Dyane Elkins IronWing can still picture Schuyler Arakawa as a long-haired little girl filled with fire, prancing around her New Tampa Dance Theatre (NTDT) floor in rainbow-colored socks, cowboy boots and a mini skirt, her beaming smile lighting up the room with an energy so pure it was impossible to resist.
When she looks at Schuyler today, Dyane says she sees the same thing. The smile is still bright, the dimples are irresistible, the energy still pure.
“She was angelic then, and angelic now,’’ Dyane says.
It’s as if nothing has changed, even if everything has.
On Feb. 19, Schuyler, her mother Meridith Hankenson, sister Saya and brother Lyndon will quietly mark a one-year anniversary that many in the same situation would rather forget.
Meridith doesn’t know if her youngest daughter ever saw the large boulder roll off the 30-foot-high cliff that day and plummet towards the water. Schuyler doesn’t remember it crashing into her face, driving her deep under the water, crushing her skull, breaking her leg, collapsing her lung, fracturing five vertebrae in her spine and almost killing her.
What they do know, however, is this: it changed their world forever.
Today, Schuyler, who is 23 years old, is moving forward, with many of the same hopes and dreams she had before.
A former Arbor Greene resident and longtime student at the NTDT on Cross Creek Blvd., Schuyler had the world at her feet a year ago.
She is a Berkeley Prep and Yale University graduate, and was on a mission to make the world a better, happier place. There was nothing she couldn’t do.
Now, she is starting over.
She goes to therapy three days a week, travels once a week to Tarpon Springs for aqua therapy, takes a yoga class and is trying to learn how to speak again, how to get up out of her wheelchair and walk again.
She is still joyous, however, in an amazing sort of way. She breaks out into smiles and laughter while finishing off leftover tacos for lunch in the Citrus Park townhome she now lives in with her mother.
Forrest Maddox, a friend from Yale who visits from New York every few months, smiles and laughs with her, reaching over to rub her arm.
Frodo, the family’s 13-year-old dapple dachshund, clickety-clacks across the floor at her feet, a treat in her mouth, perhaps to keep it from Tinkerbell, their chocolate, long-haired dachshund.
It is a quiet, peaceful, normal day. Schuyler had physical therapy in the morning, ate a big lunch, and is looking forward to her daily three-hour afternoon nap.
Her therapy is exhausting. “Everything is hard,’’ she says, quietly. “But I have to do it.”
Schuyler had traveled the world to so many places before the boulder rolled off that cliff in Colombia. She helped children and adults to read in Tanzania, and had worked with a pistachio plantation that was the lifeblood of a village in Indonesia.
She made friends everywhere she went, and created for herself a worldwide social network to help benefit the less fortunate.
Schuyler’s passion was social enterprise, and on a brief break from building schools in Peru, she was enjoying the cool water during a rafting trip. She had taken a few days of vacation before what was going to be the second installation of a Yale-affiliated post-graduate fellowship, which involved weaving for the Threads of Peru, a not-for-profit social enterprise which spreads Peruvian culture and creates a sustainable market for the local artisans by selling handmade panchos, scarves and bracelets, to name a few.
Meridith remembers getting the phone call from one of Schuyler’s friends with her at the time, Dana, frantically telling her Schuyler had been hurt.
She might not live, the friend said. Meridith needed to get to Colombia.
So began a frantic, spellbinding and critical 72-hour period in which every minute mattered, and every decision was life or death.
Meridith didn’t speak Spanish, and didn’t know anyone from Colombia, but she knew she needed help. She’s not sure why, but she posted a plea on Facebook.
One of Schuyler’s friends knew a woman who was originally from Colombia. Her name is Amalita Estrada, and her daughter had attended Berkeley Prep with Schuyler. Along with another family — Chris and Georgette Tsavoussis, whose daughter Alexis went to school with Schuyler and immediately created a GoFundMe page for her classmate that raised more than $200,000 — they began helping to pave Meridith’s way in and out of Colombia.
“I got a phone call as I was checking out at the grocery store, and for some reason I felt a connection instantly,’’ says Amalita, who had never met Schuyler or her mother. She had to look in her daughter’s yearbook to even see what Schuyler looked like.
She began making calls from her Tarpon Springs home, trying to get Meridith to Colombia, eventually booking her plane tickets.
She called her cousin, a neurosurgeon in Bogota, the capital of Colombia.
Amalita told him he needed help getting Schuyler to Bogota, where the main hospitals would be. He asked where Schuyler was, and Amalita told him Socorro, in the northeastern part of Colombia.
Her cousin told her to take a deep breath and relax. It just so happened that one of Colombia’s best neurosurgeons, and his former teacher, had retired to Socorro, a small town of 30,000. And not only that, he had built an Intensive Care Unit in the middle of this small city because there had been so many motorcycle accidents in the area.
“Out of his own heart and goodwill, he built that there, because there was a need,’’ Amalita said. Without it, it is unlikely Schuyler would be alive today.
“That saved her life,’’ Amalita says.
Schuyler had been pulled from the river by the tour guides, and transported along dirt roads to the hospital in Socorro. Amalita doesn’t know how they did it, but they had help from an American man, she says, who just happened to appear and helped them get Schuyler up the ravine and into a vehicle. No one saw him again.
“An angel,’’ Amalita explains, because how else would you?
At the ICU, doctors stabilized Schuyler, but the prognosis was still grim. Meridith and her two other children couldn’t get a flight out of Tampa, so they raced to Miami to catch the last one out that night to Colombia.
Meanwhile, the woman back in Tarpon Springs that they had never met and didn’t know was making calls, talking to doctors, organizing transportation and making the biggest decisions of the family’s life.
“Amalita was a blessing,’’ Meridith says. “I didn’t know her, but I could feel her energy, and I think Schuyler could too.”
On the flight to Colombia, a near calm had come over Meridith. A deeply spiritual person, she says she reached deep into her soul and found a positivity, a peace, that even she didn’t know was there.
She decided, on the airplane, that Schuyler was going to be all right…and nothing could shake her from that belief.
When Meridith arrived, the doctors showed her the x-rays.
“A whole part of her skull was gone,’’ she says. “They told us for sure she would not see, ever again, no possible way. She would never smell, or taste, if she survived at all.”
By the next morning, on Feb. 20, a CAT scan revealed dramatic improvement. Though in a medically induced coma, Schuyler had already begun the fight.
In the ICU, Meridith told Saya she wished she could play music for Schuyler, because she loved it so much. She fiddled with her cell phone, but there was no Wi-Fi, and she was not receiving service despite her efforts to load Pandora.
She says she placed her phone on top of the paper towel dispenser while she washed her hands, and “all of a sudden Izzy’s ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ comes blasting from my phone.”
Meridith reaches out her arm as she recalls the moment. “Look, my hair still stands on end when I tell this story.”
Somehow, the Pandora app on her phone began playing, even though her phone still had no bars. They gently placed it on Schuyler’s bed and agreed not to touch the phone again. The playlist continued to pipe in tunes. “It proceeded to a playlist that was as if she was having a conversation with us,’’ Meridith said. “It was mind-blowing.”
She wrote down all the songs as they played, and later published them to a “Schuy is the Limit” Facebook page, which Meridith started during her time in Colombia to keep the hundreds of Schuyler’s friends from around the world updated.
The Facebook page proved to be a wonderful source for the family, as prayers and well wishes poured in.
Some wrote that Meridith’s updates were so filled with a positive joy, that it transformed their lives. One mother wrote that her son had been suicidal, but after following the daily posts had told his mother he loved her for the first time in years.
Meridith and Amalita were talking on the phone regularly, about getting Schuyler out of Colombia and to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where they would eventually meet.
The second night in the ICU, before one of her many surgeries early on, the two mothers talked about positive colors, and how they can affect mood. Independently, they had both imagined Schuyler in a room awash with the healing colors of purple and green. “I thought, well, that’s interesting,’’ Meridith said.
The next morning, at 6 a.m., the doctors and nurses show up, wearing purple scrubs. Meridith found the head nurse, and wanted to give her a hug to thank her. The nurse’s name was Violet.
After the surgery, a new nurse had rotated in. Her name was written on the whiteboard in Schuyler’s room — it was Hazel, which is, of course, a shade of green. And, everywhere Meridith looked that day, people seemed to be wearing purple and green.
“There were a lot of things like that happening,’’ she remembers. “Things like that were smattered throughout the whole process.”
Over the next couple of weeks, as Schuyler recovered, there were more miracles.
The girl that was never supposed to be able to smell again complained about a particular aroma from the essential oil that was being diffused near her.
The girl that was never supposed to see again, whose optic nerves had been smashed by a direct hit from a boulder, tapped the correct number of fingers when the doctors asked how many fingers they were holding up.
The room erupted in cheers.
Once they were able to get her back to the U.S., doctors in Miami worked on putting Schuyler back together again. In March, Meridith posted on Facebook:
“Dear sweet Schuy is going to continue her titanium transformation beginning at about 6 am tomorrow morning. She will have a rod placed in her right thigh then screws and wires in her left ankle, shin and knee cap. The miracles of modern science!”
While Schuyler may need an additional surgery to repair her right eyelid later this spring, she has not required any other surgeries, remarkable considering that the boulder had made a direct hit on her head.
Amalita is Catholic, so she has read all about miracles. But, this was the first time, she says, that she had been a part of one.
“I tell everybody that you hear about these many miracles in Biblical times, and about angels and the Pope and so many religious stories, but before my eyes, I can testify that this is a miracle,’’ she says.
She is witness to it every week. She had a pool, so Amalita volunteered to learn aquatherapy. On Thursdays, Meridith drives Schuyler to Tarpon Springs for treatment. Amalita marvels at the progress she gets to see.
“It’s a beautiful, flowing story, and Schuyler is getting better when the odds were that she wasn’t supposed to.”
It has been almost a year since the accident, and the road to recovery is still a long one for Schuyler. But, she isn’t angry, she never asks why this had to happen to her, and she remains undaunted.
“She is championing her way through this,’’ Meridith says. “Neither she nor I have any doubt that within another year, she will be walking.”
The mother has been transformed, too.
Before the accident, things hadn’t been easy for Meridith. There were bad relationships, failed businesses, financial strife.
At times, life had proven difficult.
Before she got off that plane in Colombia, though, everything had come together. She looked at her past, and how it had shaped her for this moment. She was determined to will Schuyler to live, until she could arrive at her side. Once there, in concert with all of the wonderful medical advances employed by the doctors and nurses, she draped her daughter in love, and powered her to recovery, until she could bring her home, and take care of her.
Everything that Schuyler wanted to be before the accident, Meridith will make sure she still becomes.
“I am in awe of the beauty of this mom and her daughter,’’ says Amalita. “What Meridith has done, her positivity, it defies belief. Schuyler would not have survived without her.”
Schuyler has plans to start a travel website, based on the travel blog she kept before the accident. It will highlight user-generated trips made by the more curious travelers, who eschew the typical Top 10 places to visit in a city.
“If you’re ever in Montana, for example, go see the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas,’’ Meridith says.
The website will keep Schuyler engaged, as she is currently brainstorming ideas. “By the time Schuyler is up and running, she’ll be able to use her own passport and will have plenty of ideas for places to visit,’’ Meridith says.
Forrest was one of Schuyler’s closest friends at Yale, and he says he still sees the same joy and enthusiasm in her face he did before the accident. Her says her personality is the same and that he has little doubt that whatever she chooses to do, the best is still ahead for her.
“I don’t see this being a defining story for Schuyler, which is weird to say,” Forrest says. “I honestly think this is something where, she’ll be doing something else amazing and she’ll say, ‘Oh by the way, a couple of years ago I was in this horrible accident, but right now I’m doing this incredible thing.’”
In October, Elkins IronWing, who helped teach Schuyler jazz, ballet, modern and even hip-hop dance (“She loved them all,’’ Meridith says) for more than a dozen years at NTDT, held a large Dance-a-Thon fund raiser for her.
Hundreds showed up, and dozens of local businesses chipped in to pull it off. Dyane was not surprised about the large turnout.
“She was a light that everyone was drawn to,’’ Elkins IronWing says. “I always tell people, if you met her for five minutes, you would remember her for the rest of your life.”
When Dyane saw Schuyler for the first time after the accident, she was overcome with emotion. Her voice chokes up even now recalling the moment, how she so badly just wanted to run to her former pupil and kiss the familiar dimples on her cheeks.
“From the time the accident happened until that moment, she was on the front of my brain,’’ Dyane says. “I just wanted to see her, feel her and kiss her to let her know that everything would be okay.”
The women of Threads of Peru didn’t get the chance to host Schuyler, but her story moved them to make 10,000 of the very same bracelets with the exact pattern Schuyler was wearing that day on the water. She still wears that bracelet today.
Dyane sells them at her dance studio, for $10, with all proceeds going to the cost of Schuyler’s medical care and therapy.
Schuyler has a long way to go to “complete” recovery, or as close as anyone can get to that after a boulder lands on their head. But she’ll get there. She promises.
“I’m just a positive person,” she says.
To follow Schuyler and Meridith on Facebook and learn more about her amazing recovery, search Schuy is the Limit. To purchase a bracelet at the New Tampa Dance Theatre (10701 Cross Creek Blvd), visit Monday-Thursday 4 p.m.-8 p.m., or 9 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturday.
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