Her Own Experience Helps Relatives of Comatose Patients Survive the Vigil

“When I was 16 or 17, I remember saying I want someone to benefit from my being alive,” Susan Gallant recalls.

Little did she know that a near-fatal bicycle injury to her 11-year-old son, Ted, who was comatose for four months, would lead her to that point.

“I got a lot of support from friends and relatives during those desperate months before my son got better,” Gallant said. “After he went home I told the Western Neuro Care Center people I wanted to work there. I asked them what I could do to help.”

The Tustin medical facility created the job of Family Resource Specialist and hired her to offer support to people who face long waits, as she did, to see progress in a relative or friend, most of whom are in a coma.

“I’ve walked in those shoes,” she said. “And I lived through it and developed a theory about staying positive. It is something that education and schooling can’t particularly help.”

Talking about her own experience, she said, helps others who may wait months to see a sign of recovery. She also brings her son, now 13, to talk to anxious, waiting people.

“These people are hungry for any kind of success story,” she said.

Gallant, a one-time floral designer, commuted daily for four months from her home in Corona to Tustin to be with her son, who continues to undergo therapy while attending a handicapped class at school. “He looks and acts like a normal youngster, but he’s still considered to be among the walking wounded,” she said.

Her son had two brain operations to repair damage from the bicycle fall and remained in a coma for four months.

“At first we just prayed he would live,” she said. “And one day I saw him move his foot a little. I knew it was something, even though the doctors didn’t think it meant anything.”

And weeks later, “I heard him mumble ‘Mama,’ and I started crying and running through the hallway and repeating to no one in particular that ‘he said Mama, he said Mama!’ ”

Friends and relatives visited and gave support during those first months to help her through the ordeal.

“What I learned was that at first you get a lot of support from a lot of people, and soon it dwindles until you basically stand alone each day,” she said.

Gallant considers herself “darn good” at her job--the result, she said, of finding her way through the ordeal of seeing a son in a coma for such a long time.

Now her son is talking about becoming a neurosurgeon, she said, adding, “anything can happen.”

Like the Marine Corps--sort of--Knott’s Berry Farm is looking for a few good people--to be ghouls, goblins and ghosts.

In fact, spokeswoman Pamela Baker said, Knott’s needs 150 of them for the theme park’s upcoming 16th annual Halloween Haunt.

But not to worry. “We have people coming back year after year,” she said. “The pay is peanuts, but they get to scare the daylights out of people. They all dress up in costumes and put on makeup; some of them like to become werewolves. They love it.”

Final auditions will be held tonight. Baker said she expects hundreds of people to try out, including an engineer from TRW who returns each year to play the “Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

Acknowledgments--A family gathering in La Habra served to honor Florence and Don Sandford on their 65th wedding anniversary, while comparative newlyweds Dorothy and Norman K. Worthen of Brea celebrated their golden wedding anniversary by repeating the vows they took 50 years ago. They were also honored at a family celebration.