by S. Tamanaha
After the usual opening of the show and exchange with the audience, Hannah Irving made the introduction. “Ladies and gentlemen, nearly twenty-one months ago, my special guest today was considered one of the brightest and fastest rising stars in Hollywood. He was the ultimate sex symbol to women across America and Europe. He had a hit series on television. He was about to work on his first CD and he was beginning to expand his career as a producer. Then one night, while he was heading home from the airport, a drunk driver in a delivery truck collided into the cab that he was in. He suffered a broken back and damage to his spinal cord. The medical doctors did not have any hope that he would ever fully recover, but he and his wife believed otherwise and through hard work and some unique therapy techniques, well, I’ll let you see the result for yourself. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome John Alexander Hellstrom.”
He walked out onto the stage, tall and strong, looking as strikingly handsome as ever, if not more so, in a deep blue suit that set off his sparkling blue eyes and contrasted beautifully with his dark blonde hair, now slightly streaked by the Hawaiian sun. On his feet he wore the pair of black leather boots that Susan had bought for him for Christmas. The audience greeted him with loud cheers and a thunderous standing ovation. He smiled that dazzling Scorpio smile and raised his hand to wave to them before sitting down next to the host.
Isabel was one of the people that Susan had sent a text message to. “Oh my God,” she said aloud as she watched his entrance. “I can’t believe it.” Tears welled in her eyes.
Frank Pierce smiled broadly as he watched Johnny’s debut appearance. She said that she would do it and she did. He poured himself a shot of scotch and silently toasted the both of them.
In his penthouse office suite, Daniel Stevens also smiled as he watched Johnny walk onto that stage, but he wasn’t surprised. He knew that the kind of love that existed between Johnny and Susan was capable of creating a miracle. He had always known.
In New Jersey, Johnny’s mother watched her son make his entrance, healthy and strong again, and cried.
“Well, you might have been gone for a while but it’s obvious from the audience’s reaction that you’ve certainly not been forgotten,” Hannah Irving observed.
“I appreciate that very much,” Johnny said in his low, rich voice.
“Looking at you now, I mean you could still easily be considered the American hunk, it’s hard to believe that you suffered such severe injuries in that accident. You couldn’t walk at all, correct?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And the prognosis was?”
“The doctors said that I could regain some mobility with therapy but that I would probably have to use a walker or a cane for the rest of my life.”
“So more than one doctor told you this?”
“Several.”.
“And yet, here you are and you look perfectly healthy. Have you in fact recovered a hundred percent?”
“I completed another series of tests, including a CT scan and MRI, before returning to L.A. There’s absolutely no sign of any damage to my spine, my cord, or my nerves,” Johnny replied.
The audience applauded loudly.
“Now you’ve written a book about your experience and in your book, you credit this remarkable recovery to your wife, Susan.”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, before we go into that, let’s start with how you met Susan,” Hannah Irving said. “Is that a true story? She literally saved your life because she was being bothered by a recurring dream?”
Johnny smiled a little. “I know it sounds incredible, but that’s exactly what happened.”
“Tell us about it.”
Johnny related how he and Susan had met that first day and how she had told him about her dreams and her quest to find out if he was a real person.
“You mean she didn’t know?” Hannah Irving asked. “You had your posters and your face on magazine covers and your television show.”
“None of which she saw. She even told me that night at the restaurant ‘please don’t be insulted but even when I started seeing your face clearly in my dream, I didn’t have a clue who you were.’”
The audience laughed.
“Anyway, she finally finds that out and where I’d be filming, takes a plane from Hawaii to LA, and gets there literally in the nick of time. And then she tells me that she doesn’t want me to reveal this story to anyone, which I never have until now, with her permission, and that all she wants is to go back home.”
“Back to Hawaii?”
He nods. “I wanted to find out more about this whole dream thing but the next morning she was gone.”
“So this woman appears on your set, literally saves your life, doesn’t want any publicity or a reward, and just leaves?”
“That’s what happened. She wouldn’t even let me pay for the pizza since I was driving her back to her hotel and she said I’d had a bad day and needed a break.”
The audience laughed again.
“So how did you reconnect?”
“She had shown me her business cards because she wanted me to know that she wasn’t some crazy person or an aspiring psychic or anything like that, and I kept the cards. About a week later, I decided to call her, we started talking, I ended up flying to Hawaii for a vacation, and things developed from there.”
“Now, at the time you were known as the sex symbol to women all over the world practically, yet you say in your book that the fact that you were a sex symbol nearly stopped the relationship.”
“She said that she preferred talking to me on the phone because then she could connect with who I was inside which was the person that she was interested in. She said that my looks were a distraction.”
Hannah Irving raised her eyebrows. “There’s something I’ve never heard before.”
“You and me both,” he said, and the audience laughed.
“But eventually you do have a relationship and she ends up moving to L.A. to be with you and the both of you get married.”
“Well, it really wasn’t quite that simple,” Johnny said. “I mean she had to give up a lot back in Hawaii to be with me here in L.A. but, yes, she did move here for me.”
“And life is apparently going great for the both of you according to the book then the accident occurs. So what happened then?”
“After the doctors’ prognosis, I figured that I was never going to be whole again so I told her that I wanted a divorce. I thought that she’d be better off.”
“But she refused to leave?”
He nodded. “She tore up the papers and threw them across the room actually.”
“I have to tell you, I cried when I read that part of the book,” Hannah Irving said. “So she stayed with you and then?”
“I was in bed for a little over two months healing from the back surgery and then I went to conventional therapy for a little over a month and not much was happening in the way of recovery. In spinal cord injury cases, the general consensus is that if a patient doesn’t start to show some signs of recovery fairly quickly, the amount of recovery that can be expected is limited. In fact, many doctors believe that after six months, maybe slightly longer, there is very little significant recovery. I was already going into month four so it wasn’t looking very good for me.
“Then one day, Susan tells me that she wants to take me back to Hawaii—to her place where she has a salt water pool. She had done significant research on hydrotherapy and she believed in its benefits, but she didn’t like the idea that if I stayed here, the pool wouldn’t be as easily accessible to me and the therapists would probably be scheduling me for that type of therapy only once or twice a week and there’d be other patients around me distracting me. She believed that I should be in the water once or twice a day in order to relieve the stress on my spine while I exercised and to prevent pressure sores on my body and to heal my damaged nerves. And she wanted me in a peaceful environment without distractions so that I could completely focus on my heali
ng. As far as I was concerned, I had nothing to lose so I agreed to fly back with her to Hawaii and she began putting me into her pool twice a day.”
“How did she do that?” Hannah Irving asked. “She needed help didn’t she?”
“She found a great male nurse by the name of Jackson Ames who had actually been a physical therapist in Florida—a big, football player sized guy who’s as gentle as a lamb—to help with all of the heavy lifting and other things. But as far as putting me into the pool, she had a portable hoist brought in and they used it to lower me and the submersible chair into the pool.” He described the elaborate setup that Susan had designed—the harness, the underwater cameras, the protective canopy. “When I wasn’t in the pool, she made me work out my upper body to keep my arms strong, since I had to use my arms to lift myself, and I did other exercises to strengthen my stomach and back muscles.”
“You also described some less conventional treatments in your book.”
He nodded. “She brought in an acupuncturist four times a week and we did exercises with a qigong master twice a week. She also made sure that I took supplements and cooked foods for me that she believed would build muscle and enhance my nervous system. In about a week and a half I started recovering a little bit of feeling in my right thigh. Then in about another week or so, my left thigh started regaining feeling. I slowly kept getting better, but then my left leg, from my knee down, refused to respond at all to any therapy and the progress in my right leg, which had slowly been recovering, stopped. It stayed that way for months. The doctors in Hawaii said that we should be realistic and face the fact that my recovery had probably peaked.”
“But Susan didn’t believe that?”
“No. She believed that I was having problems with my left side because during the accident, I had suffered injury to the right side of my head. Since the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, she believed that the right side of my brain had gotten lazy or weak when it was healing and used to having the left side of my brain to do most of the work. She felt that I had to exercise the right side of the brain as much as possible and make it start to work again. She made me do as much as possible with my left hand—eat, write, shave—and she made me do a lot of right-brain activities such as painting and playing the piano again. I even wore a patch on my right eye to force the left eye to process more information through the right brain. And it worked. Then, several months later, we hit another kind of obstacle. I couldn’t walk normally because my ankles and my feet weren’t working right. She began showing me walking videos.”
“Why’s that?” Hannah Irving asked.
“Well, she believed that in addition to working my leg muscles with repetitive movements, we had to retrain my brain and show it what I wanted it to do. She made me watch those walking videos constantly—while I was walking in the pool, while I was exercising out of the pool, while I was eating. I complained to her once that I was beginning to see those videos in my sleep and all she said was ‘Good. If you’re dreaming about it, then you can do it.’”
Hannah Irving smiled. “Ever felt like giving up?”
“A couple of times,” Johnny admitted. “But with Susan, well, quitting isn’t an option.”
“A determined lady?”
“You have no idea,” Johnny said, smiling. “At about the tenth or eleventh month, when my left leg still wasn’t showing any improvement and the doctors said that we should be realistic and give up, I was almost ready to listen to them but when I told her that she said, ‘I’ll give up when we’ve exhausted every possible option or God himself tells me to. Not before.’ You know, I’m about a hundred and ninety pounds and Jackson’s about two forty. She’s about five one and a hundred and five pounds soaking wet but when she gets determined like that, we’re both going ‘Okay, what’s the plan?’”
Hannah Irving and the audience laughed.
“Seriously, though, if it wasn’t for her being that determined, I wouldn’t be like this today. I know that,” Johnny said. “From the very beginning, she had unshakable faith that we could do this in spite of what the doctors said. See these boots that I’m wearing? She bought them for me last Christmas and said that they were for me to use when I walked out on the stage again.”
Hannah Irving was obviously moved. “That certainly is faith,” she said softly. “And she’s not a therapist or in the medical profession at all, correct?”
“No, she’s not. Everything that she did was based on personal research and what made sense to her as far as my recovery was concerned. She wasn’t trying to develop a regimen that would apply to everyone in my situation. Her focus was strictly on getting me well. So whereas water therapy once or twice a week might be fine for some people, she just believed that for me, I had to be in the water twice a day. Some people believe that acupuncture once or twice a week is sufficient, but she spoke to several practitioners and did research and felt that for me, four times a week made sense. She’s also a very strong believer in the power of the mind to heal so using visualization techniques made sense to her.”
“And apparently in your case she was right.”
“I certainly can’t argue with the results,” Johnny said.
“And your doctors? I mean they must be stunned at your recovery.”
“Very.”
“Did you ever wonder, though, what would have happened if her methods hadn’t worked?” Hannah Irving asked.
“I wondered about that all the time in the beginning. I even asked her about it once early on—about whether she might be confusing faith with wishful thinking.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she knew it wasn’t wishful thinking because what she was doing, she was doing for me—because I needed it—and not for herself. She said that she would love me just the same whether or not I could ever get out of that wheelchair. It was hard to believe that in the very beginning, but after a while, I knew it was true and it made all the difference to me.”
“Why?”
“Because then I wasn’t doing all of those things just to please her or because I was afraid that if I didn’t get better, I’d lose her. I was doing it for me—because I wanted to walk again. All she asked was that I give it everything that I had and believe that it could be done and not quit just because other people didn’t think it was possible. Then if, for some reason, the therapy didn’t work, I’d at least know that I had given it my best shot and I’d still have her and we’d go on together.”
“And do you think that you could have accepted it if that had been the ending to your story?”
Johnny smiled slightly. “If you had asked me that a few months after the accident, I would have said ‘no’. But as time went on, we started to laugh again. We laughed a lot actually, especially when we started doing all of those right brain activities like painting and singing and playing music. So yes, I think that I would have been okay ... with her.”
Hannah Irving smiled gently. “Well, I’m glad that your story had a truly happy ending, John. It’s an amazing story and Susan must be an amazing woman.”
“She is,” he said. “A very amazing woman.”
“I understand that even though she might have been with you at that pool every day, she refused to come with you to the show.”
He smiled and nodded.
“Why is that?”
“She said that she’d probably be crying the entire time and she didn’t want to do it on national TV.”
The audience laughed.
“In a way, she’s also responsible for you writing this book, isn’t she?” Hannah Irving asked.
Johnny nodded. “I needed a project to work on while I was rehabilitating—to be doing something else besides the therapy—and she suggested that I write it. She said ‘tell them your story, Johnny’. But what I’ve written is really our story.”
“Now the title of your book is ‘Scorpio Love: A True Story’. And that’s because you’re both born under the astrological sign of
Scorpio?”
He nodded again.
There was an audible “Oooh,” from the audience.
Hannah Irving smiled. “You heard the audience,” she said. “Many people think that a Scorpio-Scorpio relationship is too passionate and fiery, too volatile.”
Johnny smiled slightly. “I suppose it could be. There is a lot of passion and emotion involved. But there are those who believe that two Scorpios who really love each other can move mountains and accomplish miracles and fortunately, that’s the type of relationship that we have. In fact, I think that was the most important factor in my healing—the kind of love that we share.”
“Now, your book comes out tomorrow right?”
“Yes, in bookstores and on Amazon.”
“I understand that even though it hasn’t come out yet, there’s already interest in making it into a movie or a television movie.”
“Yes, I’ve been approached about that and we’re in discussions now.”
“Any chance that you’ll be playing yourself in that movie?”
He shook his head and smiled. “No,” he said. “No chance of that.”
“Why not? I mean look at you. You’re as handsome as ever. Maybe more so.”
The audience applauded loudly in agreement.
“This is one role that I can’t do because I couldn’t fake the love that I have for her with another person,” Johnny said.
The audience applauded even more loudly, moved by the love that he felt for his wife.
Hannah Irving held up the book. “Go out and get this book, people, if you want to read an incredible story—not just about his remarkable recovery, but of real love. And, John, I understand that you and Susan are planning to build a rehabilitation clinic in Hawaii for spinal cord injury victims and that all of the profits from the sale of this book will be going towards that goal..”