Nee Truong’s Journeys : From Vietnam to a Crippling Accident in Westwood, She’s Spent Her Life Starting Over

It was a time of high spirits in Los Angeles, the eve of the Olympics.

Nee Truong was in good spirits herself that July night in 1984, strolling up Westwood Boulevard, chatting with former schoolmates from her native Vietnam. It was the last time she took a step with her own right foot.

Daniel Lee Young, 21, came barreling down the sidewalk behind her in a red Buick Regal, killing one person and injuring more than 50 others.

Young went to jail and would later be sentenced to 106 years in prison.

Truong went to UCLA Medical Center, where her right leg was amputated above the knee and her spleen removed. Steel rods were placed in her back; she was paralyzed from the chest down. Doctors told her to start getting used to a wheelchair, because she would never walk again.

She had survived a harrowing escape from Vietnam only to be cut down on a bustling street in Los Angeles.

Today, Nee Truong can walk. Slowly, haltingly, painfully, and with the help of a chest-high brace, a prosthesis, and a walker in front of her. But she can walk.

“Lots of people think, ‘You’re not walking. You’re just using the device.’ Yes, I am,” she said in a recent interview. “But I feel different, that’s all. In standing up, after sitting in a wheelchair for four years. . . .”

She trailed off, then began again: “For spinal cord injured people, they act sad all the time. They want to stand up, they want to walk very much. But they don’t know how.”

Truong found help at last year’s Abilities Expo here, a trade show of products and services for the disabled. There, she encountered a device called the Reciprocating Gait Orthosis, or RGO.

Trained as an electrical engineer, she looked at the device’s rods and cables and saw hope.

Now 25, Truong is one of a small group of spinal cord injury sufferers getting back on their feet again through a program called PEERS (Physical and Electrical Engineering Rehabilitation Systems) that is run by Los Angeles Doctors Medical Group, a group of private physicians in Beverly Hills.

Generates Body Motion

She and five others have been making the impossible possible with the RGO, a recently invented brace that uses body motion to generate more body motion, enabling legs that have been limp for years to take steps.

But the real key to success is internal, said Dr. Paul A. Berns, medical director of the program. Those in the program must have the stubborn determination to stick with a rigorous fitness regime to develop upper-body strength and cardiovascular endurance. They must have the resilience to overcome doubts and setbacks. And they must have a streak of rebelliousness that makes them balk at the health care establishment’s standard advice: “Change your life. Realize that you’re going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.”

“The ones that have not adjusted to this, that are not content with just wheelchair sports and wheelchair activity,” Berns said, “these are the ones that usually seek out programs such as the PEERS program.

“The mainstream of medicine would not think of these people as being normally adjusted to what has happened to them.”

Nee Truong, the eldest of four children, grew up in a wealthy family in Can Tho, South Vietnam, where her father was a successful businessman. Her days were filled with school work. Mornings, she would study Vietnamese history, culture and language; afternoons, a similar program in Chinese. Then it was two hours of tutoring every night.

In 1975, when Truong was in eighth grade, the communists took over.

“They came to my house. They took everything away from us,” she recalled. “We moved. My dad quit the business to do some farming.”

But conditions became intolerable, and three years later, in desperation, the family bought a boat and, like so many other Vietnamese, fled.

“It was terrible,” Truong said with a trace of a shudder. “We don’t know where we are going. It’s really small, the boat, it’s like a fishing boat.” Eleven family members and 26 friends crowded onto it and headed into the Gulf of Thailand. In their haste, they had taken no maps, no compass, and water enough for only a day.

“We just decide to leave the country because we cannot stay. The whole goal was just to seek freedom. If any country would take us, we’d go.”

They clung to the belief that a U.S. ship would rescue them. But it was 1978, and the friendly ships were all gone.

“On the third day, we met the Thai pirates. . . . They looked for girls to take them away to their boat.” Seeing none that appealed to them, the pirates settled instead for the women’s jewelry and, inexplicably, left the boat people water to drink.

Finally, the refugees crashed in high waves on the shore of Malaysia, weary, hungry, unable to walk after sitting in the cramped boat for five days. Malaysian police greeted them with guns drawn, then took the bedraggled and empty-handed strangers to a refugee camp, where Truong’s family stayed for six months.

An aunt who had worked for the CIA sponsored their move to the United States, and the clan settled in Alhambra.

After graduating from Alhambra High School, Truong wanted to go into medicine, but her English was not fluent enough when she entered Cal State L.A. in 1980. She switched to engineering. It was shortly before she was to graduate that Daniel Lee Young changed her life.

“Three weeks away from my degree,” she recalled, “I got into the accident in Westwood. I almost lost my life with that accident. I didn’t know the guy would hit me. All I remember is I fell down, I fainted. . . . I tried to tell somebody my phone number,” but she kept losing consciousness.

“I mean, I come to this country, I try to adapt with the new environment, the new culture. . . . Then I get into an accident.”

Doctors at UCLA Medical Center repaired her body as best they could. For three months, she lived at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, where rehabilitation therapists taught her how to dress, to drive, to get around in her wheelchair. Her family moved to a more wheelchair-accessible home, in San Gabriel.

When discussion turns to the man who ran her down, she speaks emphatically:

“I don’t have to do something to (take) revenge to make me feel better. I don’t have to do something to hurt him. It’s not going to make me feel better. I’m already like this. And the feeling inside of me, to accept my handicap, of course, it’s not happy. But nothing I can do about it. So I accept that. I accept it to make me feel better.”

Daniel Lee Young was convicted of murder and 48 counts of attempted murder in 1985. He is in the medium-security California Medical Facility in Vacaville.

“It’s a very tragic thing to happen to a young, healthy person to be healthy one second and paralyzed the next,” Berns said.

“Everybody’s looking for the cure for spinal cord injury, I mean the real cure,” he said. “This is not a real cure. This is a large Band-Aid, but it’s a useful Band-Aid. The patient is at long last able to get out of the wheelchair and ambulate.”

But the grueling program “is not for everyone,” Berns said. “This program is only for people who want these kinds of choices.”

Like Training for Olympics

To climb out of a wheelchair and onto your feet, he explained, “it takes training like you would be an athlete training for the 1988 Olympics.” That means five days a week, two to three hours a day, for months. Strength, stamina and a balanced diet are essential.

“Everybody (in the program) knows that they’re not thought of as patients, they’re thought of as athletes. And what they’re doing is an athletic achievement.”

Standing, after years or even weeks of sitting, must be done gradually, explained physical therapy aide Shahid Kahn. Unused leg muscles atrophy, blood pools in lower parts of the body; standing makes blood pressure drop immediately, and dizziness follows. It takes time in the upright position, plus exercise, to regain good-enough circulation to stand.

Must Learn Balance

Balance doesn’t come automatically; it too must be learned. The patients at the Beverly Hills clinic have endured an arduous daily grind of strapping on the brace and walking back and forth inside the clinic, then around the block, over and over, for one to two hours.

It is an exhausting regimen; using a wheelchair is far easier.

So why bother? Along with spinal cord injuries and life in a wheelchair come a raft of persistent ailments: circulation problems, skin ulcers, bladder infections and painful muscle spasms. Standing and getting some exercise help.

Their attendance at the therapy sessions over the past eight months, Berns said, is the “proof of the pudding” that his patients’ general health has been good.

“The number of days that they’ve missed has been less than average people going to work and missing their job because of the flu or what have you,” he said.

The maiming of Nee Truong changed her family. Her parents have learned to talk more, to show their love for their daughter more openly. So dramatic was the change that Nee Truong recalls her time in UCLA Medical Center as a very happy time, at least for her.

“I know my family feels very bitter about it,” she said, “very upset that they bring me to this country. They want the best education for a new career for me. They didn’t expect me to sit in a wheelchair.”

Within a year after she was knocked down on Westwood Boulevard, Truong graduated from Cal State L.A. with an engineering degree. But the real, professional world was not as accepting as her school world had been. When she sought a part-time job--persistent pain in her spine won’t let her sit and work for a full day--she found only disappointment.

Computer Science Degree

She returned to Cal State L.A., this time to work on a degree in computer science. With her attention on her studies, she was able to practice sitting for longer periods. She had hoped to walk in her graduation Saturday, but an interruption in her physical therapy has made that unlikely, she said.

Meanwhile, Truong became a U.S. citizen in 1986 and altered the spelling of her name from its original transliteration, Nghi. Without rancor, she explained the connection: Her name is pronounced nee, like the knee she lost. “I said well, I have only one knee . . .” and that was what she would call herself.

Though getting back on her feet has clearly been difficult, Truong resists any suggestion of despair.

“Adjusting psychologically is a magical process that we go through,” she said. “But every time I go through difficulty, I learn. I learn how to grow up. I learn how to deal with the reality. I think people feel bitter about things, wanting desperately, so that makes their life miserable because they want something that’s beyond their reach. . . .

“I don’t want to be (paralyzed). But I can do so many things. I’m educated, I can go to school, I can find myself a job. Now, thanks to this program, I have a chance to stand up and do some walking. Well, it’s not like before. But I feel some satisfaction.”