An Unpredictable Ending : A Quick, Full Recovery From Severe Head Injury Happens Only in the Movies

For Redondo Beach attorney Douglas Black, “Regarding Henry” was not just another afternoon’s diversion.

“I looked at this (movie) and I cried,” said the muscular 42-year-old Black. “I said, ‘By God, it’s me.’ ”

Like the film’s main character, Black, an attorney with a wife and daughter, suffered a brain injury that wiped out his memory and speech and paralyzed his right side.

But unlike the movie attorney played by Harrison Ford, Black has yet to see a Hollywood happy ending.

For five years, he has worked nonstop, struggling to reclaim the self he lost in a split second: A brick sailed out of nowhere, crashed through the windshield of his Porsche and crunched into the side of his head as he sped north on the San Diego Freeway in Carson.

Since then, Black’s income has plummeted. He has relied on contributions and disability payments for support. His marriage ended. And he still speaks with difficulty.

Yet Black’s everyday victories--recalling a simple name or phone number--far surpass any movie heroism.

Said Sandra Thompson, head of the county Municipal Court Judges Assn.: “When he walks in and I see him now, I think: miracle. . . . It’s like a living miracle.”

Unlike Ford’s character, Black faces ongoing obstacles shared by the estimated 50,000 people who suffer severe head injuries each year, said Silvana Guerci-Lena, spokeswoman for the National Head Injury Foundation in Washington.

Of those, fewer than 20% recover sufficiently to care for themselves and resume work, experts say.

Although Guerci-Lena praised “Regarding Henry” for having a heroic character with a head injury, she said the plot opted for drama, not realism: “You’re never going to get something out of Hollywood that is real clinical.”

Ford’s character, cold-blooded attorney Henry Turner, is shot in the heart. Blood loss deprives his brain of oxygen and sends him into a coma. When he awakens, he has no memory, his right side is paralyzed and he cannot speak.

Rehabilitation is tidily symbolized in a quick montage of images--from wheelchair to walker to cane to his own halting steps. Returning to work, Turner reviews his previous lawsuits, decides he has been a heel, leaves his job with no apparent economic hardship, and falls in love again with his wife and child.

Fiction, said Sheldon Berrol, chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation at San Francisco General Hospital and a member of the National Head Injury Foundation.

Brain injuries typically result in the loss of short-term, not long-term, memory as well as the ability to judge, Berrol said. Spouses more often leave than stay. The cost of care is staggering, as much as $4 million over the injured person’s life. And rehabilitation is not speedy.

“It’s hard, tedious, slow work,” Berrol said.

It is Saturday morning and Black’s 8-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Courtney, is spending the weekend at his two-story frame house near King Harbor in Redondo Beach.

Black’s face has a lined tension that is not evident in smiling, relaxed, pre-accident photos. He is blind in the left eye.

“Dad, can I open the mail?” Courtney asks. He assents.

“Dad, can I have these?” Courtney opens a piece of junk mail with stickers that must be sent back to win a drawing.

Black pauses. “No, Courtney, let me read it first. OK?”

Reading the mail may take some time. Black lost 30 centimeters of the left side of his brain, the part crucial to language processing. He has relearned to read by a complex phonics system, using a referral word to cue the sound of each letter.

He demonstrates. “Wish. That’s wah, wah, water. I is eye, like the eye of a tiger. S is sun. H is honey. Wish. “ He beams.

He pulls out a yellow legal pad on which he has written a note. Before making phone calls, he often writes down what he wants to say. Reading the note, he stumbles at the word for.

“I know this word,” he says. “That’s going to be door, or, for! “

Numbers, names and law terms are particularly difficult.

“It is . . . June? July? June? . . . I know it. I just can’t command it sometimes,” he says, trying to recall the date of his accident.

Before the accident on July 21, 1986, Black estimated his earnings from personal-injury cases at $100,000 or more a year. Well respected in the South Bay legal community, he was on the brink of being named a court commissioner--an acting judge--in Torrance Municipal Court.

Said Sandra Thompson, then-presiding municipal judge, “He was a dream candidate.”

But the dream shattered after Black was hit by the brick. His second wife, Ruth Romo, a passenger, brought the car to a stop.

The brick didn’t fall from a truck and it wasn’t kicked up from the road, sheriff’s deputies concluded. They never found who threw it.

Black regained consciousness in the hospital after a long, deep coma. “I didn’t know what the heck happened,” Black said. “I had the feeling, ‘This is a dream. . . . It’s a dream. Pretty soon, it’ll be 7 o’clock and the alarm will go off.’ ”

He babbled incoherently or cursed--loudly and distinctly.

After five months, Black regained use of his right side, but he could speak only in simple phrases. He carried a note pad and wrote in childish block letters. He recognized friends and relatives but couldn’t pull their names from his injured brain. He spent hours poring over photo albums, memorizing their names.

Saddled with staggering medical bills, Black depended on Ruth’s salary, donations from friends and fees from attorneys who pitched in and worked his cases.

The labor has gone on for five years now. Yet, Black’s initial optimism persists.

“Sometimes I wish I had a lot of speaking (ability) and sometimes I get sad,” he said on a recent evening. “But even when I was OK, I got sad. That’s life. I’m alive.”

There have been losses.

Ruth Romo left two years ago. After Black’s injury, she became responsible for most of the family decisions, she said. As Black recovered, he reclaimed that authority and conflicts ensued.

“We became new people (after the accident),” she explained. “I’ve learned quite a bit.”

There have also been victories.

Black relearned to drive a car, and has rededicated himself to painting--a pastime he had abandoned. But now it is more than a hobby. It provides rehabilitation and relaxation and does not require the struggle with words that reading and watching television do.

He has sold a dozen paintings. One of a leopard hangs in Judge Thompson’s chambers, another of a lion is displayed in the Torrance Municipal Court hallway. Each Memorial and Labor days, he shows his work at the Hermosa Beach Fiesta de Las Artes sale.

“If I didn’t worry about economy and some money, I’d paint all the time,” Black said. “But I need a job.”

His monthly income amounts to $700 in federal disability payments. Money from the settlement of a lawsuit that he had initiated before the injury pays the mortgage.

But he dreams of returning to law. He wants to work part time to defend others who have been injured.

So far, Black has been assigned a few Torrance Municipal Court cases, representing indigent defendants in cases not requiring a jury trial.

Torrance attorney Darryl Genis made Black co-counsel on another case because he was impressed by Black’s determination.

“So many other people would have copped a sour attitude in light of all the pain and suffering,” he said. “I looked at Doug and I thought, ‘That could have been me or it could yet be me.’ ”

Speech therapist Geri Knorr, who works with Black three days a week, said he can return to law: “People feel not having language means you’re not as smart, but he can still think. He can still remember.”

Municipal Judge Thomas Allen is astonished by Black’s progress.

“I saw him when he couldn’t read, couldn’t write and couldn’t understand anything,” Allen said. “I just kind of thought, ‘Well, it’s a spent life.’ . . . But if he has the same progress in the next two years that he’s had for the last five years, I believe he’ll be back taking cases.”

Black and his doctor have not decided whether that goal is obtainable. Such an assessment could be premature, said neurology professor Berrol.

“People can improve,” he said. “The limits placed on improvement in the past years seem not to be valid anymore.”

Barry Ludwig, director of the brain injury program at Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital and the doctor who initially treated Black, agrees that gains can be made in therapy after the generally accepted three-year limit.

But he cautions that a deep coma, such as the one Black suffered, may cause brain damage that is not readily apparent.

“Patients with brain injuries often have poor insights into their deficits,” Ludwig added. “They don’t see themselves as others see them.”

Black, however, wants to see just how much he can accomplish. He regularly visits other brain-injured people in the South Bay, many of them with injuries more serious than his. He encourages them to exercise, paint or simply get out of the house.

And he tells them, “You got injured. But, hey, you’re all right.”