Finding Emilie
2024-03-22 00:39:35
Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.
Hey, it's Lulu. This is Radiolab and I am about to hit play on what I think is an all-time
favorite Radiolab. It is certainly one we've heard about from listeners over and over again.
It was originally aired in 2011 and I'm not going to say much more except that we're going to launch
you into the story and then we have two pretty wild updates. So think of this as a trilogy,
the Emily Trilogy. Here we go with part one, In the Wall.
Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich.
This is Radiolab. Today, sort of a love story. Here's the guy.
My name is Alan Lundgaard. Do you want to...
Do you want to say anything more than that?
I don't know. Is this for, like, a credit?
No, sometimes we'll open it up and let people introduce themselves.
Oh, I don't know. I don't have a title.
Okay.
All right. So that's Alan. The girl, Emily, we'll meet her a bit later for reasons that
will become clear. The story begins on a fall day in Brooklyn.
And so the day in question, I guess it was the morning of October 8th.
They're both living in this one room loft in Brooklyn.
And we woke up and, you know...
Both 21.
Went about our daily routine and prepared to go.
He was in art school. She was taking some time off from art school to work for a local artist.
So she would take the bike and I would take the train.
What was the morning like?
It was a beautiful day. It was, you know, the sun was low in the sky, so there were,
you know, long shadows. I strapped on her helmet and adjusted it, took her bike out for her.
We kissed each other goodbye and said, I love you. And I watched her ride down the street
in this early morning. And then, you know, on I went down into the subway.
Six hours later, he's working in the studio doing some sculpture.
And he gets a call from a cop.
And he just said, Emily Gassio, she had an accident.
She's at Bellevue. This is the address.
And I said, oh, I mean, do you have any more information?
He just told me that it was bad.
I was carrying a bunch of stuff and I just dropped everything and started running.
Now, Alan and Emily had only been together nine months.
But when it started, says Alan, it was just so immediate.
The night they got together, they both just kind of knew.
It was sort of like a weird, prophetic kind of thing where I think it was the first day that
the schools had a snow day. It was snowed out. It was kind of like this past blizzard,
you know, sort of like city shuts down, magical kind of thing.
He'd gone out with some friends just as the snow was coming down.
And we were trapped at this party.
And that's where he bumped into Emily.
Pint sized, these big, like iridescent eyes and a very kind of.
I have trouble describing her voice.
It's almost as if I know you guys are audio people, but it's like stereo almost.
Truth is, they've known each other for a while.
But that night, says Alan, fireworks all of a sudden.
And it felt right.
So you had you had a feeling this wasn't just a thing.
This was a thing.
Right, right. Or the thing.
The thing.
Right.
The thing.
The thing.
The soul thing.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, Emily, there've always been boys around Emily.
That's Susan Gaccio, Emily's mom.
She says at first when Emily told her about Alan, she thought, OK, so that's another boy.
Emily seemed to have that effect on boys,
perhaps because she didn't really seem to need them.
Here is someone who's been obsessed with art and has given up everybody in her life for art.
At the age of six.
She was creating her own comic books.
In junior high school, she took drawing classes every night.
And then in high school.
She left us friends, boyfriends.
To go to a high school of the arts in Florida.
No one stands in the way of her art.
It's all she sees.
It's all she focuses on.
But then she visited Emily in May, a few months before the accident, and she met Alan.
I met Alan and he was delightful.
But there was a different look that I'd never seen in Emily's eyes before when she looked at him.
And I didn't like it.
Tell us about the accident from your perspective.
For my for when I.
Yeah, I was at work.
Are you in New Orleans?
Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans.
And I get a telephone call and I looked and I saw it was Alan.
Alan has never called me before.
Answered the phone.
I said, hello, Alan.
And he said, you have to come.
Emily was hit by a truck.
18 wheeler, semi truck.
And I took a breath and I said, Alan, is Emily dead?
And he said, no, but you need to get here as soon as possible.
Six hours later, her and her husband, Emily's dad,
were at Bellevue Hospital here in Manhattan.
They brought us into her room in surgical ICU.
We all went in.
She was just lying in bed.
And there were tubes.
Tubes down her throat.
Coming in and out.
And her face was so swollen.
Emily.
Covered in blood.
Weighed probably at the time of the accident about 100 pounds.
And she then weighed 128.
She had swollen 28 pounds.
She had multiple fractures in her leg and her pelvis and the left side of her face.
They had opened her abdomen.
And they had taken her intestines out and put them on top of her body.
So that she could breathe.
And she was just lying completely still, you know.
That first 48 hours, nothing moved.
Nothing.
We took up shifts, you know.
Her mother would be there in the day and her father in the evening.
And then I would be there with her at night.
Her eyes weren't even flickering.
And as she sat there watching Emily not move, she says she kept thinking,
why?
I've got these four kids and everything bad seems to happen to Emily.
Starting at six months.
Well.
Ear infections.
Then sinus infections.
Then asthma.
By kindergarten, Emily was losing her hearing for reasons no one could quite figure out.
She had to get hearing aids.
On both sides.
But somehow, her mom says, all this just made Emily more fierce.
If anyone can conquer this, it's Emily.
I think on the second day, they started to take her off her medication.
Expecting to see some sort of reaction from her.
And nothing.
Nothing.
There was a nurse.
And the nurse said that Emily was gone.
And asked me about organ donations.
And I said, yes.
And so I worked up enough courage to go into what they call the track room, which is where
the residents usually are.
And there was one woman resident sitting at a computer.
And I went and I said, when are you going to let Emily go?
And she said, we will have a family meeting tomorrow morning.
And we'll talk then.
And so I said, OK.
And I left.
And I went back.
And I'm sitting with Emily, side of her bed.
And I'm telling her, Emily and I read the book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, when she
was a sophomore.
And I remember the ending of the book.
There's a land of the living.
There's a land of the dead.
And the bridge is love.
And that love is the only thing that survives.
And it's kind of the way it goes.
And so I was sitting there with Emily.
And I was telling this to her.
I was saying this and talking in her ear and saying this.
And talking to her and telling her that I would love her eternally, through all time,
that our love would never end.
And Emily raised her left hand.
It was chaos.
I was yelling for the nurse.
I saw it.
I saw her move.
That was really one of the really abrupt moments.
Now they knew.
Emily was not dead.
Emily was alive.
But how alive?
Over the next few days, says Alan, she slowly started moving more.
Not really in response to anything.
She'd writhe in bed, scratch her leg where there was a wound.
We would hold her hand down and she'd slap.
She'd slap our hands away.
But when they tell this to the doctors, the doctors would say, that's not indicative of
any kind of mental functioning.
Could just be a reflex, really.
So the medical team began trying to determine just how damaged was she.
The ophthalmologist teams were coming in and they were trying to get Emily's eyes to
our pupils to respond and they weren't responsive.
And so I knew what that meant.
What did that mean?
It meant she could be blind.
So Emily couldn't see, couldn't hear.
Because remember, she wore hearing aids.
Why didn't you just put those in?
We tried.
I mean, we tried many times to put it in, but she just wouldn't allow it.
What would you do exactly when you did it?
Flail her head, shake around.
Kick and she would hit.
Had a lot of bruises on my body where she'd kicked me and pinched me.
So we stopped.
Every once in a while we would go back to it.
But there was the question, you know, maybe she couldn't hear anymore.
What do you do to a person who's, you don't know what's going on inside her and you can't
get to her?
You send her to a nursing home and, you know, that's where she would have remained.
And after several weeks in the ICU, Emily.
She was stable.
That meant they had to make a decision.
Once you become stable, then you have to move off surgical ICU and out of the hospital
to either a rehabilitation or to a nursing home.
So that became the new question.
Where would she go?
Could she be repaired, so to speak, in which case she'd go to rehab?
Or is this it for her?
In which case she'd go to a nursing home.
Now, making that call medically.
Is sometimes tricky.
That's Dr. Michal Eisenberg.
She's a physician at NYU and it's her job to make that call.
And she says one of the key criteria for getting someone into rehab.
To do rehab on somebody, you need to have them reacting to you.
A person needs to be able to participate in a meaningful way for three hours of therapy
a day.
They have to be able to follow commands because that's how you rehabilitate someone.
If the person can't hear, if the person can't see, then there's no way to communicate with
her.
And so they made the assessment that she could not go to rehab.
And that Emily should go to a nursing home.
So I sent my husband back to New Orleans to look for a nursing home.
That they could bring her back to.
They just kept it all secret from me that they were going to take her away from me.
I mean, how do you tell someone who loves your daughter that much that we're taking
her away?
But it was not just one life that we had in our hands.
It was two lives.
We felt that that would be the best thing for him.
And Alan could hate us.
Maybe as a way for him to bridge and let go of that grief.
But then, as the doctors were prepping Emily to move her to a nursing home, they had to
remove her tracheotomy, which was helping her breathe.
And she all of a sudden started talking.
Really?
She spoke.
Yes.
What was she saying?
She would curse.
Don't touch me, you blanky blank, you know.
She would say stop.
This was in response to someone touching her?
Touching her.
And if she wasn't cursing, says Alan?
She would call everybody Miss Dashwood.
Certain people that were touching her were Miss Dashwood.
What's...
Is it...
From Sense and Sensibility.
But quoting Jane Austen.
Yeah, we had watched the movie like a couple months previous to this.
So somehow she was locked in the movie.
And it was just the assumption of the doctors that she was just sort of mentally damaged.
But if she's calling people Miss Dashwood, doesn't that at least mean something?
No.
It wasn't enough to say that Emily could follow a command like sit up, raise your right hand.
So the plan was still the nursing home?
Right.
I mean, no.
Every possibility had not been exhausted.
I can see him.
He was sitting across the room and his jaws were just clenched.
I just was not going to give up.
And he was saying, you have to give her a chance.
You have to give her the chance.
Do you have a plan?
No, I had no plan whatsoever.
I was lost.
This experience was just completely traumatic to me emotionally.
But at the same time, I was going to help her in whatever way I could.
The only trajectory I had was to help her.
And one night, just a few days before Emily was going to be discharged to a nursing home,
away from him.
I was there alone with her and it was 3 a.m. or something.
And she was calm.
She wasn't trying to fight me away or anything.
I had helped her fix a thing that was wrong with her.
Mouth wiring.
It was like a wire that was poking her and I fixed it for her.
And he says at that moment, something occurred to him.
It really just was like in the recesses of my mind.
He thought of the story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan.
He'd read about it a few days earlier online.
And he thought, hmm, what if I tried what Annie Sullivan did with Helen Keller on Emily?
I took her left hand with my left hand and I leaned over.
And using her wrist as the baseline for the words.
And his finger as the pen.
I just wrote, I waited a second.
L waited a second.
O waited a second.
V, E waited a second.
U.
Then, according to Alan, she said to him.
She said, oh, you love me, thank you.
She literally replied.
Yeah, she replied immediately.
She has, does she know who you are?
No, she has no idea who I am.
But now he had a way to get to her.
So he could figure out how much of her was actually there.
And maybe even prove it to the doctors.
You know, I had to have something that was conclusive to present to them.
The following evening, I took out my cell phone and it has a record function on it.
And I started recording.
Question after question to determine her cognitive ability.
What is your name?
What, W-H-A-T.
Hi.
Is, I asked.
Hey.
You finger spelled every letter?
Yeah.
Car.
What is.
Your.
What is your name?
Halloween.
Let me spell it for you.
She's writing her name on the palm of my hand.
Alan called me at four o'clock in the morning.
Said you have to come now.
I have proof.
Now going to ask her what year it is.
What.
Now I'm going to write year.
Year.
Is.
Is.
Is.
Is.
Question mark.
Two thousand and ten.
Very good.
Two thousand and ten.
Emily, very good.
Very, very good.
You know where you are.
Question mark.
I don't know.
I don't know where I am.
Okay, right now I'm going to write hospital.
Got there about 4.45 in the morning.
Alan is over there by the bed continuing to finger spell and talk to her.
And she, she calls him Alan.
She knows that this person who is finger spelling on her hand is named Alan.
But Alan can't get her to understand who he really is, that it's her Alan.
I'm just going to write my name again, Alan.
Like she just couldn't make that mental jump to connect her past life with her present.
Alan, what ethnicity are you?
Are you Asian?
Am I Asian?
Then tell her no.
Next thing I hear her say is, pull me out of the wall.
She kept saying, pull me out.
Please pull me out of here.
It's dark in here.
Pull me out.
Help me.
I know you can do it.
Pull me out of the wall.
I kept saying I can't.
I would write on her hand, I can't.
Alan starts to sob.
And I'm crying too.
What are you thinking at this point?
It wasn't enough.
That wasn't enough.
It wasn't enough.
And I said, Alan, ask her about her hearing aids.
And.
So he finger spells hearing aid.
And she said, okay.
She agreed to put the hearing aid in for the first time.
So we put it in and switched it on.
He said, Emily.
Emily, can you hear me?
It's me, Alan.
And immediately.
Everything came back to me.
I was there.
I remembered everything.
The door opened and Emily stepped out.
She was back.
Yeah, it's just like hearing his voice.
I knew it was him.
And I, and then he said my mom was there.
And I heard her say what I had been waiting for her to say all those weeks.
I screamed, mommy, mommy.
She said, mama.
No, I couldn't believe they were there the whole time.
We asked Emily before she came back, where was she?
I didn't know where I was, if I could see at all.
I mean, all I knew is that I was sleeping and I was always dreaming.
She says people would come to her in her dreams and say,
Don't, don't touch that.
Stop scratching your wounds.
My dreams, they blend in with reality.
She says she knew somehow that there were people around her,
but she couldn't get to them.
And that she also knew she was in a dream.
Why am I still sleeping?
That she couldn't somehow wake up from.
I felt helpless.
I felt really helpless.
Were you waiting for someone like that?
I mean, were you?
I was waiting for some communication, you know?
And I was relieved.
Ellen, she's a miracle to me.
Emily's now at the Rusk Institute,
which is one of New York City's leading rehab centers.
And on the day we visited her, she just had a breakthrough.
Today was the first day I could stand on both legs and walk,
actually walk.
I walked 100 feet today.
After rehab, she'll be moving into an apartment
in Lower Manhattan with Ellen.
She's blind, and the chances of her seeing again are slim.
But Ellen plans to spend his time helping her cope
and helping her find a new way to make art.
Emily, can you introduce yourself?
Do you want me to say my name is Emily Garcia?
Yeah, just so we have it all on tape.
They asked me if I would have a title,
and I couldn't think of one, but I thought of one.
A title?
Yeah, I'll do mine.
My name is Ellen Lungard.
I'm the boyfriend.
My name is Emily Garcia.
I'm the girlfriend.
You're the star of the show.
Oh, is that what I should say?
No.
When we come back, Emily's story continues.
On this week's On the Media,
what happened to the offbeat, irreverent,
speaking-truth-to-power alt-weeklies
that used to populate newsstands across the country?
The Voice was their guide to life,
from people who cared about what they were covering
with such intensity that there were fistfights
and brawls inside the paper.
That's gone.
The end of an era on this week's On the Media from WNYC.
Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
Lulu Radiolab, we are following the story of Emily Gassio,
and a few years after her accident,
from her emergence from the wall
that her mind was trapped in, we followed up with her.
And we'll call this part, part two, walking fishes.
Of all the stories we've ever done,
I think this one has gotten the most response.
And when we left that story,
Emily had emerged from the coma and begun to recover.
But she was blind.
Totally blind, right?
Yeah.
And like no light, nothing coming in?
No.
Okay.
Needless to say, it was a very big adjustment.
I just had to develop my own ways
to navigate throughout the world and trust myself.
And being a visual artist,
she had to develop new ways to draw.
I had crayons.
And if you draw the crayons hard enough,
you can feel the wax on the paper.
Yeah.
But then one day in the summer of 2012, she gets a call.
From the Lighthouse School in New York City.
The Lighthouse School?
Yeah, it's a school for the blind.
Her mom had found out that they were trying out
this brand new technology.
I think they were doing a study for the FDA.
Very experimental, and her mom signed her up.
Long story short, Emily shows up to the Lighthouse School
one day and walks into this room,
and a guy named Ed gives her this thing.
He gives me his device.
Can you describe it?
I mean, is it a big helmet?
No, it's not.
It's just like a regular pair of sunglasses.
Though they were a little heavier
than your normal sunglasses, she says,
because right on the front, like on the bridge of the nose,
was a little camera pointing forward.
And then attached to the sunglasses was a little wire.
That ran out of the camera
and down to this little square piece of metal.
I think it's made out of titanium,
and it's just like the size of a postage stamp,
or a little bit thicker, though.
Ed explained to her that the little piece of titanium
was filled with thousands of electrodes.
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