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"  I was in a business meeting with my phone turned off, so I didn&amp;#039;t get the calls immediately. But when I glanced down at my phone and saw that I had those two messages\u2014the first from the nanny, the second from my ex-husband\u2014I knew something was very wrong. The message from the nanny was hysterical, breathless: &amp;quot;Heather, something has happened to Elle,&amp;quot; my three-year-old daughter. Then click, the phone went dead. Later I learned she had apparently fainted at the scene. From my ex-husband: &amp;quot;Elle was in an accident. She is all right. Call me back.&amp;quot;  She wasn&amp;#039;t all right. Elle was on her way to her second week of preschool when she was hit by a car. She was walking on the green light, in the crosswalk. The man who hit her was in a Ford Bronco, hunting for a parking space, which he spotted on the street corner near where Elle was crossing. But instead of circling the block, he reversed up a busy boulevard and through the crosswalk, the wrong way down a one-way street. His SUV struck Elle at the base of her skull.  I grabbed my purse, leaving all my books and papers behind, and ran from the meeting. The cab ride to New York\u2013Presbyterian hospital was the longest ride of my life.  I arrived at the ER to find Elle screaming and surrounded by doctors. &amp;quot;I want my mommy!&amp;quot; was all I heard as I rushed to her, finding her in a neck brace, her face and body bruised and bloody. I told her she would be okay, stroked her hair and tried to appear calm. A neurosurgeon came by to examine her, and in the middle of the exam her eyes rolled up into her head and she passed out. The doctors circled in closer and closer, and I was pushed out of the way.  That&amp;#039;s when I ran to the bathroom to throw up.  When I collected myself, I placed a call to my father in Los Angeles. &amp;quot;Elle was hit by a car,&amp;quot; I told him. &amp;quot;I need you to come. Just come.&amp;quot; He knew this call all too well: My brother had died in a car accident at age 17. He put down the phone, called my mother, and caught the next flight to New York. By evening, the pediatric neurosurgeon, Jeffrey Greenfield, MD, had evaluated Elle&amp;#039;s scans. The collision had fractured her skull in multiple places\u2014most horrifically, at the base of her cranium. This had severed her left carotid artery, the main source of blood to that side of her brain, and the fractured bone had blocked off the major vein draining blood from her brain. So in an instant, the normal blood flow was destroyed. And yet: Small connections between some of the largest blood vessels were still open, and her blood was rerouting itself to supply and drain her brain. It was a wonder that she was doing as well as she was. What Greenfield feared now was that a clot could break off from the blocked artery and result in a stroke. I slept in the bed with her that first night, thinking that we might be so lucky as to walk out of this hospital with our little miracle of a child. When Greenfield asked her in the morning if she knew where she was, Elle said, &amp;quot;I know, but I&amp;#039;m not telling you.&amp;quot; He considered that an appropriate response for a feisty three-year-old. The second night, Elle&amp;#039;s father, Nicolas, came to stay with her. We&amp;#039;d been divorced for two years, and things had been a bit tense between us, but none of it mattered in the face of Elle&amp;#039;s accident. Nervous and shaky at home that night, I took a sleeping pill, and when the call came at 5 a.m., my terror pierced through the sedative haze. It was Nicolas: &amp;quot;Come now. Something has happened. It&amp;#039;s bad.&amp;quot;  I had fallen asleep in my clothes, so I was out the door in less than a minute. By now both of my parents were in New York with me; my father stayed with my five-year-old daughter, Lila, and my mother followed me to the hospital. I ran into Elle&amp;#039;s room, finding her crying and limp. A resident examining her that morning discovered that she was having trouble communicating and moving on her right side. She was taken for a CAT scan of her brain, and our worst fear was realized. A blood clot had broken off the carotid artery and lodged itself inside the middle cerebral artery. She&amp;#039;d had a stroke. Greenfield was on his way in to perform emergency surgery.   What I didn&amp;#039;t know then was that the stroke had destroyed two thirds of the left half of Elle&amp;#039;s brain, which now was swelling in response. She needed an emergency craniectomy\u2014the removal of half of her skull\u2014in order to let the tissue swell without constraint and then heal, Greenfield hoped. Not performing this operation would have meant her swift death. She was intubated and rushed to the operating room, as Nicolas and I raced alongside her bed. We decided he would be the one to go with her, and as they got in the elevator, he looked at me, tears streaming down his face. We both knew that we could lose our little girl. As the doors closed, I crumpled to the floor, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. My mother stood over me, remembering when she had been in the very place that I was now. How devastating it must have been for her to have to relive it, but quietly, even firmly, she said, &amp;quot;Heather, you must get up. You are on the floor of a hospital. You must get up.&amp;quot; It was as if I were watching myself in a movie, pitying that poor woman on the floor, wondering what she&amp;#039;d do next. Somehow I stumbled to the waiting room, and my mother held me while I sobbed, unable to talk, barely able to breathe.  Two hours later, Greenfield emerged from the O.R. and explained that the best chance for Elle now was for her to be placed in a medically induced coma. She had tubes inserted into her brain to drain fluid and probes inserted to measure pressure, temperature, and oxygen levels. Her body was cooled to 33\u02DAC. This, along with a cocktail of drugs, reduced her brain activity to near flatline. Her blood pressure was dramatically increased to speed the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to whatever parts of her brain were salvageable. Between the breathing tube, feeding tube, and a dozen other lines coming into and out of her head, Elle was barely recognizable. But by acting quickly and decisively, Greenfield had saved her life. I started to call him Superman.  She was in a coma for more than two weeks, and during that time I went through every emotion: fear, anger, guilt, wistfulness. I used my new iPhone to look at photos and videos of her from just a week earlier. As I sat by her bedside, I listened to Elle&amp;#039;s favorite songs from Grease, remembering how she loved to play &amp;quot;dance party,&amp;quot; and watched videos of her sister teaching her ballet. A group of neurologists came daily to examine her, and one day, they took me aside to say that her stroke was of such severity that it was likely Elle would never walk again, never talk again, never be able to use her right side. I should prepare for this future, they said.  I had been living what some might see as a gilded life, working as the head of marketing at a glamorous fashion house, raising my two girls on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, juggling the schedules that came with these responsibilities. But the meeting with the neurologists brought home the fact that life would never be the same. I couldn&amp;#039;t imagine being without Elle, and I refused to think about it, but I did start considering how I would parent a very impaired little girl, and how I&amp;#039;d be the best mother to Elle, and also to Lila, who was reeling from the accident. Having been the sibling of a sick child myself (my brother was diabetic), I made every effort to spend time with her each day. Being with Lila was my antidote to total despair. Soon I developed a schedule: I&amp;#039;d take Lila to school and then walk to the hospital, arriving at 8:30 and staying until night, when Nicolas would sleep over. When he left for a business trip, I did the night shift, too. I was running on pure adrenaline, staying awake for hours on end and needing Ambien to quiet my thoughts when I was able to sleep at home. It was during this time that my father went to pick up the police report from the accident. It confirmed that the driver, Jose, had struck Elle in his quest for a parking space.  His penalty? A traffic ticket.  I became obsessed with bringing him to justice. All calls to the police confirmed that he had indeed received nothing more than a ticket. &amp;quot;The law is the law,&amp;quot; I was told, and advised that my only recourse was to sue him in civil court. A friend who was able to get to New York&amp;#039;s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, was told that if Jose had been drunk when he hit Elle, he&amp;#039;d be in jail. I found this beyond ironic. Because he had destroyed a child&amp;#039;s life by soberly deciding to drive recklessly\u2014and illegally\u2014he was treated as if he&amp;#039;d merely rolled through a stop sign.  I was furious at Jose, and then I was furious at God. Having never been religious, I couldn&amp;#039;t understand how any god would let something like this happen to a child. No positive force would allow my daughter to lay before me, tubes and wires poking out all over her body, a vest freezing her, EEG probes across her head to monitor for seizures, while we wondered if she would ever wake up. I concluded then that I believed in nothing.  After days of letting anger and despair rule my thoughts, I began to feel helpless. I spent hours on end alone with Elle, interrupted only by the doctors and nurses caring for her. One day, I stared out the window of her room, looked at the sky, and cried\u2014silently, but with such severity that my insides ached. I prayed: Please let Elle live. I can deal with anything and everything else that happens, but I cannot deal with a world without Elle. Please just let her live. I repeated my prayer over and over; I cried until I felt that no more tears could come. Five hours went by like this, until finally a nurse came and asked if I needed anything. I took out my phone, and on the notepad I wrote, &amp;quot;Elle is going to live. She will have a long, healthy, happy life.&amp;quot; I spoke it like a mantra and wrote it on my notepad every day. Instead of nothing, I thought I would try believing in everything.  Word had spread among my friends, family, and colleagues about Elle&amp;#039;s accident, and I was receiving calls and e-mails from around the world offering prayers for her. Elle had Catholics in Paris, Mormons in Seattle, Hindus in India, and Jews in New York praying for her. She had Presbyterians in Malibu and Muslims in London and received prayer candles from Wiccans on the Lower East Side. I told my friend Cindi that I was missing a Buddhist, and she called a well-known writer who is a practicing Buddhist; two days later, a row of Buddhist prayer beads arrived at my home. I asked my dad to call our Cherokee family members so we could add Native Americans to the list. Meanwhile, my bathtub was starting to look like a mottled shrine, with candles of all shapes and sizes, dried sage, beads, rosaries, and prayer books covering every inch of space. Lila must have figured out what was going on, because she started wishing on the North Star every night, asking it to bring Elle home.  On the day that she was scheduled to come out of the coma, the doctors told me that it could take anywhere from one to six hours for her to wake up. I sat staring at her, looking for any sign of movement. After two hours, her eyes opened. I put my face close to hers, and said thank you to the sky above. And I said it to my daughter: &amp;quot;Thank you, Elle, for coming back.&amp;quot;  The neurologists were right about the severity of the stroke and her immediate symptoms. It would be weeks before she could talk, but eventually she did. It would be months before she could walk, but she did that, too. None of it was easy. She endured multiple surgeries and infections. Superman followed her every symptom, visiting her between his other surgeries, keeping in touch with me by text message each day to see how she was doing. He said that he felt like Elle was his child, and his dedication to her bore that out.  In December, Elle was preparing for her eighth brain surgery in three months, having suffered another infection. I felt sorry for her, and for myself. Why wasn&amp;#039;t she getting better?  She shared a room with a two-year-old girl, and the girl&amp;#039;s mother told me that her daughter had been without oxygen for more than 20 minutes. They were talking about removing her from life support in the coming days. This woman was so brave as she told me her story. After I took Elle to the O.R. that evening, I came back upstairs to wait for her. The curtain dividing Elle&amp;#039;s side of the room from the little girl&amp;#039;s was closed, and through it I heard the doctors say, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve done all we could do.&amp;quot; The child&amp;#039;s father, a large Slavic man, let out the most terrible cry I&amp;#039;ve ever heard a man make, and the mother was trying to be strong, but I could hear her weeping behind the curtain as they turned off the machines that were keeping their only child alive. I ran from the room and sat at the front of the ICU in the hallway to wait for Elle. Two hours went by, and those two hours changed me forever. Through the curtain I&amp;#039;d heard this family go through the most painful moments imaginable, and yet I sat there confident that Elle would come out of surgery and that she would live.  When she was wheeled back into the room, she opened her eyes, took a big breath, and said, &amp;quot;You are the worst mommy ever because you weren&amp;#039;t there when I woke up!&amp;quot; I laughed and hugged her, and felt positively lucky. It&amp;#039;s that feeling of gratitude, a new appreciation for life, that I&amp;#039;ve carried with me since this experience. It&amp;#039;s why friends who haven&amp;#039;t seen me in months say I look like a different person\u2014that I&amp;#039;ve changed. I have a new perspective, and it&amp;#039;s made me calmer, softer, and happier. Let&amp;#039;s just say it takes a lot to rattle me now. That bad temper I had before is a thing of the past; it&amp;#039;s just not worth the energy. I&amp;#039;ve learned that it&amp;#039;s okay to let people help me, like my wonderful friend Ruth, one of the moms at school, who cared for Lila three days a week so I could be at the hospital worry-free, or my writer friend Michele, who wrote a book with Lila about a little girl who saves her sister from the hospital. I used to plan everything. Ask what I was doing a year from now, and I&amp;#039;d have been able to tell you. Now anything beyond a week ahead seems like a long time, because I&amp;#039;ve gotten so used to the unpredictable. When my brother died, I said that my biggest lesson was that life is short. This experience was a reminder, and I am now determined to live the best way I can.   Three months after the accident, I was walking Lila to school when we saw a Ford Bronco idling at the stoplight next to us. I thought, That could be him. My stomach started to churn, my hands to shake. Lila sensed something was wrong, and when I told her I thought that could be the car that hit Elle, she asked, &amp;quot;Didn&amp;#039;t the driver go to jail?&amp;quot;   I was too embarrassed to answer. At that moment, I decided that I would do anything I could to take drivers like Jose off the streets.  &amp;quot;How do you change a law in New York?&amp;quot; I asked my friend Sean Cassidy, one of the leading communication consultants in the country. Instead of laughing at my na\u00EFvet\u00E9, he offered to introduce me to Allison Lee, his top lobbyist. Lee, who looks like a blond version of Annette Bening in The American President, took my case pro bono. What happened from that point on really does sound like a movie: Her office drafted the language for a bill, which we called Elle&amp;#039;s Law. On a Tuesday in early April, Lee took me to meet my state assembly representative, Micah Kellner. She presented him with the draft of the bill, which would make it a crime to injure a pedestrian while violating traffic laws. Six days later, Kellner had introduced the bill to the assembly. Lee then asked that I come to the state capital, Albany, to get support for the bill in the assembly and the senate. I arrived to find her perfectly coiffed and in a sleek navy sheathdress. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s go make some friends,&amp;quot; she said, her Manolos clicking up the concrete steps of the Capitol. By 4 p.m., New York State Senator Martin Dilan had introduced the bill on the senate floor.  On my way home, I stopped at Blythedale Children&amp;#039;s Hospital, a rehabilitation center north of Manhattan where Elle was now a patient. Maureen, her physical therapist, told me to drop my bags. She then handed Elle a silver four-pronged cane and said, &amp;quot;Walk to Mommy,&amp;quot; and lo and behold, Elle walked to me for the first time since the accident. It was a monumental day. On Elle&amp;#039;s fourth birthday, celebrated at Blythedale, she was given a wish bracelet as a gift, and her wish was that she would be home for the summer. She is a determined little girl, and the day before Memorial Day, Elle came home for good, having survived 11 surgeries, five infections, four months in ICU, and four months of intensive in-patient rehabilitation. Cognitively, she is, amazingly, the same as she was before the accident. She will have months and maybe years of rehab ahead of her to help her walk normally and to use her right hand. But she is alive and healthy, and a study following her exceptional case and recovery is being prepared by her doctors.  Two weeks after Elle came home, Elle&amp;#039;s Law was signed by the governor on August 13, 2010, having passed both the New York State Senate and Assembly in June. Now, if a person does what Jose did to Elle, he will lose his license for six months. Even that seems a small price to pay for nearly ending a life. But it&amp;#039;s a beginning.  In those first weeks after Elle woke from the coma, I had modified my notepad mantra, boldly stretching my wish a little further. I wrote, &amp;quot;Elle is going to live. She will have a long, healthy, happy, normal life. She will be a miracle child and grow up to inspire others.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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