A Matter of Recovery

Disappearing into the Darkness

Blueberries. Sharon Miller still vividly remembers the scene as she and her husband, Mike, drove away from dropping off their son, C.B., at the apartment he shared with friend and fellow Wilkes University student, Jack Swearhart. Jack and C.B. were casually tossing blueberries into their mouths on this warm summer afternoon in Wilkes-Barre, PA. It was about 1:30 p.m., and Sharon’s fleeting image of her son was the last she’d see him as he used to be. It was just another summer’s day, even forgettable had it not been seared into their memories later. C.B. Miller was excited about the prospect of playing football as a collegian, and summer practices were coming soon. The imposing 275-pound junior, rallying from an earlier injury, had been undergoing rigorous conditioning for months to play on the line for the Wilkes Colonels. On this particular day, July 21, 1994, a Thursday, Mike and Sharon Miller had used some vacation time to spend a few days with their eldest son, Michael, Jr., who was interning at Crozer Chester Hospital in the Philadelphia suburb of Chester. C.B. had gone with them, but he had to get back to his summer job at the Woodlands Inn, a popular resort on the threshold of the Poconos, that evening. His brother, Mike, would remember leaving his apartment early for work that morning. There were hugs and kisses for his parents, but C.B, was still in bed and he had stirred just enough to extend a hand from underneath the covers. “I never really saw his face,” Mike recalls. “Looking back, it was the last time I shook his right hand when it was still vital and strong.” Shaking your brother’s hand can be a big deal when you think of it that way. The Millers left later that morning, with only a handful of stops between Philadelphia and Wilkes-Barre, linked by the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. They would drop C.B. off there at Jack’s apartment over a storefront just a couple of blocks off the city’s Public Square. He would be staying there until he moved into a dorm when the fall semester began. His parents would continue another sixty-five miles to the north and obliquely west to their home in Towanda, like Wilkes-Barre situated on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River. C.B. would go to his job that afternoon —something subsequently erased from his memory—and, later that evening, after busing tables on the dinner shift, he decided to check out a gathering at the third-floor apartment of another college friend a short walk from his apartment. C.B. had been there before, but he doesn’t remember being there on the evening of July 21, 1994. He certainly doesn’t remember walking out on the balcony or leaning on that railing. That rotten railing. Funny the things you remember. They had purchased laundry detergent for C.B. and Sharon realized, upon arriving home, that the soap was still in the car. As it turned out, that soap would have been of no use to C.B. Maybe that’s why the memory of that forgotten container stays with her. Their daughter, Kathie, soon to be pursuing a graduate degree at American University in Washington, D.C., was still at home, working a summer job. She had gone to bed for the evening. All four Miller siblings were smart, but the two best students were Kathie and Michael. Kathie was the brain and Michael was the focused overachiever, who still, as he likes to say, “starts each day with a lean.” That left sister, Maurita, known as Maurie, and C.B. Maurie, excelling at mathematics, holds a degree in accounting. She was working and living across the New York State border in nearby Elmira. Maurie was, and still is, good at taking care of others, setting her own ego aside. There was a close bond between Maurie and C.B., and, ever the clown, he found in her his most appreciative audience. C.B. was definitely the underachiever when it came to school, but the hulking 21-year-old sparkled at sports, particularly baseball, swimming and football. He loved life, people and having a good time. He was smart enough, but he had yet to be convinced of the merits of scholarly pursuits. There was about a two-year gap between each of the Miller kids, starting with Michael, followed by Maurie, Kathie and C.B. Michael loved sports, playing backup quarterback in football and achieving more distinction as a starting catcher on his high school baseball team, the Towanda Black Knights. Maurie, the math whiz, loved to get involved in school fundraisers. Kathie was the academic who excelled in school but was also involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, including cheerleading and student council. Then there was C.B. His given name is Christopher Bradley Miller, but by that time he was known to just about everyone by his initials. That he walks among us today, hobbled and physically altered from his injuries, is, in the minds of many, a miracle. It is a miracle, some would argue, that he survived the accident that sent him plummeting some three stories head-first into an alley below on a summer’s eve, destroying 40 percent of his brain. Eradicated within milliseconds upon impact was virtually the left front, a repository for, among other functions, problem solving, behavior, personality, emotions, speech, understanding and control of the right side of his body. There was also rampant devastation to the parts of the brain affecting reading, writing, spatial relationships, sensation, perception and memory. They would discover, through pain and suffering, how truly amazing the human brain is in bridging the gap from massive destruction of brain cells to working cells that may seem to have nothing to do with the functions that have been lost. His brother, the doctor, describes it as “cross talk,” pointing out that you can take out half the brain of a child and still retain most, if not all, the functions of the other side. Autopsies, going back as far as 130 years, have revealed people who have enjoyed productive, gratifying lives after having as much as half of their brains destroyed. He knows that today, but back in the summer of 1994 the young intern understood the components of traumatic brain injury—the fundamentals of treating for survival— but acknowledges that he still didn’t understand the chronic implications, what C.B. would be facing should he survive. There is brain, but there is also heart and soul. Some seem to have more of the latter than others, and C.B. Miller, blessed by youth and a competitive spirit, would prove he had plenty to spare. As is often the case with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) survivors, science and medicine are inadequate to explain why things turn out the way they do. July 21, 1994, would trigger the beginning of his new life, and there would be no football ever again for the burly collegian. A dilapidated balcony railing outside a friend’s apartment changed all of that.