Injured Boy Gets Touch Therapy

Three days after the September accident at Disneyland, Elinor Silverstein met Brandon Zucker, a beautiful but broken little boy, and a family gripped by pain. Silverstein began daily sessions in the movement and touch therapy she has practiced for two decades, softly caressing Brandon’s lips and face to stimulate his shattered nervous system.

At that time, the 4 1/2-year-old’s limbs were taut, his feet were curled in tight balls and his only sounds were gasping cries muffled by tubes inserted in his mouth. The first thing his father, David Zucker, told Silverstein was, “He never got to play baseball.”

Doctors told the family on Oct. 12, after conducting an MRI, that the boy had suffered substantial brain damage, and that he might never see again, Silverstein said. But, six weeks after Brandon slipped out of a car on Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin, the boy occasionally makes eye contact with his mother, Silverstein said, and he brushed his hand against his face for the first time Sunday.

“To see the changes have been nothing less than dramatic,” Silverstein said Monday. “He’s coming closer and closer to the surface.”

In the process of working as a volunteer with Brandon, Silverstein said she has befriended his family and now is trying to help them find a place to live. The family plans to move to Orange County from their home in northern Los Angeles County in order to center their lives around Brandon’s recovery, which remains uncertain despite recent gains.

Late last week, Brandon was moved from UCI Medical Center in Orange to HealthBridge Children’s Rehabilitation Hospital in Orange, a facility that opened in February, and is currently treating 20 children ranging in age from 10 months to 19 years, including Brandon.

“He’s making some positive changes which are certainly encouraging,” Robert Buckley, clinical program director at HealthBridge, said of Brandon. “His physical responses are coming along nicely. We’re hoping that his cognitive abilities, his awareness, will continue taking place.

“But it’s very difficult to predict how someone with a catastrophic injury, how far their brain will come back,” Buckley said. “We just don’t know how that recovery will come along, but his recovery over the next three to six months will be the most telling period of time.”

Silverstein, a Cowan Heights resident, practices and teaches a therapy called the Feldenkrais touch method. She will continue trying to help the boy--and his family.

Her observations, offered in an interview Monday, paint a picture of a family stunned by a sudden disaster, but pulling together bravely under painful and financially straining circumstances.

Victoria Zucker has stayed nearly around the clock with Brandon--first at UCI Medical Center in Orange, and now at HealthBridge. She often sleeps at his side, and at times has used a stuffed bear as her pillow, Silverstein said. David Zucker has continued to work as a steelworker on a Los Angeles construction job, and has maintained the family’s home in Canyon Country in northern Los Angeles County with their 6-year-old son, Nicholas, a first-grader.

The family, Silverstein said, needs help locating a two-bedroom condominium to rent in an area with a good school system not far from HealthBridge, perhaps in Irvine or North Tustin. They hope to find a place, as soon as possible, in the $1,150 to $1,250 a month range, Silverstein said.

“The family has been coping beautifully,” Silverstein said. “They are one put-together family. But it’s been very difficult because Victoria feels that she has not been able to be there for Nicholas. She’s been so torn because she does not want to spend even five minutes away from Brandon.”

Moving to Orange County would allow the family to live together instead of being together only on weekends, Silverstein said. They haven’t had much time to find a condo they could afford, she said. Victoria Zucker has stopped working at Mervyn’s in order to stay with Brandon, Silverstein said, so the family is getting by on one income.

“They’re putting all of their energy on their family, and the healing of their little boy,” Silverstein said.

For six weeks, Disneyland has paid for the family to stay at a hotel in Orange, near the hospital. The theme park also provided a cell phone for the family, Silverstein said.

The Zuckers also need some loose-fitting clothing for Brandon, soft sweatpants (size 6 1/2) and flannel shirts that button in the front to avoid pulling over Brandon’s head. Silverstein, who has been working for free, would also like someone to donate what she calls “bubble tubes,” 4-foot to 5-foot clear plastic cylinders with lights, bubbles and fish swimming around, “something that his eyes can track.”

The Zuckers and Silverstein credit the medical care at UCI Medical Center and the Feldenkrais method for much of Brandon’s recovery.

The Feldenkrais method is a type of “supportive therapy” that can help a patient move and recover from illness and injury.

Practitioners, including Silverstein, say the method can alleviate pain and helps people with neuromuscular disorders, such as multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy or stroke. Now they are trying the method on people who have lost bone density because of osteoporosis. It also is popular among professional dancers.

“It is a very, very gentle form of specific movement sequences that are geared to communicating directly to the brain,” Silverstein said. “It’s a form of retraining and reteaching to learn function. We use neurological diplomacy by very gently and very kindly connecting with the nervous system.”

In Brandon’s case, “the nervous system has been broken. I’m saying remember, remember, remember who you are,” she said.

Silverstein said she will begin billing for her services but will not press for payment.

She is a second cousin of Moshe Feldenkrais, an Israeli scientist who created the method after injuring his own knee, she said. In the 1970s he taught the method internationally and directed the Feldenkrais Institute in Tel Aviv until his death in 1984.

At the heart of the method is a respect for the human potential for change and an ability to recognize an unconscious pattern of movement.

The Feldenkrais method is only one therapy that Brandon will undergo, Buckley said.

The boy is being evaluated at HealthBridge and will have the more traditional “physical, occupational, speech and language therapy as well as rehabilitative nursing,” Buckley said.

“We certainly anticipate some more improvement,” Buckley said. “But how far, it is certainly too early to say.”

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Those offering assistance locating housing for the Zuckers can write HealthBridge, 393 S. Tustin St., Orange, or call and ask for the social services department at (714) 289-2400.