Coming Home to Heal

OJAI —  August in the Arce home was supposed to be, as it has been for years, the back-to-school month: Susie heading back as assistant principal at Nordhoff High School. Bob to teach Spanish at Ventura College. And Sam to his second year at Santa Barbara City College.

But this August has been different. In fact, more than different it has been difficult.

Buying notebooks and making lesson plans have been pushed aside for a more important project: Sam’s homecoming.

No, not the fall ritual that revolves around the big football game and coronation, but a true coming home.

It has been 83 days since Sam’s car tumbled off a mountain curve. To say almost three months doesn’t justly mark the accident that paralyzed half his body.

The June 8 accident on California 150 left the 19-year-old alive, but the young man who was once too busy to eat dinner with his family now spends much of his day in a wheelchair.

But as Sam said, “There’s pluses and minuses to everything that happens.”

The night of the accident, Susie Arce had fixed some of her son’s favorite foods. But Sam’s plate of chicken and sauteed red potatoes would go uneaten, as he dropped in and dashed out again.

June 8 was one of those early summer nights that still called for long pants and, for Sam, one of his dad’s shirts. The hectic day had included a visit to his former girlfriend’s father in the hospital and lunch with his sister. He was headed from Ojai toward Santa Paula, a trip he had made many times before. This time, he said, he “didn’t make it though.”

The phone rang at the Arce home about 9:30. But this time, the call wasn’t for Sam; this time it was about him.

The Ventura County Fire Department told Susie and Bob that their son had been in a car accident--not a first for Sam, the youngest of their six children. “Having worked with kids all these years, nothing’s too great a surprise,” Susie said. “Of course, we had no idea how bad it was.”

As Sam’s body contorted in the flipping car, a lower part of his spine snapped, the broken bone pressing against the signal-sending spinal cord. His injuries are labeled incomplete; he has feeling below the injury but no muscle reflex, an encouraging sign that he may walk again, but not a sure one.

Miraculously, Sam had virtually no other injuries--just a black eye and some short-term memory loss.

“I remember going down the hill. I remember having the car flip on me. I just remember trying to hide my head from hitting the windshield,” he recalled.

Sam spent the first week after the accident in intensive care at Ventura County Medical Center before moving to St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, where his stay turned into two months.

“When I first got there, I couldn’t do anything on my own--just too dizzy,” he remembered. “I was just a mess for the first week.”

Visitors dropped in and out of his extra-large room on the fourth floor.

“Some of the people I don’t even remember talking to,” Sam said.

“But you weren’t rude to anybody,” Susie said with maternal pride, adding that well-wishers called from the East Coast, England, Paris and Brazil.

The Arces said they’ve been overwhelmed by the support from Ojai.

“I had no idea, even close, that the community and a family could care for a person and a family that much, but they have,” Sam said.

“You find out who your friends are, and it takes something like this to figure it out . . . who’s with you when the times are bad, not just when the times are good.”

The therapy routine that began at St. John’s continues there several times a week and in Ojai with a therapist--tiring sessions of physical, occupational and recreational therapy to strengthen the muscles Sam can control and to maintain those he can’t.

The two metal rods that keep his back straight will eventually come out. The brace that keeps him straight--but also hot--comes off in a few weeks.

Sam is adjusting to his injury, taking the advice of those who also are paralyzed. “Those kind of people help the most actually--those people who’ve been through what I’ve been through.”

During a visit home from the hospital, his mother drove him by the embankment near the Dennison Grade where his Acura Legend drove off “into space,” as a witness said, and fell about 100 feet.

“I went and looked where I went off and I had no clue it was that high,” Sam said.

He won’t be returning, at least for a while.

“I don’t want to go up that road if I don’t have to. Just going up there once was enough for me.”

Sam and his mother had heard the whispers around Ojai that his accident was not entirely accidental. Sam’s breakup with his girlfriend of two years was weighing heavily on him. He said he was also known as a “guy who liked to party.”

But a breath test administered by a police officer at the scene showed no evidence of alcohol, and a later test revealed no drugs either. What was found was dangerously high blood sugar, which for Sam, a diabetic, can cause blackouts.

Sam has had diabetes for three years, but he conceded he never monitored it closely.

“I just wish I’d taken better care of myself,” he said.

Bob Arce said he was worried about his son long before the accident.

“My concern had always been his schedule, his horrendous schedule,” which did not mix well with his diabetes, Bob said. “Before, he was involved in things, but just so scattered in terms of just activities and things to do. He was just running on an edge.”

There was school at Nordhoff High and then a year at Santa Barbara City College. There were extracurricular activities, including football, a “full-time” girlfriend and two jobs, at the Ranch House in Ojai and most recently also at the Oxnard Hilton.

“I was never home,” Sam said. “I had no time for play.”

Well, that’s not exactly true. Just because he is the son of the discipline principal doesn’t mean Sam was a stranger to her office.

“I was just like every other kid,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let my mom’s position stop me from what I was going to do and what I was going to be in high school.”

“I’d say that puts it pretty well,” his mom said, rolling her eyes.

“He’s very independent, very strong-willed, and as a result he was doing what he thought was good for him to do,” said Bob of his son.

During Sam’s high school years, he and his father grew apart.

“Before he went into junior high, we’d go fishing every summer, out to Lake Casitas and just hang out. We got along real well because he liked to eat,” Bob joked.

“We were good friends,” Bob added. “I’m looking forward now in terms of spending time with him, but also maybe to recapture some of that.”

There were times when Sam’s mother saw him only at Nordhoff, and his father saw him even less.

“My dad felt like he didn’t even know me for the last three years,” Sam said.

Now that Susie is back at school, it is Bob, on a six-month sabbatical from Ventura College, who shuttles Sam to doctors and therapy.

“I think the accident gave him a definite focus and also a sense of reality,” Bob said. “He realizes that every day he has to take up the struggle and work with it. And every day is just a new day. Sometimes there’s progress, sometimes there’s setbacks.”

For now, Sam often speaks of aspirations in the past tense: He was into computers, he wanted to one day manage a restaurant.

That’s not to say that his goals are gone; they’ve just become shorter term. “To get up every day, stay positive, try to keep busy,” he said.

“The ultimate goal is just to become as independent as I can with this injury.”

There are times, he said, when “you feel like you’re 10 again.”

Although it won’t be this month, Sam said he will go back to school. He’s shooting for the spring semester at a community college. He may also apply to a program at the regeneration center at Denver’s Craig Hospital.

He learned about the program through online research of his injury and his prospects for healing. He has bookmarked 15 Web sites on spinal regeneration from around the world and has concluded that “the U.S. is really behind” in spinal-cord research.

It has been 18 days since Sam came home from St. John’s. Things are measured now in the Arce home by incremental victories--another task Sam can do without help, more feeling in his legs.

“Everything you get back gives you that feeling maybe you’ll get up again and walk,” Sam said.

As the rituals of August give way to the challenges of September, Sam is going to therapy five days a week, writing in his journal and researching the outlook for his injuries on the Internet.

Susie is back at Nordhoff.

Bob works on the house and the improvement projects he enjoys but wishes there was no need for: new doors wide enough to accommodate Sam’s wheelchair, a larger bathroom, a gentle ramp at the front door.

At night, the Arces again gather for dinner and watch movies, not just catch in-and-out flashes of each other.

“Home is now Sam’s circle,” Bob said. “This is where his soul has to be replenished.

“There’s a lot of sincerity here and a lot of honesty here,” he said. “You just can’t hide, while in the social world you can go out and wear the masks. Here we’re just each other, and it’s really nice because we’re helping each other.”

Here, during this homecoming.