Bella Fresca
When I first met Paige in the summer of 2017, I didn't see any more than another legal file crossing my desk, one of hundreds that had done so throughout my years of law practice. Like a slow-budding flower, however, I soon began to recognize that fate had crossed my path with that of a remarkable woman in the middle of a grueling, life altering, experience. Before I met her, before the accident, she had had it all - the high-powered job, the sprawling country house, all the trappings of success, and friends and family surrounding her. Then one day through a freak accident, it all got taken away. One strike to the back of the head by a strangely designed car headrest and Paige's life would never be the same again.
Traumatic brain injury is a silent bulldozer of one's life, wrecking the old and familiar and replacing it with an unknown and sometimes unnavigable landscape. It is a lonely journey with others only glimpsing a little of the brain's changes. For me, and others supporting her, we could never fully understand what Paige's journey was like on a day-to-day basis.
I soon began to realize that this amazing woman would never be able to obtain justice or regain any semblance of her life through the court system. Drivers involved in the car accident had small insurance policies and few other assets. The car company threw endless money and resources fighting the obvious conclusion that a headrest that is triggered by a pyrotechnic device and forcefully and unexpectedly flies towards the driver's head was not a wise idea. They demanded to depose her even though there was good reason to believe the anxiety of it might cause her to suffer a stroke. They threatened her with financial ruin if she would not accept a trivial payment in settlement.
It became clear that a plaintiff with a brain injury is no match for the corporate machinations of an international car company and the "trial by endurance" that the US legal system has become. "First do no harm" may originate in doctors' Hippocratic oath, but it was also in my personal commitment as a lawyer. Trying to obtain justice this way wasn't going to work.
Even on the darkest days, however, as I struggled to guide Paige through the legal maze and make decisions about her present and future, I knew something. Beyond reason, beyond the opinions of doctors, beyond her current inability to go a single day without her brain injury interfering with her life, this was not the end of her life story, not even close. She was going to survive and thrive, spread her wings and make her life something new and beautiful and inspiring.
Paige never got her day in court, never got to tell a jury what happened and how it affected her life, and she never got justice through the legal system. Instead, she agreed to write this book with me, to pay tribute to the beautiful life she once led and the new promising one she is building, and recounting the difficult journey between the two. This is a story of survival and hope, of new blooms peeking out from the desolate snow of winter at the beginning of Spring. This is the story of Bella Fresca.
