Teacher, coach is a living inspiration

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Imagine this: One moment the school counselor is saying you're bright enough to skip seventh grade. The next, you're in the hospital with a severe brain injury after being hit by a truck. If you live, you may never be the brightest kid in the class again.

It happened 20 years ago to Aaron Norman of Yakima.

Norman endured six life-threatening brain surgeries and beat the odds that he'd be permanently impaired.

He's telling his story in hopes of inspiring the families of other victims of brain injuries, in particular Highland High School junior Matthew Newman, who remains hospitalized after suffering a head injury in a football game last month.

Now a math teacher at Wapato's Pace Alternative High School, Norman said his daily mission is to repay everyone who had a hand in his recovery by working with kids who are challenged academically because of a poor home life or poverty.

"I wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for the teachers, the nurses, the doctor and everyone else who encouraged me, and I need to repay that somehow. This is a way of doing that," he said.

Norman was 12 years old when he and a buddy got off a city bus on Tieton Drive near Franklin Middle School, just down the street from his family's home on 21st Avenue.

The bus driver checked his side-view mirror to make sure the way was clear and then waved the boys across the street. What the driver didn't know was that an impatient pickup driver behind him had decided to pull out into the left lane and zip around the bus.

Norman was struck and thrown 30 feet. His sister, playing nearby at a friend's house, happened to look over and see orange fluorescent shoelaces on a pair of empty sneakers in the middle of the street. She knew they belonged to her brother.

The last thing Norman remembers was sitting with his friend Margaret France in the counselor's office talking about skipping seventh grade.

"The next thing I knew, Margaret got bumped to eighth grade and I got bumped to Memorial Hospital," he quipped. (France is now an up-and-coming comedian who's also finishing her doctorate in English.)

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At Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital, Norman's neurosurgeon told his parents, Don and Patty Norman, that their son had less than a 10 percent chance of emerging from a coma. And if he lived, the doctor said, he could be severely brain damaged.

The trauma to his brain included severe bleeding and internal swelling. He needed a ventilator to breathe.

The first time he came off the ventilator, his lips started moving. Don put his ear to his son's mouth and heard the words, "Big Gulp," indicating he was thirsty.

"That's when I knew there was still something there," said Don.

But Aaron had a long way to go. Over the next three months, he lived in his own intensive care unit at Memorial as doctors and nurses monitored his condition. His family camped out at the hospital and formed deep attachments with many of Aaron's caregivers.

One of them was Gail Fast, a pediatric nurse with Memorial at the time. She credits the family with Aaron's eventual recovery.

"They were a family with an incredible spirit," Fast said.

She said they reached out to other families with children who had head injuries. The Normans did something else that impressed people at the hospital: They didn't blame the drivers of the truck or the bus for their son's misfortune.

"It's a family I will never forget," Fast said.

Don doesn't remember exactly why his son had each of the six surgeries, except that one was for an infection that nearly killed him. Aaron's neurosurgeon has since died.

Dr. Gus Varnavas, a neurosurgeon with Memorial, said having six brain surgeries would be highly unusual today.

In one of those surgeries, a damaged piece of the left side of his brain was removed and replaced with an acrylic plate to protect the rest of the healthy tissue.

The area of his brain responsible for speech and language had sustained the most trauma.

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In the weeks following the accident, Aaron -- still hospitalized -- relearned how to walk, talk and write. One of his first assignments was to write one word a day. Even though it was just a single word, figuring out how to spell again was torture, he recalled. For "cat," he wrote "it."

The former straight-A student, whose parents frowned on an A-minus, began to think he was dumb.

But while Aaron was coaxing the left side of his brain back into some functionality, something was happening to the right side, which plays a large part in interpreting visual information and spatial processing.

He began developing a system of abbreviations and codes to remember things, such as people's names or earlier events. His mind photographed numbers.

His doctor explained that the right side of his brain, which wasn't damaged, was making up for the left side. Varnavas said it happens a lot, especially with younger victims of traumatic brain injury.

"The neurons start filling the void," he said.

One thing Aaron never lost, according to his mom, was his sense of humor: "It's one of the things I'm most proud of him for," Patty said.

After Memorial sent Aaron home, he was tutored but struggled to keep up with the seventh-grade work. When he went back to school, administrators put him into some special education classes.

To top things off, he had to wear a bicycle helmet to protect his head.

"I made jokes about it before anybody else could," he said.

His first report card was full of C's and D's.

"That tore me apart," he recalled. "I was a good-for-nothing and I didn't like it."

So he made a decision: "I said, 'There aren't going to be any excuses.'"

Language and English remained challenging as Aaron entered eighth grade, but his math skills went off the charts. Psychologists routinely tested his abilities so his parents and school officials could evaluate his recovery.

On one multiple choice vocabulary test, he figured out there was a mathematical pattern to the answers. He marked the answers according to the pattern instead of defining the words and scored 100.

At Davis High School, he continued to work hard. His dad remembers seeing the light on in Aaron's room until 1:30 in the morning.

But he excelled, taking college-level classes and running cross country. Ten years ago, Aaron graduated from Central Washington University, where he was a dean's list regular. He majored in education and earned a graduate teaching certificate.

English continues to be a bit weak for Aaron. He was an avid Hardy Boys reader before the accident. Now, fiction leaves him a little lost, although he gobbles up random facts, which draws needling from his wife, Jennifer, who is also a teacher.

Aaron started his teaching career at Riverside Christian but took the job at Pace when it opened up several years ago. Now he teaches math just across the courtyard from his dad, who is an instructor in business and marketing. Together, they coach the Wapato High School cross country team.

The kids at Riverside Christian were a snap to teach, Aaron said, but he identifies more with the kids at Pace. For that, he credits the accident.

"Before the accident, I was not that nice. I identified with my fellow gifted and talented classmates and nobody else. I didn't have to work hard to get A's," Aaron said.

"But after the accident, I gained a whole new respect for people who work hard. It made me respect other people's achievements."

Aaron and his dad also reach out to other brain-injured victims and recently offered encouragement to the family of Highland football player Matthew Newman. A quarterback and defensive back, Newman was hurt in a Sept. 18 game against Naches Valley. Newman is finally breathing on his own, eating solid food and finding his voice, according to his family's comments on the CaringBridge Web site.

Cathy Hammerberg, the retired principal of Pace who hired Aaron eight years ago, said he excels as a teacher because of his own difficult journey.

"These kids are reluctant learners," Hammerberg said. "Because of his patience and his high expectations for them, he gets wonderful results. They do math and they do difficult math. He just gets it out of them."

* Leah Beth Ward can be reached at 509-577-7626 or lward@yakimaherald.com.

Traumatic brain injuries

• It's estimated that from 50 percent to 70 percent of the nation's traumatic brain injuries result from motor vehicle crashes.

• Sports and recreational activities contribute to about 21 percent of all traumatic brain injuries among American children and adolescents.

• The mortality rate is 30 per 100,000, or an estimated 50,000 deaths in the United States annually. Of those who die, 50 percent do so within the first two hours of injury.

-- Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention