Helping Patients Fashion New Lives

If you think Downey’s not the place for fashion shows, you should have seen the one they held there Thursday.

There was Jose Mark, his neck and face etched with tattoos from his former days as a member of the 18th Street gang, wearing a dark olive-colored suit and a colorful tie as he rose from his wheelchair to walk the length of the room with the help of two attendants.

There was Sarita Hernandez, 23, who was in a coma for 19 days after being hit in the head by a flying object in January. She moved her wheelchair forward slowly, white tennis shoes peeking out from under a silky floral dress. Later, wearing strappy black heels and with an attendant pushing her chair, she coquettishly crossed and uncrossed her legs for the crowd.

And there was Richard Powell, 51 and blind since birth, who suffered a stroke in January and is paralyzed on his right side. Powell, who has used a wheelchair since then, walked the length of the room with the aid of arm braces.

With family, friends and physical therapists looking on in mingled states of anxiety and amazement, the three patients and 13 other people who have suffered severe brain injuries and strokes took important steps toward their recovery at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center: One way or another, each patient moved carefully across a walkway during a hospital-sponsored fashion show.

Powell’s careful but confident stroll was accompanied by a song of his choosing, Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” and thunderous applause from the crowd.

“I made it, Dickie,” said Powell’s cousin Beverly Campbell, reaching over from her seat to touch his face.

Campbell, who had driven to Downey from Agoura to see Powell, sat down after his appearance, overwhelmed.

“I’ve never seen him walk. This is the first time,” she said. “I’m astonished. I’m shaking. I can’t believe it.”

These otherwise basic acts were major triumphs for the participants in the fourth annual fashion show at Rancho Los Amigos, where about 3,100 people suffering from traumatic brain injuries, strokes, spinal cord injuries and neurological disorders come for intensive therapy and rehabilitation each year.

The show was an attempt to increase the self-esteem of patients, most of whom will continue inching toward normal life after they leave the rehabilitation programs.

“This is like a confidence booster, like a dry run for being out in society,” said Mo Johnson, an occupational therapist who organized the show. The object was to help patients regain a sense of normality by relearning how to do such things as put on makeup and dressy clothes, instead of the sweatsuits they typically wear while they undergo various forms of physical, speech, occupational and recreational therapy for three to five hours a day.

Many patients, Johnson said, are anxious about appearing in public for the first time after their injury, especially if they are newly in a wheelchair, have difficulty speaking or bear scars.

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But accidents and disabilities were never mentioned publicly at the fashion show, during which everyone drew applause and the emcee repeatedly and earnestly exclaimed, “You look beautiful!”

Mark’s brother, Manuel Demming, watched the show and remembered how he had searched three days for the 27-year-old in February, only to be told repeatedly that Mark had been beaten to death. He finally found him in the hospital, where he was comatose for 40 days.

“Doctors said he would never come out of the coma,” Demming said. “But we believe in miracles of Jesus, you know what I mean?”

Everyone in the room--eyes universally and unabashedly brimming with tears--believed in miracles of one stripe or another by the time Thursday’s show was over.

“It helped me in so many ways, in so many things,” Mark said afterward. His eyes lighted up. “I’m going home Wednesday.”