot.
Mike entered the store to pay for the gas, and walked into a robbery in progress. The store clerk, hiding in the restroom, heard the three robbers say they planned to “waste all witnesses.” They took Mike, the only customer, into the store’s cooler, told him to get down on his knees, and shot him, execution-style, in the back of his head. They assumed they’d left him dead.
Mike was not expected to survive, and if he did, doctors said he’d never walk or talk again. For months, he couldn’t speak at all. He couldn’t move the right side of his body. (Like Gabby, he was shot in the left side of his head.) He considered killing himself, but couldn’t figure out a way to do it.
Through a tremendous amount of hard, painful therapy, and the faith of family and friends, Mike was able to reclaim himself. His parents had to reteach him the alphabet. They helped him learn to count. Eighteen months later, he returned to college. He graduated with honors, and went on to get a master’s degree in social work. He married his girlfriend and they had a child. Some disabilities still remain—he has breathing issues, he can’t move his right arm much, he speaks a bit more slowly—but Mike’s cognitive comeback is remarkable and complete. He wanted Gabby to see him. Thirty years down the road, at age forty-nine, he was thriving.
Mike told Gabby that he doesn’t think about the three men who tried to kill him, two of whom are now out of prison. He doesn’t think about the fact that he used to be able to do five hundred things well, and now he’s down to two hundred. He thinks about all the things he can do. “I’ve come to see that everyone in life has obstacles,” he said. “I believe that’s the definition of being human. These are our obstacles, Gabby, and we just have to deal with them.”
He talked about how his father, a rabbi, had pushed him to work hard in therapy, and how he resented his father’s efforts. Now, of course, he’s grateful.