A Mother’s Devotion Pays Off : Recovery: Carrie Williams has camped out at the hospital to help her son get well after he suffered a life-threatening brain hemorrhage.

Home for Carrie Williams, a freckled, auburn-haired woman of 44, is a parking lot behind Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills.

She is not homeless, although she only returns home to Orange once every three weeks.

The rest of the time, she spends either in a small trailer parked behind the hospital or at the bedside of her 18-year-old son, Michael, who is struggling to recover from a life-threatening brain hemorrhage that left him in a coma for six weeks.

Williams’ unusual devotion--she spends 10 hours a day coaching her son as he laboriously relearns the names of friends and regains command of his body--is credited with helping her son defy his doctors’ predictions. If he ever came out of the coma, they said, he would in all likelihood be in a permanently retarded state of development, a toddler with an athlete’s body. Instead, eight months after the hemorrhage, he is walking, feeding himself and initiating conversation.

“The neurosurgeon did not expect him to come out of the coma, much less do anything afterward,” said Williams, the mother of three, standing nearby while Michael played catch in his wheelchair with a physical therapist. “I think a lot of it is because we were there talking to him, making him know we loved him.”

“His mother has been a real positive reinforcement,” agreed Debbie Flaherty, 33, the program administrator for the Synergos Neurological Center at Holy Cross, which specializes in the treatment of injuries such as the one Michael Williams suffered. “It has helped his recovery to move along at a rapid rate.”

If this marathon urban camping expedition is a definition of a mother’s love, it also is a tale of a family’s unwavering refusal to accept the conventional wisdom. And of their belief that if tragedies can strike out of the blue, so can miracles grow on barren ground.

“I always felt he was going to get well,” said Williams, a cheerful woman with a strong religious faith and a belief that things happen for reasons. “How well, I don’t know. He’s going to get as well as he has to in order to do whatever he has to do.”

It was Oct. 9, 1990, when Michael Williams, a happy teen-ager with a part-time job at a local sandwich shop who was preparing for college, came home from school and complained of a headache. Luckily, both his mother and his father, Bill, a landscape contractor, were at home. On most days, the house would have been empty, and Michael probably would have died.

Michael took two aspirin and lay down to rest. Minutes later, Bill Williams came in and said Michael was complaining of a headache and wanted some aspirin. That was strange, Carrie Williams thought, since he had just taken some. She went upstairs to Michael’s room.

“He looked at me and said, ‘When is my mom coming to see me?’ ” she recalled. “Then he said, ‘I can’t talk right.’ ”

Michael suddenly went into convulsions and began vomiting. He had suffered a massive stroke brought on by an arterial ventricular malformation in the brain that had lain dormant since birth. “The doctor said later that even if we had known about it there wouldn’t have been anything we could have done to prevent the stroke,” Carrie Williams said.

The parents rushed their son, who was thrashing about violently in the car, to a nearby hospital where he lapsed into a coma. Within two hours of the onset of the convulsions, Michael Williams was in surgery. Afterward, the surgeon declared the operation a success, but warned the family that the chances of recovery were poor.

“They never made us feel confident he would wake up,” she said. “But no matter how many times the doctors said it, I didn’t believe it.” Not even after her son was taken in for a second surgery for an abscess on the brain, not even when additional surgery was required for a collapsed lung, or even when the boy’s weight plunged from 150 to 96 pounds.

Carrie Williams camped out at the hospital, talking to her son constantly in the belief that behind the empty countenance was a living person. Finally, on Jan. 7 he opened his eyes.

It was at that point that Carrie Williams faced a difficult choice. She could transfer her son to a rehabilitation ward at a hospital only moments from her home in Orange County, where he could continue his recovery close at hand, allowing his mother to continue living at home. Or the family could send him 80 miles away to Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills.

Both looked like good facilities, but Carrie Williams liked Holy Cross better for reasons she still has trouble articulating. It just felt right. So, in the end, there was really no choice at all. Home for Michael Williams for the past four months has been a small room in the San Fernando Valley hospital festooned with pictures of friends he doesn’t remember and get-well cards he can’t read yet.

Home for his mother is a borrowed 25-foot-long camper parked behind the hospital. Though utility hookups had long been available in the parking lot, Williams was the first person to roll up a camper and plug in.

The loaned camper has been a lifesaver because the couple could not have afforded to pay for a long motel stay. Still, it is a Spartan existence. Carrie Williams reads a lot, knows the lunch menu by heart at all the surrounding fast-food restaurants and takes walks around the grounds. She is so well-known around the hospital that the security guards greet her and watch out for her safety, since the neighborhood around the hospital by night can be dangerous.

Each Wednesday night, Bill Williams drives out for a visit and every third week she returns to Orange for errands such as having her nails done.

It has, she admits, tested her marriage. “It’s not always easy,” she said. “I get used to doing my own thing here.”

It takes effort for the couple to re-establish themselves as partners when they get together after spending so much time apart.

And the strain of being constantly on duty with her son, encouraging every little sign of improvement and buoying him up to keep fighting for more improvements even when his own energy flags, can be enervating. Especially when she finds herself going over old ground. “Last week he had a cold so I had to teach him to blow his nose again,” she said.

Then the trailer is her refuge.

“Some days I come out here and sit in my rocking chair because it is so emotionally draining,” she said. “Sometimes I get lonesome and feel sorry for myself.”

She has had her fill of being what she calls “a permanent camper. I may never camp again as long as I live.”

But the Williamses begrudge nothing. “We both are committed,” she said.

Their gamble on their son’s future has paid off. He has already made a surprising recovery. How far can he go?

“We haven’t gotten an indication of how far he can go, because they didn’t think he would get this far,” she said.