Seriously Hurt Cyclist Is on Road to Recovery

In his nightmare, the truck is always green. It thunders toward him relentlessly, faster and faster. He cannot pedal furiously enough. He cannot cry out. Trapped in his nightmare, he can only watch helplessly as the huge green monster smashes into his body, spewing clouds of dust, hurling him and his bicycle 40 feet into the air.

For a split second, he is flying. He is soaring above a thousand other cyclists. He is floating above the highway, above the desert, above the life he once had until it all came crashing down.

The last image is the most vivid. It is of his brain, dribbled in a stream of blood down the highway.

He wakes sweating, hyperventilating.

The nightmare always ends in the same place. For George Good-deCurnou, it is the place where reality begins.

The reality is that George doesn’t remember anything of the accident in Santa Fe, N.M., four years ago. The reality is that he doesn’t even know if the truck was green. All he knows is what he has been told, that a drunken driver slammed into him at 70 miles an hour, leaving his body a charred, bloody mess, his brain mashed into the side of the road.

More than anything, George wants to understand this reality, wants to remember everything: the bike tour, the pain, the color of the truck. Because if he can remember, then maybe he can reconstruct himself, become something closer to the man he once was--a man whose body was lithe and strong, whose mind was so quick that people laughed at his jokes.

And so he fights, every moment, every breath, to reconstruct himself.

His fight has won him accolades and a job. But George wants more. He wants to talk with the elegance of a poet. He wants to walk with the grace of an athlete. He wants to savor the sweet taste of spontaneity once again.

He wants to find the courage to do the one thing he knows will make him feel whole: to get back on a bike and ride once more in the tour that nearly killed him.

George started pedaling to college in his native Philadelphia in the 1970s. He discovered that he loved cycling--the freedom, the speed, the joy of propelling himself wherever he decided to go.

When he and his wife, Luann, moved to Golden in 1995, they found a cycling paradise: challenging trails, biker-friendly communities, plenty of enthusiasts to cycle with.

On weekends, George would hit the trails with friends and bike for hours, talking about literature and jazz and his work as a nurse. His friends persuaded him to ride competitively, to enter 100-mile marathons, so-called century rides that attract cyclists from all over the country. There are no grand trophies or cash prizes. Riders enter for the sheer joy of it.

You push yourself to the limit and then go some more, George says.

But pushing yourself to the limit means pushing your brain. It takes willpower and stamina to pedal a bike hours at a time in all sorts of conditions. It takes balance and coordination and confidence.

It takes everything that George Good-deCurnou lost when he was left for dead on Interstate 25 four years ago.

Broken brains don’t heal in the same way as broken bones; they don’t grow new cells in the same way. They leave gaps--gaps in personality and dynamism and spirit, gaps that are all the more terrifying because they are not easily understandable.

Luann understands the gaps better than most. She works as a physical therapist. She knows how illness can shatter lives. She also knows that, with proper care, bodies can be repaired from the most devastating of blows.

So when Luann first saw George comatose in the emergency room, kept alive by a ventilator, the extent of his injuries didn’t frighten her the way it did others. She could see beyond the charred skin and broken ribs and holes in his back and side. She knew that eventually, if George survived, the injuries could mend.

What scared Luann most was George’s right fist, clenched into a ball.

“I knew it was a sign of brain injury,” Luann said, “and we would have no idea of how serious until he woke up.”

Luann knew she could help George through any injury. But massive brain damage? George was diagnosed with a bleeding brain stem and damaged frontal lobes, the area of the brain that affects speech and balance and cognitive skills. But what about intangibles such as emotions and hopes and dreams?

More than any other organ, the brain makes us human, gives us personality and creativity and our own idiosyncratic charm. What would George be like if his brain couldn’t work? Would her husband of 17 years be the same?

Would George still be George?

In his mind, his tongue is golden, always poised with the wittiest of retorts. In reality, George says, “It is so hard to get anything out of my mouth.”

His speech is the most visible sign of his injury. His words lurch out in spurts, then screech to a halt, creating long, awkward silences. George hates them. He fights them. His face contorts, his eyes squint, his whole body tenses as he struggles to lasso his thoughts and pin them down.

People who don’t know him assume he is drunk. Once a cop forced him to take a Breathalyzer test because he didn’t understand what George was saying. Others assume that brain-injured means mentally deficient. They don’t understand that it just takes longer for connections to be made.

George still has a cyclist’s body, long and lean and very, very thin. But his face is hollow and gaunt. With his dark beard, pale skin and mournful eyes, he looks older than his 46 years.

There are those who suggest that acceptance of injury leads to peace. Not George. Acceptance, he snorts, leads to learned helplessness.

“I refuse . . . to accept the injury,” George stammers, sitting in his office at the Brain Injury Assn. of Colorado. “I . . . I . . . must fight.”

George’s refusal has confounded doctors who, when he was still in a coma, told his wife that he might never walk again, that he would be lucky to hold the most menial of jobs.

And it has confounded Luann, who for all her patience and support, cannot fathom why George would put both of them through the torture of returning to the 100-mile bike tour in Santa Fe.

“Setting a goal might be fine for him,” she says, painfully. “But he doesn’t remember how hard it was in Santa Fe.”

George winces. His eyes beg for acceptance as his mind casts about for an explanation.

“I must . . . I . . . I must master my injury,” he says.

Luann’s journal documents the early days of George’s recovery:

His first word after 12 days in a coma: coffee.

Floods of emotion and tears. Falling out of the wheelchair because he refused to believe he couldn’t walk.

Speech therapy. Physical therapy. Psychological therapy.

Drugs to wake him up and keep him awake. Drugs that Alzheimer’s patients take for memory. Drugs that Parkinson’s patients take to control shaking.

Anger. Denial. Despair.

Begging to go home. When he finally did, after six weeks in hospitals, the strangeness of monitoring her husband’s every movement. Hiding the keys so he wouldn’t try to drive. Writing notes so he would remember the simplest chores: Eat breakfast, put on shoes. Watching, petrified, as he attempted to walk around the block alone.

There were times Luann felt more like the mother of a kindergartner than a wife.

And then somehow, through the maze of red tape and therapists and tears, George met Rick Olderman.

Olderman works as a sports therapist. He understood George’s injury and he understood George’s limits. More than anyone else, Olderman understood George’s need to get back on a bike.

The first sessions in the gym were excruciating. The aerobics class thumped in one corner, the football team pumped iron in another, noise and lights and activity bombarded George’s brain from every direction. Even the simplest exercises left him unable to speak or think or move.

At times, George felt hopelessly lost. And then Olderman would remind him, as George continually reminded himself: Push yourself to the limit and then go some more.

Gradually, George built up his strength and his courage. One day, three years after the accident, Olderman suggested that it was time for George to get back on a bike.

George panicked. He wasn’t ready. He didn’t feel safe.

But in his heart he knew: He had no other option.

George’s hands clutched the handlebars so tightly his knuckles were white. His feet fumbled for the pedals. He nearly fell.

And then he started pedaling.

After five minutes, he was so drained he couldn’t speak for half an hour. But he was smiling, a beam of certainty and gratitude.

George felt as exhilarated as if he had just completed a century ride.

A month before Santa Fe, George was riddled with doubts--doubts about his speaking, his confidence, the way he comes across. Was he too arrogant, too self-centered? Was he worth anything anymore?

Luann reassured him: “You’re just George. And we’ll get through this.”

Sometimes she wished he would take a break from worrying about mastering his injury and just let himself be George.

But the training made him even more obsessive. A month before the ride, he nearly gave up. The exertion had drastically affected his thinking and his speech. The nightmares grew more frequent. Luann grew more tense.

Maybe he expected too much from the bits of his brain that are left.

“You’ve worked hard enough,” Olderman told him. “You can be proud. You’ve earned the right not to ride. No one will think less of you.”

“As if . . . I . . . I give a damn what people think,” George replied.

The day dawned clear and sunny, just as it had four years ago. Two-thousand cyclists converged on the starting point. George stayed away from the crowd, locked in his hotel room. He had slept badly. He had never felt so scared.

Olderman had called to say he was stranded in Utah; he wouldn’t make it in time for the ride.

George could hardly believe it. Without Rick, how could he possibly confront his deepest fears?

“I felt like the floor had opened and sucked me into this black hole,” George said.

Gradually, he forced his mind to focus, forced his head to be calm.

“Rick doesn’t get inside my body and ride for me,” he told Luann. “I can do this myself.”

Luann blinked back tears as she watched him climb onto the bike, his brother, Paul, riding beside him. George looked so frail, the road seemed so busy and unforgiving.

George had agreed not to cycle the first 25 miles of the route, including the portion where the accident had occurred. But that was little comfort to Luann as she watched him ride off in a blur of cyclists down a long desert road.

George didn’t cycle 100 miles, of course. He never expected to.

But he pedaled for 29 miles--more than he had dared to hope. Six weeks later, he is still trying to make sense of what he has accomplished.

“I allowed myself . . . this emotional dream,” George said, “of . . . of . . . thinking that achieving this one goal . . . would make everything right.”

There is pride, certainly. But there is sadness too. It is hard to accept the idea that mastering his injury, reconstructing the old George, means far more than a brave bike ride in Santa Fe.

The reality is that the nightmares continue. The reality is George still fights his daily battle to stay motivated and focused and calm. The reality is he still doesn’t know the color of the truck.

“Santa Fe was a benchmark,” George says with a sigh. “It gave me back a piece of myself.”

And it motivated him to fight for other pieces. He says he will battle his brain to let him read again--serious reading--the books he loved, Dickens and Steinbeck and Hemingway. He says he will fight for the confidence to write about his injury.

And when he returns to Santa Fe next year, he plans to ride for 50 miles.