Years after drunken driver paralyzed her, ex-triathlete puts experience in book

http://www.sacbee.com/2010/02/25/256...paralyzed.html

Years after drunken driver paralyzed her, ex-triathlete Jill Mason puts experience into book
smcmanis@sacbee.com
Published Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010


She had been an English major in college, so naturally she wanted someday to write a book.

One problem, though.

"I really didn't have a topic," Jill Mason says.

True, in her mid-20s, Mason felt she hadn't done enough living to tackle a memoir or even fiction. Not that she didn't have a full life. She was a triathlete, had run marathons, worked in marketing for a Silicon Valley firm and had found love with a high-tech engineer and fellow triathlete, Alan Liu.

Life was going swimmingly, to say nothing of the running and cycling.

A training ride along Highway 12 near Santa Rosa on Easter morning 2004 changed all that. Liu and Mason were hit by a drunken driver whose blood-alcohol level measured more than four times the legal limit.

Liu was killed; Mason survived – barely. Her spinal cord was severed, permanently paralyzing her. Injury to her brain limited her motor function – her right arm is numb, essentially useless – and leaves gaping holes in her memory and cognitive ability.

Now 32, living independently in a house she owns in south Sacramento, Mason works closely with Every 15 Minutes, a program that educates students on the perils of drinking and driving. She volunteers to help physical therapy students at California State University, Sacramento. She mounts her specially equipped hand cycle and heads out on the road for solo training rides, albeit much slower ones than in her triathlete days.

And yes, Mason has written that book.

Her self-published "Couldn't Happen to Me: A Life Changed by Paralysis and Traumatic Brain Injury" is available for $15.99 at www.amazon.com or at www.jillmason.com. It is a memoir she didn't want to write, given the circumstances, but found she had to write.

"This gave me a topic!" she exclaims, guffawing and slapping her left palm flat on her kitchen table.

Mason often laughs and punctuates her points with that endearing hand-slap. She has always been a practical, outgoing, driven woman with a need to keep busy.

In the years since the injury – she refuses to call it an accident, given the nine-year prison sentence the driver received – Mason's time was dominated by rehabilitation: relearning the basics of everyday life, from changing clothes to using the bathroom to seeking to restore long- and short-term memory.

But she also found time to work on gathering into prose the jigsawed pieces of her life, pre- and post-Easter 2004. That was difficult because, as a result of her head being slammed against asphalt, memory gaps remain and retention of information is elusive.

With the help of her aunt, Carol Mason, a professional book editor, Mason eventually assembled a memoir detailing her physical and emotional ordeal, rendered in stripped-down prose short on cheap sentimentality and long on heartfelt insights.

Was writing the book a cathartic act?

Mason pauses, tilts her head to the left as if trying to dislodge the answer.

"I think it helped," she says. "But it really was hard during the last review (of the manuscript), having to go through reliving everything again."

The psychic pain was worth it, Mason says, because her story is meant to draw attention to drunken driving and the related issue of bike safety on the roadways.

"I just want to help others in this situation," Mason says. "There's not a lot of information out there."

At times, "Couldn't Happen to Me" is intensely personal in detailing Mason's struggle. In addition to the daily bodily challenges, Mason's flitting memory makes life – and writing – difficult sometimes. Her Palm Pilot, on which she constantly types reminders, serves as a lifeline.

In the book, she shares anecdotes about forgetting things, like the time she left her purse at the curb and had her credit cards and identity stolen. She often failed to remember buying an item at a store and worried that she had stolen it.

More poignantly, she writes about having no memory of the crash – or her relationship with Liu. In the early months of her recovery, her parents had to keep reminding her that her boyfriend had been killed.

"… It was hard for me to have to continuously relearn of his loss," writes Mason, who has recovered memory of Liu but not of the crash.

She doesn't sugarcoat her emotional struggles. Though positive by nature, Mason admits getting depressed sometimes.

"It's like I'm very deep in a well and cannot escape," she writes. "Often, when I'm in this sort of funk, I curse Harvey."

"Harvey" is 75-year-old Santa Rosa lawyer Harvey Hereford, the man sentenced to nearly nine years in state prison for vehicular manslaughter, driving under the influence and inflicting great bodily injury.

Mason doesn't speak of Hereford often ("He's not worth my time"). She did, however, write him a letter – never sent – venting her anger. She does not expect him to read her book.

The important thing, Mason says, is to make the book available to help others.

"This is not the life I'd chosen," she says. "But it's my life now. I try to just think of the next goal and move toward that. And right now I'm thinking, 'OK, what's next?' "

Jill Mason's memoir, "Couldn't Happen to Me: A Life Changed by Paralysis and Traumatic Brain Injury" (BookSurge Publishing, $15.99, 169 pages), can be purchased at www.amazon.com or on Mason's Web site, www.jillmason.com.

Mason will hold a book signing at 1 p.m. March 27 at the Book Seller, 107 Mill St., Grass Valley.

For more information: (530) 272-2131.