Tom Archdeacon: Survival nothing short of a miracle

Nov. 17—NEW WESTON — They were gathered around the kitchen table of their home, out among the farm fields between North Star and New Weston in Darke County.

Behind them a bouquet of 14 colorful balloons framed the French doors leading outside. A large sign dominated the front yard. It read: "Welcome Home BROOKE."

Brooke Bergman, a tall junior guard on the Versailles High School girls basketball team, was in her wheelchair. Her walker was propped up nearby.

Her parents, Gwen and Kevin, sat to her right and, like her, they wore black T-shirts that read "Fight Like Brooke" on the front and had the silhouette of a basketball player hoisting a shot.

Brooke's two younger sisters — Allison and Claire — were in school and her dog CeeCee was in the garage.

The four-year-old Welsh Corgi had been so excited following their two-month separation that the first time it saw her — in a feeling shared by many two-legged friends — it showered her with kisses and ran in circles of joy.

Brooke had gotten home just five days earlier following the fight for her life, an ordeal that in many ways is still ongoing.

She'd spent 52 days in the hospital -19 at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton and 33 at the Ohio State Dodd Rehabilitation Hospital in Columbus — following a near fatal accident coming home from school on Sept. 18.

Brooke sat down the other afternoon with her parents to talk about the atypical, but still long road of recovery she's on and how they've all been coping with the most traumatic time in their lives.

They also wanted to share the way family, friends and so many of the surrounding communities have helped lift them when they needed it most.

But one of the first questions jarred them from this sense of hope back to a scene of horror.

"Could you tell me what happened?" they were asked.

Gwen and Kevin both hesitated and looked at each other with unsettled silence.

Their 16-year-old daughter sat quietly. She doesn't remember the accident, the days before it, or most of her time at Miami Valley.

"Well... everybody's heard...so I guess....." Gwen said, choosing her words carefully, then just saying it. "She was hit by a semi just outside Versailles after school."

"She stopped at a stop sign, looked both ways and...pulled out," Kevin finally said. "She wasn't on the phone, nothing like that. And the (semi) driver wasn't doing anything wrong. It just happened."

Brooke, two months after getting her license, was driving her 2006 black Pontiac G6, north on Conover Road. The semi-driver, a 47-year-old man from Versailles, was headed into town on State Route 47 in a red Kenilworth tractor trailer and hit her broadside.

It was 3:20 in the afternoon.

Not long after that, Kevin, who teaches vocational agriculture at Franklin Monroe High School, was headed back home.

He had his radio tuned to the Greenville station -WTGR — when he heard a report from station manager/sports director Scott Ward, who lives in Versailles.

"He'd heard about an accident and drove out to cover it for the radio station," Kevin said quietly. "He said a juvenile in a black car had been in an accident....That's how I learned about it."

An unease settled over Kevin and he texted Gwen, who is a math teacher at Mississinawa Valley High School, where she once was the girls' basketball coach and, before that, a multi-sport athlete herself.

"I asked where Brooke was," Kevin said. "And she answered 'Home.'"

"With a question mark," Gwen interjected. "Home?"

As soon as Kevin got to Versailles, he got a call from a county sheriff telling him their daughter had been in an accident and was being flown by a CareFlight helicopter to Miami Valley Hospital with "serious injuries."

Brooke had to be mechanically extracted from her crushed car and that phrase — "serious injuries" — doesn't fully capture the depth of the devastation.

"She had seven broken ribs; a broken sternum; broken left femur; the front of her pelvis was broken; and her tailbone was broken," said Gwen before adding the most serious injury.

"And she suffered a severe traumatic brain injury."

Brooke was in the ICU at Miami Valley when her parents first saw her.

Kevin said she was in a coma for eight days, on a steady fentanyl drip longer than that, and for a while there was real uncertainty whether she would survive and, if she did, how much of her old self would return.

Gwen said she remembers "sitting in her room when two doctors came in and said, 'Well, we'll do this (tomorrow)...if she's still here.'

"But every brain injury patient is different and it's tough to speculate the outcome."

Kevin nodded: "One doctor mentioned long term, how she could end up in a nursing home. That just broke my heart. That would be hard to bear."

Brooke ― so battered and so broken — proved to be tougher than anyone fathomed.

Her family credits much of that to heavenly help and community support.

The Versailles community, people from surrounding towns, other schools — and especially other sports teams — as well as complete strangers all helped buoy them any way they could.

Such effort will be on full display next Saturday and Sunday when Jim Dabbelt, the long-time girls basketball media person, puts on his 4 Decades Tip-Off Classic at Vandalia Butler High School.

Over the two days, 24 girls teams — most from around the area, but a few from as far away as Garfield Heights and Portsmouth — will play 12 games.

Four dozen former girls hoops stars from the area — including Andrea Hoover, Ally Malott, Alison Bales, Brandie Hoskins and Chelsea Welch, all who went on to play pro — will be honored at halftimes of the games.

Dabbelt said a majority of the money made from the silent auction held during the two-day hoops extravaganza will go to the Bergman family.

Although Brooke is still going through extensive physical, occupational and speech therapy in Columbus and still must rely on a feeding tube to hydrate as she works on swallowing water again, she was allowed to come back home last Saturday.

As she and her parents came into the little crossroads of North Star on North Star-Fort Loramie Road, they were met by a scene reminiscent of the one victorious high school teams in the small towns of rural Ohio get when they return from the state tournament.

"They threw me kind of a little parade," Brooke said in a voice that was a bit breathless and hoarse as she worked to fit all the words together as though they were scattered puzzle pieces.

Nothing though compromised her big smile as she recalled: "People clapped and cheered and they had painted signs for me."

"There were more than 100 people," Kevin guessed.

"They'd made signs and stapled them to the telephone poles," Gwen said. "They threw streamers and honked car horns."

She said they were overcome with "tears of joy."

"It was overwhelming," Kevin said. "Family and friends were there. So were her teams."

The whole basketball team was there, minus head coach Tracy White.,

"I had to miss it," she said. "I was having a baby."

She named her 7-pound 3-ounce daughter Jacey.

Monday, White plans to return to Versailles and coach her team for a week before it opens the season at home next Friday against Botkins and then plays Bellbrook in the Tip Off Classic on Saturday.

Brooke is planning to return to school on Monday, as well. She'll try for just a couple of hours and eventually hopes to work up to half-days when she's not travelling to Columbus for her various therapy sessions.

"I miss school," she said. "I miss my friends and the basketball team."

'It's about positivity'

While Kevin admits he often got caught up in "the worst-case scenarios" of what their daughter might face, he said Gwen "wouldn't stop asking the doctors questions until she got something positive to hang onto every day."

He said she continually lifted him.

And Brooke continually showed that same attitude as her mom.

"She hasn't complained once," Kevin said.

"She's never been frustrated," Gwen said. "She's been strong and determined. She's been a fighter."

Asked how that can be — with all the broken bones, the lifting but still prevalent mental challenges, the tubes and therapy and trauma — Brooke quietly explained:

"Well, I knew I had to get back to school, so I had to keep a good attitude. I thought about all my friends. They make me really happy. And my faith and my family helped me. It's about positivity."

That's similar to the approach she took with her involvements before the accident.

She's a mass server at Saint Louis Catholic Church in North Star and she works as a cashier at Ace Hardware in Greenville.

She's a student officer in Versailles High's Future Farmers of America (FFA) club. She raises sheep that she shows at the Darke County Fair, and she competes across the region with the FFA's General Livestock team.

At Versailles, she's on the softball team, runs cross country, and is especially known as a 5-foot-11 basketball guard.

She was part of a Dayton AAU travelling team and mostly played for the Versailles junior varsity last season, winning the MVP award at the Versailles Lady Tigers Basketball Classic last January.

"She got some time on varsity last year and actually had some big games knocking down threes in the tournament last year," said White.

In the second round of the Division III state tournament, she came off the bench against Brookville and hit three three-pointers.

"This year she was going to be a guard we sometimes could move underneath to give us a size advantage," White said.

"She had just worked so hard and was so determined. She's a good teammate and gets along with everybody. There's not a single person that has anything negative to say about her."

Community support

When Kevin called and told her Brooke had been in as serious accident and was on a CareFlight to Dayton, Gwen had an unexpected response.

"I actually felt a sense of calmness come over me," she said.

Kevin shook his head: "I wasn't so calm."

"I felt a calmness when he picked me up in Versailles," Gwen said. "I just knew it was God's way of telling me Brooke was going to be OK."

Since the accident, so many people have had Brooke and her family on their minds:

St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Osgood had a prayer service for her and a group of Brooke's classmates visited her every Sunday when she was in the hospital, first at Miami Valley and then in Columbus.

Along with painting her nails — they're blue now — and decorating her room with signs and a photo collage, they would pray the rosary over her even when she could not respond. Now that she's able to thumb her way through the beads, she prays with them.

A T-shirt company in Versailles sold over 700 Brooke shirts. Mississinawa Valley High School started a food train that provided the family with meals. The Do Good restaurant in Osgood is donating all of its November tips for Brooke's care.

When the Brookville JV volleyball team came to Versailles, the players brought along a sign wishing Brooke well and a $300 gift card they'd collected for the family.

The list goes on and on.

Her parents noted while it takes six to eight weeks for bones to heal, doctors have told them it can take a year for the brain to heal and there's no way of being sure just how much of a recovery there will be.

Brooke has amazed doctors with her strides, and they credit some of that to her youth and being in shape.

"She was lifting weights three times a week before the accident," her mom said.

Last Monday, two days after she got home, Brooke was inducted into the National Honor Society at Versailles.

"She was able to wheel herself across the stage to get her certificate," Gwen said proudly, "That was huge."

Although White said Brooke's "a quiet kid," she added "when she's not quiet, she can be pretty fun."

And you saw that during the kitchen table talk the other day.

Asked about her parents' support through all this, Brooke said: "They've been huge. They've been there for everything."

Then, after a moment of silence, she smiled and added: "And the amount of times I've asked him for a tissue — and dad never complained — well, that's been awesome!"

The quip was unexpected and that brought warmth to her parents' laughter. It was another sign of the old Brooke working her way through the haze and scoring a mental three-pointer.

"If anybody wants to argue that there's no such thing as miracles; or no such thing as God; or no such thing as the power of prayer, I'll go to bat (against them)," Gwen said.

"Anytime people ask about Brooke, I tell them, 'God has big plans for her.' Because if not, he would have taken her.'"

And some of that plan already seems to be unfolding.

She's bringing out the best in people.