Is Brooke Ellison Still Alive

[Magdalen Jhonston]

Todaywe're talking with Dr. Brooke Ellison, associate professor at Stony Brook University, author of Look Both Ways, and subject of the Christopher Reeve- directed documentary, The Brooke Ellison Story.

When Brooke was just 11 years old, walking home from her first day of junior high school, she was hit by a car-- and left with quadriplegia. In a raw, no-holds-barred conversation, we talk not only about that fateful day and the way it changed her life forever, but what it can teach us all about resilience, struggle, perseverance, and hope. Completely honest, full of insight, and often funny, today's discussion is not one to miss.

Follow Baggage Check on Instagram @baggagecheckpodcast and get sneak peeks of upcoming episodes, give your take on guests and show topics, gawk at the very good boy Buster the Dog, and send us your questions!

Dr. Andrea Bonior: Sometimes life can change permanently and irrevocably in a microsecond. Imagine that you're eleven years old, walking home from school with a group of friends, and you are hit by a car. You sustain injuries to every part of your body, and it's deemed likely that you won't survive. You, when you come out of it, you are paralyzed from the neck down and fully dependent on a ventilator. Do you imagine that you have what it takes to start moving forward and building your life again? Our guest today is Dr. Brooke Ellison, associate professor of health policy and medical ethics at Stony Brook University and the author of um Look Both Ways and Miracles Happen, which was adapted into the Brooke Ellison story directed by Christopher Reeve. Brooke lived this path, and her story applies to all of us. If you've ever been curious about resilience, trauma, and growth after life is turned upside down, you'll want to listen to today's Baggage Check. Welcome. I'm Dr. Andrea Bonior, and this is Baggage check, mental health talk and advice. Thank you for being here today. I'm very glad that you are. I must remind you that Baggage Check is not a show about luggage or travel incidentally. It is also not a show about why nobody seems to cover textbooks with brown grocery bags anymore. Okay, onto the show today, I have got a great conversation for you. I have as a guest Dr. Brooke Ellison, who serves on the faculty of Stony Brook University, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in Cognitive Neuroscience. She got her master's in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and her PH D in sociology from Stony Brook University, where she teaches today. Her, uh, most recent book, Look Both Ways, details a defining moment of her life, which is the day when she was eleven years old and was hit by a car. And her path since Brooke became a quadriplegic. Her story resonated with me so much, and I don't even know where to begin in telling you the things we covered, because I know it's going to resonate with you as well. We talked about resilience and social connection and humanity, and what it means to just completely start from scratch. How easy it is to take things for granted. How disability, in some ways, is a construct that represents obstacles for all of us to connect with her. Check out her website at, uh, Brooke ellison.com that's Brooke with an E, and then ellison.com and Look Both Ways is available wherever you like to buy your books. Let's get to it. I learned so much from this conversation. Welcome Dr. Ellison to baggage check. I am so glad to have you on the show today.

Dr. Andrea Bonior: So I've been able to take a look at your book, Look Both Ways, and there are so many aspects of it that I want to talk about today. But first, and I know this is the second time that you've written something so personal. I was curious how it feels to have your life out there on the written page, to have people reading it and really understanding the inner workings of you and your emotional landscape in a way that's quite personal. What has that been like?

Dr. Brooke Ellison: Super crush on him when I was, when I was a kid? So he wasn't going to say no to that. Um, and then he asked, can I tell your story in the form of a movie? Um, and of course, at the first it just kind of knocked you over a bit. And then I had to think, wait a second. That's not just a question for me to answer. I have to talk to my family about this because it's going to be their lives on display just as much as my own. So we had a familiar conversation about it and talked about, um, where do the benefits lie? Where are some things that we need to think about, um, a little bit more cautiously? And my family came to the conclusion that we have had a series of experiences that are valuable to people. People who are undergoing levels of difficulty or have experienced hardship that can feel very isolating and feel like you've been distanced from the world. So that was kind of the premise that we went ahead on and thought, this is something that could be quite impactful. And that turned out to be the case whenever. The Progellos Story, the film that was based on my initial book, it's shown anywhere. It's shown all around the world. So I've heard from you, Ball, africa and Australia, just literally all over the world. People share their lives with me. They tell me about their experiences and different struggles that they've had and how they feel like parts of our story gives them, um, either a sense of, um, purpose or a newer perspective on their lives. And I think that's been quite powerful for me. So when it came time, and in the years since then, I do a lot of talking about my life. Um, I give speeches and presentations and a lot of writing, introspective writing. So when it came time that I decided to write look both ways, which was just, um, several years ago, actually, right after my 40th birthday. Um, this was at a time in my life when I was experiencing a lot of health challenges. I had become very sick with a pressure wound that needed to be treated for quite some time. And my life was in question, right? My ability to survive what I was experiencing was in question. I said I had known that for a while and I wanted to write another book after my first book was published. And then this opportunity came around and I said, you need to write from the heart. You've had important experiences that people can learn something from. And it's not just those experiences, but the lessons that have been borne out of those experiences. And you need to be thoughtful about this. So I kind of squirreled myself away, locked myself away in my bedroom and that summer just wrote and wrote and wrote and forced myself to be as self probing as I could possibly be and talk about things that I did that I was kind of afraid and felt very vulnerable. Talking about, um, whether it's love and what that means to me, or what that means to people with disabilities. My role in my family as kind of the person with the disability and how I understood that role to be different than I understand it now. And you're just challenging parts of how people perceive me and perceive disability that I think was different from how I had often talked about my life. I've often talked about my life in terms of triumph and resilience and strength and hope and which are all very important. And whenever I talk about disability, those are the kinds of ideas that I want to encapsulate it in. But at the same time, I couldn't talk about those things with autos and talking about the vulnerabilities that I've had to come to terms with. And when I talk about Look Both Ways, I'm not just kind of, I guess, acknowledging, um, being hit by a car aspect of my life. Right. Kind of the admonition, uh, you have to look both ways before crossing the street, but actually looking at all parts of your life. And in order to have a full understanding of who you are and where you are in the world and how you've gotten to where you are, um, you need to look in all directions and see all sides of it.

Dr. Andrea Bonior: Yeah. And it seems like it's a never ending path. Right. It's not like, okay, so I wrote these memoirs, I was able to tell my story and then everything was wrapped up and forever more. I'm struck by the fact that when you decided to write Look Both Ways, it sounds like you were in the midst of another challenge. And I'm sure that the ongoing challenges continue in such a way as they do for all of us, but especially too, for you, some of the physical challenges that still stem from that accident. And that's not something that you ever are able to rid yourself of. For listeners that aren't familiar with your story, how would you describe your story to them?

Dr. Andrea Bonior: Oh, my goodness. So you're not busy at all? I mean, the word remarkable doesn't begin to describe what it must have been. The trajectory from those months in the hospital to actually imagining how much you were ultimately able to thrive. I'm struck by that notion of how jarring, emotionally, so many aspects of this, of course, must have been. But the idea that maybe your friends and your peers might find your actual presence in the classroom to be scary or traumatic, and as you said, you were a product of that culture as well. I'm guessing it has to do with sort of the way that folks with disabilities are made to feel like others. Right? Like you went from a pretty typical kid with peers and friends and everything, and all these activities to being a twelve year old who, just by existing, was told, well, maybe your existence is a disruption.

Dr. Brooke Ellison: I sure do. I remember being discharged from the rehabilitation hospital and being afraid. I remember being afraid that I was going to be leaving a place that offered almost like a cocoon like existence where everybody who was around me had experienced some kind of trauma, some kind of life altering circumstance. And to be kind of discharged into a world that I knew firsthand was not going to see me the way that I saw myself, that was frightening. And then that fear was kind of reified by the very first experience I had with the world and with kind of bureaucracy in general trying to return to school and getting some resistance that I feared I would get but was hoping that I wouldn't. Ah, this is really impactful and um, jarring for anybody at any age. But when you're twelve years old, when you're just full of so many anxieties and wanting to fit in anyway, that was really hard. I think that some of those beliefs came from adults and um, when I ultimately returned to the classroom, like my friends and my peers, they were less, ah, I guess less concerned about those ideas than the adults were. M, but it was difficult. And fortunately some of my friends had come to visit me when I was in the hospital. They came to see me. Not everybody felt comfortable doing that, but a number of them did. There was a lot of community support for me and a lot of being kept up to date as to what my progress was in order for me to even get home. There was a tremendous community outpouring of, um, your support and love and, um, resources. We had to make a lot of modifications to my home, renovations to my home that was completely community driven process. So just friends of our family did all the reconstruction. The day that actually we have videos here in my house, VHS, uh, recordings, uh, the day that my family broke ground and the renovations that needed to be done. And my neighbors were all pitching in and helping to dig the ditch or whatever they were doing, right? So it was just like, literally like a scene out of a movie, which actually turns out to be the gator went down that cushion the blow a little bit. But I didn't know what to expect. And just trying to internalize an identity around disability that took me a very long time. That was not something that came easily or without tremendous internal struggle to go from just living with disability. That was how I was discharged from rehabilitation as somebody who could learn to live with disability as opposed to somebody who is disabled, right? Somebody who could um, incorporate the identity of being disabled into who she is. And that took a really long time and I think there's an important distinction between those two things that we're not just talking about accommodating my life. Just like the world used to accommodate itself to offer some kind of modicum of acceptance to disability. That was kind of how I was taught to understand my life and rehabilitation. But to change that, to feeling proud of who I am and to know that disability is not how it has always been contextualized or described as some source of weakness or, um, a population that is not worthy of our respect or inclusion. I view disability very differently now, and I understand disability to be kind of the culmination of humanity and resilience at its apex. Right. You need to be strong in ways that I think life doesn't always understand strength. You need to be resilient in ways that life doesn't always value resilience and be hopeful in ways that life doesn't always value hope and, uh, problem solve on a daily basis because the world is just not designed for the needs that you have. Be creative and how you approach the problems that you encounter without feeling completely diminished by them. Uh, so those are all really important virtues and aspects of the disabled identity that I think don't get nearly enough attention.

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