Refusing to Close Any More Doors
She had come to Hermosa Beach to say goodbye. Stephani Victor and her boyfriend had broken up six weeks earlier, and he was leaving the following day for a new job in Houston.
It’s hard to say which feeling was stronger the night of Dec. 19, 1995: The pain of a shattered relationship or the love she still felt for him.
They were standing behind his Ford Explorer, getting ready to leave for dinner, when she was struck from behind by a van, whose driver had lost control in a construction area. Pinned between the two vehicles, Victor was carried about 30 feet before she dropped to the sidewalk.
“I saw my legs scoop up underneath me, and they just exploded,” the 27-year-old actor-filmmaker says. “I saw the fabric of my pants rip apart. It was like the Incredible Hulk, how he would just burst out of his shirt, and I remember the feeling of spray hitting me in the face. It was the soft tissue and the blood.”
Her first instinct was to get up, brush herself off and hope that no one had noticed, the way a child stumbles over his feet on the playground and bounces up as if the whole thing were choreographed.
But Victor could not get up. She lifted her head and saw her legs split apart, mangled and bent. Her feet were positioned on either side of her, almost even with her shoulders. Her ex-boyfriend ran to her. She could see the panic on his face and, very calmly, she said, “I’m going to die.”
She could see people running, looking down at her from balconies. Against the dark sky, she saw fluffy, white clouds. She thought it was the white light. Then she blinked and everything went dark.
“Everything was just sucked out of me, and I went to this place of jet black. . . . I wasn’t panicked and I wasn’t anxious. I just surrendered, and I closed my eyes.”
When she was 9, she had a near-death experience following a bicycle accident, and so she knew the feelings well.
“You don’t smell, you don’t hear, and you don’t taste. It’s just energy, and I felt this pulling, like a plane of energy pulling from my chest, like it was going from the earth, through my chest and straight up to God . . . and I thought, ‘I can’t leave like this,’ and as soon as I made that decision, it was like, whump, right back into my body, and I opened my eyes and the clouds were back and I remember thinking, ‘OK, I just have to breathe. I just have to breathe.’ ”
Both legs were amputated, and tonight Victor will stand on prosthetic legs before a sold-out house at the Hermosa Beach Comedy and Magic Club, where friends will gather for a fund-raiser to help cover ongoing expenses for physical therapy, prostheses and other equipment needed for her recovery.
One smile is all it takes to make you think she has risen to high ground amid this flood of change and struggle, but she will point to her chin and tell you how close she sometimes feels to sinking.
It has been a year of lawyers and doctors, conflicting information, HMO battles, mounting medical bills, therapists, nights when she had to be held down through fits of pain. And, still, there’s the dream of Hollywood.
Every ounce of her strength is needed to get through a day, so she has neither time nor energy for sympathy. Not even a second. She exudes a no-nonsense demeanor--boundless determination, impenetrable tenacity. Victor, you see, is a very good actor.
Her tenacity is not impenetrable, and sometimes her determination falls short, and there are brief moments--less frequent now--when she wonders why she didn’t die.
*
The night before the accident, Victor, her roommate, Meredith Escabar, and mother, Chloe Victor, visiting from Oklahoma, hosted a Christmas party. Late in the night, after everyone had gone home, they were sitting on the floor in Escabar’s bedroom.
They extended their legs in front of them so that their feet touched. A bit loopy from wine, they laughed and giggled as they critiqued their toes. It’s funny the things that stick in your memory, Chloe Victor says. It was the last time she touched her daughter’s feet.
When doctors explained after the surgery that they had to remove Victor’s legs to save her life, Chloe dropped to her knees and prayed. Escabar doubled over feeling sick.
A doctor told Chloe that her daughter hadn’t been told that her legs had been amputated, and it would be best to wait, so a surgeon could explain her injuries.
“There were huge casts on her residual limbs, and she had a silver heated blanket over her,” Chloe says. “There was still blood in her hair. She looked at me with all those tubes in her mouth, and she was trying to mouth, ‘Are my legs gone?’ and I said, ‘Yes, baby, they are.’ ”
When Escabar entered the room, Victor shaped the words, “I chose to live,” and that is how Escabar knew her friend would survive.
Soon after surgery, Stephani Victor realized she needed a laptop computer to get online and gather information needed for the decisions confronting her. Escabar sat at her side reading aloud, “Coping With Limb Loss,” skipping parts she felt might be too much to hear. Escabar, 27, was still dealing with the death of her father a year earlier. She understood what it was to need a friend.
On Christmas Eve, Victor had a dream in which she saw the film, a documentary, of her recovery. She awakened on Christmas Day and told an uncle, “That’s what I can do. Maybe that’s what all this is about, to just make one film. I’ve got to get a camera.”
It was instinctual. Even in sixth grade, Victor demonstrated show business qualities. She had talent and looks, and she could tell a lie without missing a beat. She looked straight into Mrs. Epstein’s eyes at Edgeworth Elementary School in Sewickley, Penn., and told her she had been taking dance lessons forever. “Annie”? Sure, no problem. And that is how she landed her first role. Ballet lessons started soon after.
Victor followed her dream to the USC School of Cinema-Television, where she graduated in 1992 with degrees in production and critical studies, but she never lost her passion for acting. She appeared in an episode of “Beverly Hills, 90210,” a pilot for Fox called “Exposed” and the film “Monkey Shines.”
A professor she knew from USC delivered a video camera to the hospital and Victor started shooting on New Year’s Eve.
Through the documentary--which is shot by Victor, family and friends--she has learned how not to act because there is no acting involved in her pain and determination captured on more than 60 hours of video. In one scene, she is listening to a doctor who is telling her not to get her hopes too high about total independence from her wheelchair.
“I always did things big, even the little things, so when I say the wheelchair isn’t a choice, don’t misunderstand,” she tells the doctor, her voice wavering between conviction and despair. “I’m not closing doors.” She straightens her palms, bends her wrists and holds them where her limbs now end. “This,” she says, “closes enough doors. I personally choose to close no more doors.”
And so she moves forward each day, hoping a door will open, but each day begins the same. She has moved her wheelchair so that it’s no longer the first thing she sees in the morning, but even without it there, she is immediately reminded that her legs are gone, that her life has changed.
By 7 a.m., three to four days a week, Victor is swimming laps in the pool. Two to three afternoons a week are spent in physical therapy. She cannot afford a vehicle suited to her needs, so she depends on friends and family to drive her. Her mother and brother, B.J., 23, from Colorado, have taken turns helping, offering moral support.
Victor’s legs were amputated high above the knees, making the prostheses even more challenging. They are black and weigh 8 1/2 pounds each. At the bottom of each are Nike running shoes.
She stands them up next to her bed, inside a walker. Then she grabs the walker and lifts herself on top of them, attaching one prosthesis at a time.
“Just do it,” she says, reciting the Nike slogan. “I should call Nike. That’s exactly what I’m doing every day. It’s scary and it’s hard, but I just have to do it.”
* At the time of the accident, Victor was employed as an administrative assistant by United Friends of the Children, which raises money for children in foster care. United Friends has established the Stephani Victor Fund, 14000 Palawan Way, Suite E, Marina del Rey, CA 90292.