Inside the Halo and Beyond

9780393049008

0393049000

In July 1998, Maxine Kumin celebrated poet & horse woman suffered a hear fatal accident when her horse bolted at a carriage-driving clinic. Ninety-five percent of such victims die before reaching the emergency room. Of those who do survive, ninety-five percent are paralyzed for life. But Kumin, less than a year later, was pronounced "a miracle." This is the journal of her astonishing recovery. Though at first words threatened to elude her, writing (at first by dictating) became a way of maintaining her sanity. Kumin tells of her time "inside the halo," the near-medieval device that kept her head immobile during the weeks of intensive care & rehabilitation. During the long evenings she gets hooked on the Red Sox, muses on the state of the world, & forms lasting "rehab" friendships. She salutes the loving family who always believed she would heal & who "kept the garden going as a way of keeping me going." Maxine Kumin is the kind of person about whom it is said "they don't make them like that any more." She swerves from despair to hope to unshakable determination as this harrowing yet heartwarming story of a fighter & survivor unfolds.