In the weeks after Hickey woke from a coma, he spent long days reteaching his body at Magee Rehabilitation Center, where his physical therapist said he made a “miraculous recovery.”
“Many who suffer severe brain injuries don’t recover fully to where they were before,” therapist Joe Ferguson said. “Brian is back to where he was before.”
I’ll never remember getting run over last Black Friday. Best I can reckon, my head would have exploded if barking dogs, alert medics, forward-thinking neurosurgeons and a slew of other lucky bounces didn’t occur.
I’m 95 percent full-force. The missing 5 percent: the ever-present back and shoulder pain and inability to sleep on my right side; occasionally fumbling for the right word; and an inability to ever adequately apologize for what my bride, dad, friends and caring strangers went through during my eight-day “nap.”
Wielding my onto-the-next-story mentality, I’ve managed to just go on as if the chapter’s closed.
(But if you’re reading, kiddo, pray your friends never set their loyalty-to-you value below the $11,000 reward.)
For protagonists of public stories most thought would end in eulogy, sound-bite-sized answers become natural, I guess. It’s not that inquiries bother me; things just stop changing. That’s where a North Philly man and South Jersey woman enter the picture.
After I got hit, Eugene Braxton e-mailed a friend offering psychic remote-viewing powers (think “Minority Report” and “The Men Who Stare at Goats” mashed up) that enable him to flash-backward for details. Gene, who says he knew Dr. J’s son drowned before the tragic 2000 discovery, remote-viewed with my blessing and saw a dark sedan, silver grill, inexplicable “T” or cross, and white-wall tires with a post-impact slumped-back driver with dark, long hair. He “couldn’t tell if it was a girlish guy, a guyish girl, a goth punk-rocker. The T might mean it’s a priest.”
If his remote-viewing works, I’ll probably feel like Betty Davis felt last month when Joseph Bozzelli was sentenced for killing her son Brian Lilley instantly in a 2006 hit-and-run. Bozzelli’s license was suspended at the time for DUI; he got caught because somebody was enticed by the $10,000 reward. She says a Court TV psychic saw a Bozzelli-type to the T. “At first I didn’t want to live, but I prayed every night not to die before I found out who killed my son. I knew he’d get caught sooner or later,” she told me. “Never give up hope.” I won’t, Betty. But, if I have one last talking point: Please people, look both ways before crossing the street on Black Friday. I don’t want another survivor to have to write about their near-death anniversary next year.
– Brian Hickey lives in East Falls.
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