Checking In on a Couple of Our Friends

Sometimes in this business, you tell somebody’s story, but you forget to return to it at a later date and tell how the story ends.

We used to refer to these as “human interest” stories, although it’s been a long time since we’ve heard anyone utter that phrase. (I was never quite sure what “human interest” was supposed to be, anyway--as opposed to what, dog interest?)

If a crime is involved and a person goes on trial, then eventually a story comes to a natural conclusion. The accused is convicted or walks. There’s not much more beyond that to tell.

Should a juicy scandal be involved, then a story gets told and retold until it’s old, until everybody gets sick of it--or at least until a new scandal takes its place.

But when what you have is a story of somebody’s personal misery or misfortune, sometimes the public will get interested in it, even get emotionally involved with it--then wait impatiently for a sequel, wondering what the heck happened next.

You forget to check back, however, because in the storytelling business, you get so busy looking ahead that you neglect to look back.

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We can only plead guilty to this, having been inundated with “whatever happened to?” inquiries on a regular basis.

Take the story of Terry Green, a 36-year-old lineman who got shocked in Long Beach on May 18, while working on overhead power lines.

Scores of readers responded sympathetically in the days that followed, after it was told in this space how Green had to endure the amputation of both arms after his life-endangering accident.

A divorced native Texan who travels extensively for his work, Green had come here with his fiancee Lorraine to complete one last job before they could drive their trailer to Las Vegas to get married.

He sustained great physical injury and psychological trauma after the accident, which occurred when Green apparently lost his balance in a cherry picker and grabbed a power line with his free hand.

When we visited the patient’s room at a Grossman Burn Unit ward of the Sherman Oaks Hospital, he was unable to speak, a tracheotomy having been performed to aid his ability to breathe.

His room was next to that of a popular Channel 7 news reporter, Adrienne Alpert, who suffered injuries eerily similar in an incident involving a TV van’s antenna.

Green’s public profile was not akin to Alpert’s, who came to have thousands of Southern Californians offering prayers for her recovery as local TV kept viewers apprised of her condition. But as his fiancee’s sister, Justine Andrews, pointed out: “No one knows what a wonderful person Terry is, with the exception of his family and close friends.”

“He’s deeply loved by all who know him,” seconded Christine Cowart, another sister of Lorraine.

Painful, even for a stranger, was the knowledge that Green’s condition could deteriorate at any time. He had been through so much--limb loss, skin grafts, debridement of dead tissue. Unimaginable anguish.

A doorway away, meantime, Adrienne Alpert fought her own fight.

“Adrienne is a true hero,” her husband, Barry Paulk, told me after one of her many operations. “She has her good days and her bad days, but overall she thinks of ‘how’ rather than ‘why.’ ”

Correspondence regarding the TV journalist came my way day after day. A former Channel 7 on-air personality feared for a colleague of Alpert who in his opinion might yet be blamed for her accident. A nurse in Oregon who attended college with Alpert praised her for bearing up under “what must be unbearable pain.”

Then there’s a Ventura woman who said she felt “a very strong empathy, even though I’ve never met her”--because her name is also Adriene (with one n) Alpert, and acquaintances keep thinking she’s the one who got hurt.

“She’s been coming into my living room for years,” this Alpert said of the one she knew only from TV. “To me, she’s family.”

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With their multiple surgeries and concomitant horrors, Adrienne Alpert and Terry Green could easily have succumbed, out of sheer frailty or desolation. Doctors knew from the start that death was a possibility for each.

I checked with their hospital on Thursday, having had so many people ask. No one knows what the future holds, but Alpert is scheduled to be released by the end of next week.

Terry Green is doing better and being released on Monday.

Some stories are worth retelling.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to: Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com