Daniel Rubin: Healing hands for 'a connector'

Gordon Hershey sits by the window of the hospital room with its view of the changing leaves. "I didn't even notice that it's gotten colder," he says.

His wife, Joan, leans over the bed, stroking their daughter's face.

"Hi, sweetie pie," the mother says. "I see you looking at us. Are you with us?"

Alice Hershey's eyes are open. What she sees is not evident.

"Every day little things happen that didn't happen the day before," Joan says. "The only thing is that they're little things.

"It's not that she graduated Swarthmore. It's that she swallowed."

When your daughter is in a coma, these are the milestones a mother marks. It's progress, compared to the news the family first heard seven weeks ago, when their other daughter, Elizabeth, called from the emergency room.

Alice, 29, director of outreach at the Live Arts/Philly Fringe Festival, had been out with friends in Northern Liberties on Aug. 13 - dinner, an art exhibit, lots of talking as usual - and then just after midnight she was bicycling home to South Philly to meet another friend when she ran a red light.

A Cadillac Escalade was heading west on JFK Boulevard. They collided at 17th Street, a 6,000-pound truck and a 140-pound young woman in a hurry. The driver called police.

Alice Hershey's body suffered few scratches, but the trauma to her head was extraordinary. Her father says her helmet probably saved her life.

Twelve hours later, at Hahnemann, Gordon Hershey looked down at his daughter and found her almost unrecognizable, her face chalk white and flattened. "She looked like a Chinese theatrical mask," he says.

The Hersheys have been by her side almost every day since, sleeping at Alice's apartment the first month, then on the grounds of Bryn Mawr Rehab, and now in Germantown, in the home of yet another Swarthmore connection.

Gordon Hershey says he and his wife and daughter Elizabeth have been embraced by "this swarm of angels." That would be Alice's friends.

More than 850 of them have gathered on Facebook and in person, delivering meals to the family, lending cars, sympathetic shoulders, and remarkably good humor. This compassion has helped the family through the unbearable.

"Pretty amazing how people came out of the woodwork," says Anneliese Van Arsdale, a friend from both Philadelphia and back home in Bloomington, Ind. "Alice is a connector, someone who brings other people together. Whatever she's doing, she wants you to come along."

For most of Alice's time since graduation in 2002 - her degree from Swarthmore College is in psychology - she has made her home in Philadelphia. For two years she worked at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., in residential living. She tried New York for a while and moved to Colorado during the Obama campaign. But she kept coming back to friends in this city.

Her mother says her analytic skills allowed her to flourish at PeopleMetrics, a market research firm. A coworker there wrote on a poster made for Alice, "You were always the sweetest, happiest, and most energetic person in the room."

Alice lived much of her life outside the 9-to-5 - helping run a South Philly kickball league, assisting a college friend to build a 42-foot sailboat, working at theaters so she could see free shows, ringing bells at Christ Church. Van Arsdale says her childhood friend talked over the summer of becoming a math teacher.

What's next now is uncertain, for Alice, for her family. Joan Hershey is postmaster of a small town in Indiana. She has a few weeks of family leave left, mostly unpaid. Gordon, an administrator at Indiana University, has been able to teach his course about the history of IU and Western education over the Internet. Elizabeth, 25, works here as a freelance photographer.

The insurance, too, is ambiguous. Alice had bought coverage from Aetna, thinking she needed more than the festival provided, her mother says. Aetna at first denied Alice's transfer to the rehab center, and the family and friends scrambled to write letters of protest. But the company quickly reversed its position and has given Bryn Mawr Rehab 14 days before reevaluating her case.

Kristin Stamboolian, Alice's caseworker at the hospital, says that is a generous amount of time in today's health-care world. Bryn Mawr Rehab has asked the insurer to cover Alice for eight weeks. "She's going to be here a while," Stamboolian says.

David Long, medical director of Bryn Mawr's brain-injury program, says there is a significant possibility Alice will regain consciousness. But it's too soon to know what will happen. So the family waits and watches and charts each movement she makes.

Each morning the staff dresses Alice for the day and feeds her. She undergoes three hours of therapy, much of it vigorous, intended to help reawaken her brain and keep her body vital.

She arrives back from the gym down the hall, slightly flushed, her legs twitching slightly in the footrest of her wheelchair, her eyes open. Then aides scoot her back into bed, positioning her in a curl on her side, her neck braced, her head cushioned in a soft maroon helmet that reminds her father of something from the Stargate SC-1 TV series.

And her parents keep talking to her.

"I keep seeing her as sleeping, and then she's going to wake up," her mother says. "If you stop thinking that way, it gets real hard."

Her father listens and adds a dash of leavening: "You cannot not rely upon your hopes, but the pain is much harder when you pretend it's all going to be fine."