Physically, she's intact.
Her clothing hides the scars. She has all her limbs, full use of them, too.
And she can walk.
Barbara Romer could have been one more teenager in our region killed in a car crash. Some say she should have been.
She lay unconscious, upside down, dangling from the stranglehold of a seat belt inside that car.
But she survived.
It's hard for the 19-year-old to fathom that.
"I figured you can break a few bones that will heal in a few months or you can die," Barbara says now. "I thought there's really nothing in between. I almost survived as a fraction of myself.
"
It's January 2005. Barbara's 18 and she's been driving for less than two years.
She has accidentally dyed her hair purple, a mistake that must be fixed right away.
She jumps into the car and heads to a store in Pine Bush.
The Romer family hasn't lived in Bloomingburg that long. Barbara makes a wrong turn.
She's lost.
She thinks she's found a turn-off along a dark stretch of Route 302, and has pulled over to turn around. She needs to get across the county road, straight across.
Barbara pulls out. She's pretty sure she blew through a stop sign. She never saw the red pickup truck as it headed for her car.
A witness to the crash would later tell Barbara that he rushed to the wreckage and did something most might fear doing he cut the seat belt constricting her neck as she dangled unconscious, upside down.
He's a father and he acted on that when he saw her. If he hadn't, who knows what could have been.
Morphine kept Barbara in a comatose state at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla for 27 days.
As Barbara slept, doctors hoped her young brain, bruised and battered, would heal.
If you looked at the images of Barbara's brain, you wouldn't see an injury.
But that's not unusual, says Dr. Glenn Seliger, director of Traumatic Brain Injury Rehabilitation Services at Helen Hayes Hospital in Rockland County. MRIs rarely detect brain injuries like Barbara's, which can be microscopic but still devastating.
"They look fine," he says, "and they still have significant problems."
For Barbara, the problems would surface as soon as she opened her eyes.
Barbara awoke from her coma three weeks after the crash.
Her first word came in a raspy, forced voice: "Daddy." It had been her first word as an infant, too.
Her rehabilitation at Helen Hayes lasted nearly three weeks.
She spent seven hours each day learning how to be "normal" again.
Barbara watched others around her, some of them teenagers and survivors of horrific crashes, too. Their heads were stabilized with metal screws and halos, their limbs lifeless and useless.
And there was Barbara. She couldn't coordinate her legs to navigate a small step. She couldn't place the Scrabble letters into the game board squares.
When her speech therapist, Cristina Farrell, gave her three words to recite, then recall minutes later, Barbara couldn't do it.
"She wanted to know: 'Mom, am I retarded now?'" Marta Romer recalls through tears.
"I told her: 'No, honey, you just hurt yourself.'"
Barbara walked out of Helen Hayes.
Others simply don't.
This day, a cold day in March, Barbara Romer visits Helen Hayes again.
It's amazing how far she's come. The 19-year-old returned to the New York Institute of Technology at the end of January to resume her studies.
She feared the brain injury would have wiped out her design skills.
Her therapists are amazed that Barbara can even commute regularly to the Big Apple.
"A near-full recovery," says her occupational therapist, Katie Kelly, "is very rare.
"
It's weird to be here, Barbara says, noticing changes at Helen Hayes since she last navigated these halls in a wheelchair.
And the tears come easily now.
"You look great," Farrell, her speech therapist, says, embracing the young woman.
And Barbara Romer does.
To look at her, you'd never know she has to keep a detailed accounting of every little thing she has to do every day. You wouldn't know that just a year ago, she couldn't name more than three animals.
"Not everybody comes back the way Barbie came back," says Farrell.
"Not everyone 'rewires.'"
Barbara Romer is one of the lucky ones.
Kristina Wells is a reporter for the Times Herald-Record. Reach her at kwells@th-record.com.
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