A Survivor's Story:
This true story brought to you by St. Petersburg Times (http://www.sptimes.com)
Accident starts mom on helmet crusade
Carol Hasbrouck has a thing or two to say about kids who ride scooters and skateboards without helmets. She knows all too well what can happen when they don't.
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 22, 2001
ST. PETERSBURG -- She was nestled smack in the middle of the suburban dream. Her husband is a scientist with an engineering firm, and she's a mortgage banker. They have a cozy house on a canal in Shore Acres, two sons, two boats, three cars and a dog.
No health problems. No money problems.
Life had dealt Carol Hasbrouck a pretty good hand.
And then last summer, her older son fractured his skull in a skateboarding accident, lapsed into a coma and nearly died.
After he recovered, something inside her changed. She saw things she hadn't seen before, and what used to be important wasn't so important anymore.
Now, when she sees a child skateboarding or riding a bike without a helmet, she'll roll down her window and yell, "Hey! Nice helmet!" or "You should be wearing a helmet!"
She once wrote a letter to the St. Petersburg Times when it ran a picture of boys riding scooters without wearing helmets. When she sees an ad for a scooter, a skateboard or a bike, she'll check to see if the child in the ad is wearing one. If not, she'll write a letter asking the store to change its ads. (Dillard's agreed last fall to remove an ad that showed a helmetless little girl riding a scooter.)
The sum total of her political involvement had been voting, but when Gov. Jeb Bush signed legislation last summer repealing Florida's 31-year-old motorcycle helmet law, Hasbrouck wrote him.
"It wasn't a friendly letter," she said. "(The repeal) hurts my effort because it's a 'Do as I say not as I do' kind of mentality.
"I am very upset with Mr. Bush."
This is the new Carol Hasbrouck.
"I've never been an activist, never tried to influence people," she said. "And I know this isn't one of the most glamorous issues.
"And some people probably think I'm just meddling.
"But I don't care, because I don't want anyone to go through what I went through."
* * *
Andy, 15, is sitting next to his mother on a recent Wednesday afternoon. While talking about the accident, he lets it slip that that it wasn't the first time he hitched a ride on a car while skateboarding.
His mother's jaw drops.
"You told me you had never done it," she shoots back. Andy tries to explain and realizes it's futile. They will discuss it later.
Andy is asked if there is a skateboarding term for hitching a ride a la Michael J. Fox in Back To The Future.
Carol answers for him.
"Idiotic? Stupid? I could go on."
Andy rolls his eyes.
On the kitchen counter is evidence of how close he came to death: photos of Andy in an intensive care unit in a Memphis hospital, his face swollen and tubes leading from his neck.
All Andy remembers is that he was on summer vacation visiting a friend in Tennessee. It was June 23, 2000. They went to Beale Street and then to an ATV track. His next memory is being in the hospital.
He had been riding his skateboard and holding on to the driver's side door of his friend's car. They were doing 25, maybe 30 MPH.
Andy lost his balance, the board flew up in the air, and he fell to the street, smacking the back of his head against the asphalt.
He was in a coma, on life support. His brain began to swell. There was a chance part of his brain would have to be removed. His parents decided that if he died, they would donate his organs.
On the Fourth of July -- four days after the repeal of the motorcycle helmet law -- Andy opened one eye and yawned.
"I never thought I'd be so excited to see my son yawn," Carol says. "But he still had a long way to go."
At first, he didn't know where he lived and didn't recognize his father. But Andy accomplished in three months what physical and occupational therapists said would take a year. He was back at Northeast High that fall, and on Dec. 23, he went wakeboarding.
It would be easy for Carol to count her blessings and leave it at that. She doesn't have to call the department stores. Let someone else write the governor.
"But I can't," she says. "It has to be the norm to see kids with helmets on.
"Maybe parents don't know how easy it is to get hurt. Maybe they think this isn't going to happen to their kid."
And so she fights on. It's not easy being an advocate. To have a cause.
"Sometimes I hesitate to say things," she says. "Someone at work was saying she bought her daughter a scooter for Christmas. I just kind of looked at her and right away, she said, 'She wears her helmet.'
"I understand how hard it is to get kids to do something. Before this happened to me, I got tired of arguing with my son and I just said, 'Okay, don't wear it.' And that was a mistake.
"I should have said, 'You don't want to wear a helmet? Then give me your skateboard.' "
She can't see a time when she won't be trying to make people listen. She's in this battle for the duration.
"I'll just keep doing this as long as the need is there," she says, "and hopefully, at some point, it will be the norm. Kids will grow up not thinking that it's not cool to wear a helmet.
"I'm not trying to make kids wear helmets. I'm trying to make parents make kids wear helmets."
She stopped for a moment and looked at her son.
"You know, Andy said a week before the accident that he was invincible. He still thinks he is.
"This scared the living daylights out of him, but he didn't watch himself in a coma.
"I did."