The Apartment : Recovery: On the third floor of a Valley hospital, paralyzed accident victims and their families try to complete the transition from hospital to home.

For some paralyzed accident victims, the long road to recovery leads to the door of a budget motel sort of a room on the third floor of the Northridge Hospital Medical Center.

“The Apartment” is where some patients learn whether their lives will ever return to normal. Behind a locked door that keeps nurses and doctors at bay, patients practice independent living at the stove, sink and VCR. Just as important, they also must relearn roles as spouse and lover to their mates and parent and disciplinarian to their children.

It can be a harrowing and exhilarating experience.

“I was scared to death” before moving in, said Marlene Rudolph, 38, a slender, dark-haired woman who fell 60 feet down a cliff in Big Sur in September and was paralyzed from the neck down.

She stoically withstood five months of round-the-clock medical care and frustrating rehabilitation, which included teaching her to paint with a brush in her mouth and to steer a wheelchair with a chin control because her arms and legs were now useless.

But her scheduled weekend stay in the apartment panicked her. Rudolph worried that her husband, Paul, 42, who is slight and suffers from multiple sclerosis, would not be able to transfer her leaden body from the wheelchair to the bed. She couldn’t help thinking, what if something went wrong and she fell, again?

“But it was wonderful,” she said on a recent Sunday morning, between bites of lox and bagel fed to her by her sister, Maurica. Paul Rudolph had cooked steaks for dinner the night before. When it came time to retire, he deftly performed the special lift to move his wife from the wheelchair to the bed and she slept for the first time since her accident without pain pills or sleeping pills.

“Now I’ll be comfortable going home,” Marlene Rudolph said with confidence. “Until yesterday, I wanted to stay longer” in the hospital.

Officially called the Transitional Living Apartment, the room opened two years ago. Patients are encouraged to use it as part of their rehabilitation. It cost $9,000 to convert a hospital room into a one-room living area that is unique among rehabilitation units in the San Fernando Valley.

It reflects a trend toward bringing the comforts of home to the antiseptic hospital ward. UniHealth America, the company that owns the Northridge hospital, is so taken with the concept that it is using the facility as a model for similar programs at other hospitals, said hospital spokeswoman Leslie Wither.

The apartment, created by contributions from the Thank God I Care volunteer group, is located down the hall from more conventional rehabilitation facilities, such as parallel bars that help victims relearn how to walk. The living area contains a bed, a sofa that converts into a foldaway bed, a television and VCR and a washer, dryer and sink. Purposely, there is no fancy equipment for the wheelchair-bound quadriplegics and paraplegics who use the room.

“This apartment is the way most homes are,” said Karen Barnes, manager of the Spinal Cord Injury Program. “That’s what most people go home to.”

Not everyone has as easy an experience as the Rudolphs. One woman emerged from her first weekend stay with her paralyzed husband with complaints to the nurses that she was totally exhausted. She had become aware for the first time of what it would be like to cope with a disabled mate. Then there are the more mundane problems. One woman arrived unprepared for the fact that there is no bathroom in the room. The hospital had to scramble for a spare bathrobe for her to wear during the night when she left to use the restroom down the hall.

Typical of victims seen in the rehabilitation unit is Mickey Schechter, a 27-year-old plumber who was rock climbing in Chatsworth last Aug. 5 when the rope he was rappelling with gave way. His girlfriend, Melodie Gibson, 27, watched in “helpless fascination” as he plummeted 65 feet to the ground. “Don’t you die on me,” she screamed when he didn’t breathe for nearly a minute.

Finally, he came to with a deep groan, having broken bones all over his body. His heels were crushed, both wrists were shattered and his pelvis was split. He is now confined to a wheelchair and is partially paralyzed.

“I used to get upset and angry because this happened,” said Gibson, who was considering marriage to Schechter before the accident. “I wanted him the way he was.”

In the hospital, she thought about leaving, and Schechter admitted later he would not have blamed her if she sought companionship elsewhere. “I could either go or stay,” she said. “I chose to stay.”

Anticipating an evening alone with her, Schechter reserved the apartment for Valentine’s Day, six months after his accident. His parents arrived with scampi and a bottle of sparkling apple cider--no alcohol allowed--then quickly departed. The couple sat holding hands and Gibson propped her feet up on his wheelchair.

They had spent one weekend together previously in the room. “To be intimate again was wonderful,” Gibson said.

Rudolph’s accident occurred a month to the day after Schechter’s fall. She was hiking with her two children--Tammy, 13, and Shawn, 16--when they lost the trail and plunged 60 feet down the hill. Shawn shattered his elbow, but still managed to hike out for help as Tammy, uninjured, stayed with her mother. Marlene Rudolph knew after she hit the ground that she was paralyzed.

Though on the brink of death several times, she survived and has even surprised doctors by her recovery. Once offended by the idea of using a mouth stick--a grip for the teeth to which a paintbrush can be attached--she now paints regularly. Her next goal is to learn to eat on her own, using a mechanical aid that lifts her arm for her.

When she uses it, she maneuvers her fork uncertainly toward her mouth like an astronaut docking a capsule in space. It is awkward, but learning to live as a quadriplegic means learning to find personal dignity in something other than dainty table manners. The fact that she has come this far has inspired everyone who knows her.

“She’s the one I look up to,” said Schechter, who met Rudolph in the hospital. “If she can keep it going, I think what I have is nothing.”

She remains dependent on those around her, something that once would have infuriated her. “Since I was a baby, my mom has taken care of me,” said Tammy, reflecting on their role reversal. “It’s kind of like a pay-back time.”

Marlene Rudolph reserved the apartment two days after Schechter. While not luxurious, the room is comfortable. The only item that would be out of place in a home is the emergency beeper above the bed, which is connected to the nurses’ station. It is to be used only in a medical crisis. Inability to operate the washer and dryer does not count as a medical emergency and patients must learn to deal with these problems themselves.

Rudolph had the opportunity to use the apartment twice before, but had “chickened out,” she said.

She worried about what might happen inside that room when she and her family tried to rediscover normalcy.

All she had to do to see how much she had changed was to look in a mirror, where she saw, not Marlene, but a “Raggedy Ann in a wheelchair.”

The night before her stay, in fact, she and Paul argued on the phone about her fears and she broke down and started “boohooing.”

Paul, who had always shared household duties with his wife anyway, cooked New York-style steaks for dinner, with side dishes of vegetables, a salad and cinnamon rolls for dessert.

Then the family tried to watch a movie on the VCR.

But as Marlene Rudolph began to relax and chat, everyone kept losing track of the plot so they had to start it again.

The two-hour film lasted almost four hours.

Tammy spent the night, which precluded physical intimacy between her parents. That was all right.

“What I want most is to cuddle with Paul right now, to hold him,” Marlene Rudolph said.

“I’m not worried so much about the sex; it will happen.”

“It better,” Paul Rudolph chimed in, causing her to laugh.

“When I met Paul I had no sense of humor, but he refuses to take me seriously,” she said.

“What we have to contend with I wouldn’t wish on anybody,” said Paul Rudolph. But, he added, “We don’t need people to feel sorry for her.”

Laughter helps Marlene Rudolph deal with her situation, but it doesn’t change it. Even though she has no sense of touch below her neck, she still gets pains in her body.

She also is frequently uncomfortable, subject to strange hot flashes that make her feel like her pores are wide open and spouting. But that night, for the first time since her fall, she needed no pills to help her sleep.

“It was like a little oasis,” she said the next morning. “It was like being at home.” She was at long last beginning to feel “like myself again.”

There are still hurdles ahead. Paul Rudolph’s illness is a worry. “If I get sick, my family is in deep trouble,” he said. “Right now I’m her backbone.”

Beyond that are financial concerns.

Though MediCal is taking care of the $55,000-a-month hospital bill, the program will not pay the full expenses of a live-in aide, who will be necessary for at least the first few months after Marlene Rudolph returns home.

Northridge hospital officials estimated the family will have to come up with an extra $36,000 for that.

The family also must purchase a van just to transport Marlene Rudolph home on March 7.

But after their successful stay in the apartment, the family wasn’t worrying as much about the future.

“I don’t like this. I hate it,” said Marlene Rudolph of her paralysis. “But I still can recognize how fortunate I am that I’m not alone.”