‘Helmet activist’ finds a calling

By Jonathan Kipp

The Forest Grove News-Times, Jan 11, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

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On a warm June evening in 1996, Cecelia Warner and her friend, visiting from Utah, decided to take a little bicycle ride around Cecelia’s new Forest Grove neighborhood.

She’d moved to town just weeks before with her husband and was eager to explore her new home town a bit more.

Life was good. Just 24-hours earlier Cecelia and her husband decided to start trying to have a child. A new chapter was beginning: a new home, a new town and an imminent baby.

Maybe she’d planned on telling her friend about the news of a baby during the bike ride. But she wouldn’t remember. After all, most of the details of that day have been erased from her memory.

Within minutes of leaving Cecelia’s home that evening, life quite literally got turned upside down. Her front wheel hit the back wheel of her friend’s bike and locked up. She flew over the handlebars and was knocked unconscious when she landed. Her friend watched in horror as Cecelia’s body, flat on the pavement, convulsed with seizures at the corner of 12th and Filbert.

A Life Flight helicopter transported her to Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland. The emergency crew only knew her name; that’s all the identifying information her friend knew. Cecelia’s friend didn’t know the house’s address or the phone number. There was no way to contact Cecelia’s husband. She couldn’t even direct the police to the house because she had no idea how to find it.

Both women – one on a helicopter and seriously injured, the other an innocent, and now traumatized, houseguest – were quite literally lost.

To this day the thought of flying to the hospital with an incomplete identity still makes Cecelia shudder. “I think that is horrifying,” she says, flipping through a thick folder that holds countless old medical bills. “I can’t imagine my family not knowing where I was,” Cecelia adds, turning especially serious.

Eventually police found the friend’s car parked in Cecelia’s driveway. Before long Cecelia’s husband was in route to the hospital to be by his wife’s side.

Cecelia remained in full body traction for three days, enduring endless x-rays and scans of her brain and back. When asked to name the President of United States, Cecelia answered “Carter” rather than “Clinton.” That is the only detail she can remember about her time in the hospital.

Despite the bike helmet on her head, the accident left Cecelia with a concussion that caused a brain hemorrhage. The consequences were many – short term memory loss, confusion, problems with focus, sustained attention and concentration, word memory loss, weakness and fatigue.

A verbose person by nature, Cecelia found difficulty finding “words in spontaneous conversation.” Expressing herself was often impossible. And her ability to recall facts was difficult. She still carries around a notebook filled with everything she is supposed to remember about her life.

Healing was difficult and slow. Smaller seizures continued. Cecelia remained disabled, isolated and depressed, a common side effect of this type of brain trauma, for a year.

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