Walking long road of recovery, step by step

Three months after her car accident, Susan Peters woke up.

She couldn't move. She could barely speak. It was hard to breathe. She looked up and saw her younger sister, Alecia, who began calling to their mom, "She's awake! She's awake!"

Last she remembered, she had been driving to work on a December morning in 1993. It had just started snowing and she was heading down Hwy. 3 from her home in Eagan to her job in Rosemount.

What seemed to her like an instant later, the 27-year-old was in bed at her parents' Prior Lake home, where she'd been moved after weeks in hospitals and a nursing home. Her family broke the news: She'd been in a head-on collision with another car, followed by a second impact from a truck. She hadn't been wearing a seat belt, and she'd been thrown through the windshield by the first impact -- then through the side window by the second. She'd suffered brain damage, a collapsed lung and a shattered ankle. She'd been in a coma.

And most people didn't think she'd ever walk again.

Those people would be surprised to learn that nearly 16 years later, on Oct. 31, Peters was not only walking, she was in Minneapolis walking a 5K race -- her fifth. And she set a new personal best time of 1 hour, 37 minutes. (Her previous best was 1:38.)

The road back was often frustrating and slow. She endured day after day of slow progress with physical therapists and speech therapists, and more than two dozen surgeries. But, she says, she stuck with it simply because she couldn't stomach the idea of quitting, and she wanted to show others that it could be done.

"If I can do it, anybody can," Peters said.

She and her mother, Helen Videen, told me their story last week at Peters' apartment in Burnsville, where she now lives mostly independently. She gets out of bed, cooks for herself, cleans up the place, and cares for her two cats. She goes to the grocery store with the help of an aide. And she hits the gym two or three days a week to continue her rehabilitation with one of the many professionals she credits for helping her get back on her feet again, personal trainer Erik Peacock, who is the owner of Puravida Fitness in Lakeville.

She's been working with him since 2000, when she was still in a wheelchair and looked as if she'd be that way for the rest of her life.

Because of the brain damage, Peters lost her sense of balance and had to re-learn everything, including forming basic sounds in order to speak. Immobilized for many months after the crash, her muscles weakened and her tendons tightened, causing her extremities, such as her hands and fingers, to curl up. Most of her surgeries were done to relax those tendons.

"It was like being in a prison made of flesh," she said.

There were times when it seemed too hard to bear. She had been married 11 months when the accident happened, and afterward, her husband left. It took her a year just to sit up. There was a time when she told her mother every day that she wished she had died.

And even once she could get out of the house in her wheelchair, she had to adjust to a new reality.

"The world views wheelchair-bound people a lot differently than people who can walk," Peters said. "It was a double-whammy, being in a wheelchair and not being able to speak well."

Before the crash, she loved to ride her horses and was a talented jazz vocalist and musician. She was in good physical shape and liked to run.

But after the crash, she couldn't do any of that. Being trapped was bad enough, but being patronized drove her crazy. Being seen as incapable was demoralizing.

One of her turning points was something she was told by a doctor she only met once: "Don't let anybody tell you you're done improving," he told her. "As long as you try, you will improve."

As the little successes started coming, and then started snowballing, she dedicated herself to beating the odds, she says. And that's why she set the goal of being able to walk in a 5K, which she first did in 2005.

"Most of it was her willingness to try to get better," Peacock said.

From the days when a home health aide had to bribe her with grape bubble gum to get her to try a leg lift, Peters worked herself up to the point of doing weight training, mobility drills and balance exercises at the gym. Now, Peacock said, she can walk into the studio, hop on an elliptical trainer and start going.

Now that she's come so far, Peters said, she hopes to continue improving her speech so she can share her story with more people. She'd like to speak to groups; a few years ago, she tried it with a freshman health class in Lakeville and remembers getting thank-you notes from 42 students afterward. One of the things she made sure to tell them: Always wear your seat belt. "I always thought it would never happen to me, and part of my talk was, yes, it does happen to you," Peters said.

And now that she's walking 5Ks, she hopes to someday run again. And ride a bike. And drive a car.

Some might say she'll never do it. But that's what they said when she was struggling simply to get out of bed all those years ago.

"She's proved them all wrong," Peacock said.

Dylan Belden is the editor of Star Tribune South Extra. E-mail him at dylan.belden@startribune.com.