Quadriplegic Finds Hero Within

I went to see Pam Ortega of Irvine after she wrote to ask if we at the newspaper liked happy endings.

But before you can understand just how good it gets for Pam Ortega, you have to see how bad it was. Ortega could make most people’s nightmares seem like mere indigestion.

Let’s start with Ortega’s Nightmare/Happy Ending No. 1:

Ortega, who is now 41, had a difficult childhood. Partly as a result, she became an alcoholic. And a drug user. She suffered through two unsuccessful marriages, she says.

But then, Ortega hasn’t been so innocent herself. When she and her second husband separated in 1990, her alcoholism so controlled her life that she lost custody of her two daughters.

“We chose to go with our father,” daughter Laurie, now 18, told me. “It was hard to be around her then.”

Losing her daughters scared Ortega so much she sought help, through Alcoholics Anonymous. Her first day of sobriety was May 10, 1991, and she’s been free of drugs and alcohol since.

The nine months after she began sobriety, Ortega says, “was the best time of my life. I was about to get my daughters back. I was working, I was about to go into business. I was creating a life for my family.”

Which brings us to Nightmare/Happy Ending No. 2:

She had become close friends with her AA sponsor, Gina Howard. They not only lived together, by then up at Big Bear, but made plans to invest their savings in a restaurant Howard knew was for sale in Boise, Idaho.

On Feb. 10, 1992, just after midnight, the two women took off in Howard’s Jeep for the trek to Idaho, to sign the papers for the restaurant. They left at that hour because that’s when Ortega got off work from her waitress job.

On a lonely stretch of desert highway at dusk, just outside Fallon, Nev., Howard apparently fell asleep at the wheel. She lost control of the Jeep, and when she tried to correct it, the vehicle crashed down an embankment.

Ortega’s next memory is screaming from a hospital bed, “There’s someone naked in my bed!”

Ortega had some feeling in her arms and hands, but was paralyzed from the chest down. The body she was feeling with her hands was her own, but she couldn’t tell it.

The accident had left her a quadriplegic, she was told, and her best friend, Howard, had been killed in the crash.

Fighting depression became Ortega’s greatest obstacle.

“I thought my life was over; I thought no one would ever love me again,” she said. “I had no idea how I would get through this.”

Ortega put her faith in God, she said, and the capable hands of excellent medical staff, first at Fallon, then at San Bernardino General Hospital, then at the Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Center in Downey. And finally, at the Petrofsky Center for Rehabilitation and Research in Irvine.

She learned that she was loved, by friends from AA, and especially her daughters, who needed her. Some friends even organized a fund-raiser for medical equipment.

Ortega learned she could make a life from a wheelchair. It became the best time with her daughters Kelly, 20, and Laurie.

“I can really talk to her now,” Laurie Ortega said. “We’re there for each other more than we’ve ever been.”

And for the first time, Pam Ortega has become a college student. She enrolled part time at Irvine Valley College in 1995 and got an apartment near the campus. She’s working toward a psychology degree.

Michael Bisteny, who coaches wheelchair basketball at Irvine Valley and is its disability specialist, told me: “Pam has come a long damned way. When I first saw her, her self-confidence was shot. But now, she’s an inspiration. Her attitude is just terrific.”

Ortega had another goal, one that might be hard to understand, given her condition: She was determined to walk again.

“I said I’d walk in five years, and I did it in four years and 10 months,” she said.

It might not be what you would call walking. She can’t walk to the store, or even from her living room to her bedroom. She can only walk along a set of rails at the Petrofsky Center, and she’s only up to 18 steps. She can only move her legs forward by a thrust of her hips. But it’s out-of-the-chair-on-your-feet walking.

Dean McCabe, director at the Petrofsky Center, explained that standing upright and moving forward not only is good physical exercise for Ortega’s muscles and bones, it’s healthy for her internal organs too.

Walking became such an obsession with Ortega that she had her first efforts videotaped. It’s hard to keep the knot out of your throat as you watch her painstaking effort on that tape to get that first step, to try and fail, try and fail, and then finally make it. I watched Ortega’s smile as we watched that first step on the tape together.

“Quite a day,” she said.

Ortega hopes to someday work in hospitals, with patients just like herself--”with other quads,” she said.

“When you are in that hospital bed and you can’t feel your own body, you think there’s no hope,” she explained. “I want to go to these people and help show them that there is a life for them. I can make them understand, because I’ve been right where they are.”

Wrap-Up: There is a new hero in Pam Ortega’s life. Her glowing admiration shines through when she talks about him. He is Christopher Reeve, Superman of the movies and now left wheelchair-confined in a horse-jumping accident. Reeve has become a national spokesman for more research efforts for those with similar disabilities.

“He is just amazing,” Ortega said. “I knew good things would come from that man. It’s a little sad, though, that it took a celebrity to bring public attention to us quads.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by call-ing the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail tojerry.hicks@latimes.com