Emilie Gossiaux, 21, lay in a bed in the surgical intensive-care unit at Bellevue Hospital Center. She could not see. She could not hear. Beyond asking for water, she spoke very little. Her boyfriend, Alan Lundgard, 21, took her left palm in his.
Gossiaux was riding her bicycle in Brooklyn on the morning of October 8 when an 18-wheel truck making a right turn struck her. Once she arrived at Bellevue, her heart stopped for about one minute after she went into cardiac arrest. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, a stroke and multiple fractures in her head,pelvis and leg.
Gossiaux's mother said that on the second day a nurse told her that her daughter was gone,and asked about organ donations.Five weeks later, Gossiaux was still alive. But her future looked grim. Her parents were planning on taking her back home to the New Orleans area and placing her in a nursing home. At the time, a doctor told her family that she was not a candidate for rehabilitative treatment because there was no way to communicate with her.
Lundgard had spent every night at the hospital. Nobody had told him what the nurse said that second night. Nobody had the heart to.Gossiaux and Lundgard met in 2006 in Colorado at a summer arts program for high school students. She was born in Metairie, Los Angeles, and raised in Terrytown, both suburbs of New Orleans. He was born in California but grew up in Midland, Mich. He loved her voice, one of his friends called it milk and honey. They met again in 2007 at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art as freshman art students. They had been a couple since this February, and soon moved in together. The loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where they lived and drew and painted was filled with light. The morning of the accident, she had been riding her bike to an art studio, where she had an internship.
When Gossiaux was a little girl, there were times her parents thought she was asleep in bed, but she was not. She was drawing her own comic strips, sometimes in the closet, sometimes with the shades open by the light of the moon. She has been hearing-impaired since she was a child, and had been wearing hearing aids since kindergarten. As she grew older, her hearing worsened.
In May,she had surgery to receive a cochlear implant, an electronic device known as a bionic ear, in her left ear. She took the fall semester off from Cooper to recuperate.
After the accident, Gossiaux had not allowed anyone to put in her cochlear implant or the hearing aid she wore in her other ear. Lundgard and her parents, Eric and Susan Gossiaux, feared that the accident had left her blind. Lundgard read about Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan on the Internet - to communicate, Sullivan used her finger to spell words on Keller's palm. He did not think it would work. But about 3 a.m. that November morning in her hospital room, leaning over her bed and holding her left hand, he decided to try.
With his index finger he spelled, one capital letter at a time, the words "I LOVE YOU." "Oh,you love me?" she told him. "That's so sweet. Thank you." It was the first time she had responded in any significant way to the many attempts to communicate with her. In her disoriented state, she thought he was a kind stranger.
"It wasn't even a conversation," Lundgard said. "It was just that one exchange which alerted me to the fact that she was not damaged to such an extent that it was beyond her ability to recover." Lundgard later had a longer conversation with Emilie Gossiaux, in which he finger-spelled questions and she responded. It took a long time to spell one sentence, but she understood what he wrote on her palm, telling him what year it was and where she was born.
Shortly after, she allowed her hearing aid to be put in her right ear. In an instant,she was back.
"When she came to, it was like a party in the hospital," said Lundgard, who is taking a year off from Cooper to help his girlfriend; he is a seasonal employee at The New York Times, working as an art assistant."All the nurses came in; they were,like, dancing and screaming." Emilie Gossiaux never went to a nursing home. She was transferred to NYU Langone Medical Center's Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine on East 17th Street,where she has been undergoing physical therapy.
Fate seems a meager word to describe the great mystery of their lives. On the morning of the accident, Lundgard put her helmet on her, strapping it on tight.A bus driver at the Louisiana school district where Susan Gossiaux works - a woman Emilie Gossiaux's mother had never met - donated 106.5 sick days so that she could be by her daughter's side. After the nurse told her that her daughter was gone, Susan Gossiaux was whispering in her ear when Emilie Gossiaux suddenly raised her arm."I had the head doctor of surgical ICU say, ‘Miracles happen,"' Susan Gossiaux, 59,said.
On Saturday afternoon, Lundgard sat at the edge of the bed next to Emilie Gossiaux at the hospital on 17th Street. "I feel like a newborn baby, just starting over," she said softly.
The big rig had nearly killed her 71 days ago. Now she lay in bed, teasing Lundgard about the crush she had on him in sophomore year, laughing about a joke one of her therapists had told her. She spoke of wanting to graduate from Cooper, of wanting to sculpture again, of wanting to join the Peace Corps. She believes she will get her vision back.
"They told me that there was a very small chance, but if there's a chance, then I'll believe in it," she said, "and I'll have hope in it." Emilie Gossiaux reached for his arms. He leaned over the bed. "You want to get up?" he asked.
"No," she said. "I want a hug."
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