“You May Marry My Daughter, the Day You Can Walk Up the Aisle”: by ELISE PIQUET

Courtesy: Medical Miracles, from Readers Digest 1981. November.

From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and human triumphs.

Selected and edited by the editors of Readers Digest

On July 9, 1976, in the Chicago suburb of Bellwood, the car 21-year-old Peter Saraceno was driving suddenly skidded.  It hit a utility pole, then smashed into a large advertising-sign pole and was demolished.  Peter was critically injured when he was thrown 66 feet into the pavement.

Peter’s widowed mother, Louise, rushed to nearby West lake community Hospital to find the emergency-room staff working feverishly to save her son.  It was a near-impossible task; Peter was in a deep coma, and there was severe damage to the area of the brain that controls muscle coordination and tone, speech and memory.  The doctor’ prognosis was “guarded.”

  Even if he lived, they said, peter would probably remain paralyzed, speechless and totally dependent on others for care.

Peter had excellent doctors, devoted nursing care, the most modern equipment and medical attention possible.  But for Louise Saraceno it was not enough.  A lawn chaise was moved into Peter’s room, and for the next four months Louise never left her son.  It was as if she had a sick and helpless baby—a-six-foot-one-inch, 208-pound baby.

Louise’s job had been to make a home for her five children, helped by Social Security and a large Italian-American family.  Now, her oldest daughter, 20-year-old Ammamarie, quit her job to care for her three younger sisters.

Louise also counted as part of her family 21-year-old Linda Frachalla, who had become engaged to peter three years earlier.  Linda had a full-time job with Presbyterian-St. Luke’s hospital in Chicago, where peter had been a security guard at the time of his accident.  He had recently finished a hitch in the Marine Reserves and was waiting to be accepted into the police academy.  Peter idolized Linda and, in turn, he was her whole world.

Linda drove to Westlake Hospital each day after work to help Louise with the unconscious, immobile peter.  Many times during the night, they would struggle on the high bed to bathe and powder him and to rub on lotions.  Linda manicured Peter’s nails, and when the bandages from his head were removed, she had a stylist cut his hair.  “I wanted to dress him up so that when he regained consciousness, he’d feel good,” Linda explained.

Louise and Linda brought in Peter’s favorite Italian dishes, knowing how important food had always been to him, and they would hold them under his nose hoping the smells would penetrate his subconscious memory.  And all along, the two women talked to peter, as he lay deep in his coma.  Over and over, for hours on end.  “Peter,” they would say, “you’ve been in a terrible accident, and you can’t talk or move, but it’s not going to be like this forever.  We’re right here.  Don’t be afraid.”

Then one night in September, Louise put on the television and switched to one of Peter’s favorite programs. “Kojak.”  As she adjusted the colors of the set, she saw Peter’s eyes blink and move.  She flicked the set again.  He blinked again.  Louise ran down the corridor calling the nurse.  After 2 ½ months, Peter was coming to!

By October, as he gradually became fully conscious, his eyes would follow Linda or his mother around the room and he could be fed baby food.  He had to speech.  His body, arms and legs were paralyzed, but he could move his right hand ever so slightly, and extend the index finger on command.  And he used that finger to push letters on a magnetic blackboard that Louise had brought him.  With Peter tied and propped in his wheelchair, she would ask, “Who am I, Peter?” “Mom,” she would answer, pinching his lips to form the shape of the sound as Peter grunted a response.  “Spell it, Peter,” Haltingly, Peter would move his hand to the board in his lap and with one finger crookedly spell M-O-M.

This was all Peter could do in January 1977 when he entered the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) for intensive therapy.  He was put in the charge of Dr. Bhupendra K Agarwal, a physiatrist—a doctor especially trained in rehabilitation.  Working with home were nurses, psychologists, vocational counselors and RIC’s bioengineering center.

Although he knew where he was, Peter tended to fade in and out of consciousness.  But as his damaged brain began to heal itself, he was given daily physical, occupational and speech therapy.  He perked up most when Louise came for visits three or four times a week of when Linda arrived each night from work.  Eight times Lind took him in his wheelchair to see his favorite movie, ‘Rocky’.

The first vocal sound he made came in February.  It was “Ah.”  Peter’s speech disorder was sysarthria, a type of oral muscle weakness or paralysis.  It takes over a hundred muscles to form the words we say aloud, and Peter had to relearn the motor movements.  By March, he could say three words: no, any, Ma.  The sounds were flat, toneless and very hard to understand.  But they were words.

Peter was also learning to hold up his head, by wearing a fitted radio hat with a biofeedback control.  The radio played music as long as his head remained upright.  The music stopped when his head tilted, a constant reminder to keep it steady.  His comprehension was growing, and he was becoming impatient to go home for a visit.

On March 8, 1977, Peter saw his home for the first time in eight months.  The house was filled with 142 relatives, friends and neighbors.  Even a blind aunt who hadn’t been out of her house in five years came.  “When she bent down to touch Peter’s face as he lay on his cot, we all cried,” says Louise.  Even Peter, for the first time since the accident, cried out loud.  Later a cousin started singing “My Way,” and the others jointed in.  Peter, who couldn’t sing a word, kept time with his hand.  Then everybody broke down and embraced all over again.

After that celebration Peter’s spirits soared.  He began to work in phrases and was able to feed himself with a spoon in a special holder strapped like a splint to his hand.  During physical therapy, he would roll over on a floor mat to push himself into a sitting position.  He exercised his arms by lifting weights strapped to his wrists and, to strengthen his hands, he worked with a material similar to Silly Putty.  By May, Peter was allowed to work at home.

Linda withdrew her savings and brought a 28-foot pool for her mother’s back yard.  Then she quit her hob, and with one of her last paychecks she brought Peter five bathing suits and two floating mattresses.  “I wanted to be with him, to help him do the exercises and everything.  But I wanted it to be fun.”

Fun it wasn’t, but at least Peter was home.  Linda stayed in Louise’s house, working with her to help with Peter’ feeding, hygiene, exercise and emotional support.  Relatives were in and out of the house, and Peter’s friends were always on hand to lift him from bed to wheelchair to couch, and to drive home to the pool at Linda’s house.  After sex weeks he returned to RIC for more intensive therapy.

Back at RIC in December, Peter was beginning to be his old self again, laughing and teasing as he whizzed around in his wheelchair—feeling impulsive, affectionate, competitive, and male.  He also felt that he was in the home stretch as an inpatient.

He was right.  There were just two more hard months at RIC, months in which his speech improved ad he began to walk again.  This was what Peter was most eager for, and he nagged everyone for an aluminum walker.  He earned it after weeks of walking for ten feet between parallel bars.  And once the walker was his, the only way to stop him from practicing was to remove it forcibly.  He was determined to walk again because Linda’s father had told him, “The day you can walk up the aisle with her, you may marry my daughter,” peter knew the church; it had a long aisle.

On February 21, 1978, Peter left RIC in his walker.  He would return for checkups every three months.  Day after day, his speech improved.  His appetite for work was enormous.  So was his appetite for food.  By summer he weighed over 200 pounds, up from 140 only a year before.  He was strong and healthy—and readily to walk up that aisle.

On July 16. 250 joyful relatives and friends watched as Peter entered the side door of Our Lady of Pompeii Church on his walker.  Tears streaming down her face, Louise stood in a front pew and watched bridesmaids walk past her.  ‘Smile, honey, smile,” she kept saying, wanting them to show on their faces all that she felt beneath her tears.  In her bridal finery, supported on her father’s arm, Linda smiled through her tears as she passed Louise.  She walked under an arch of flowers to Peter.  Then together, with his best man supporting him, they climbed three steps to the altar.

When the ceremony ended, with Linda next to him, Peter slowly began the long walk up the aisle in his walker.  Almost everyone was crying now.  From a side aisle of the church floated a young soprano voice: “I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times.  I’ll take you just the way you are.”

Peter and Linda are now living an apartment in Melrose Park, with their baby daughter, Nicole Annette Saraceno, born September 14, 1980.  As Peter continues to improve, his doctors are amazed at his progress.  He can now get around without the aid of his walker of cane, event though his walking will never be completely normal.  In addition, his speech has improved considerably.  As Dr. A. Afshar, Peter’s doctor at Westlake Community Hospital once said, “The case of Peter Saraceno is more than a miracle of modern medicine.  It is an awesome triumph of the human spirit.”