[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today, on this program, we are calling it ...

ROBERT: Lost and found.

JAD:That's right. We have stories of getting lost.

ROBERT: And of course, getting found. Now I think we're gonna make a little adjustment here.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Recalculating.]

ROBERT: Shift gears.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: Approaching emotional left turn.]

ROBERT: I don't know how to turn mine off.

JAD: Oh, give it to me. This next story is a very different kind of lost and found, sort of a love story.

JAD: If you can tell us your name?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh.

JAD: Here's the guy.

ALAN LUNDGARD: My name is Alan Lundgard. Do you want to ...

JAD: Do you want me to say anything more than that?

ALAN LUNDGARD: I don't know. Is this—is this for like a credit?

ROBERT: No. Often on our show, we let people introduce themselves.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh. I don't know. I don't have a title.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: All right.

JAD: So that's Alan. The girl, Emilie, we'll meet her a bit later, for reasons that will become clear. The story begins on a fall day in Brooklyn.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And so the day in question I guess was the morning of October 8.

JAD: They're both living in this one-room loft in Brooklyn.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And we woke up and, you know ...

JAD: Both 21.

ALAN LUNDGARD: ... went about our daily routine and prepared to go.

JAD: He was in art school. She was taking some time off from art school to work for a local artist.

ALAN LUNDGARD: So she would take the bike and I would take the train.

JAD: What was the morning like?

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was a beautiful day. It was, you know—the sun was low in the sky, so there were long shadows. I strapped on her helmet and adjusted it, took her bike out for her. We kissed each other goodbye and said, "I love you." And I watched her ride down the street in this early morning, and then, you know, on I went down into the subway.

JAD: Six hours later, he's working in the studio doing some sculpture, and he gets a call from a cop.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And he just said, "Emilie Gossiaux, she had an accident. She's at Bellevue. This is the address." And I said, "Oh. I mean, do you have any more information?" And he just told me that it was bad. I was carrying a bunch of stuff, and I just dropped everything and started running.

JAD: Now Alan and Emilie had only been together nine months, but when it started, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was just so immediate.

JAD: The night they got together, they both just kind of knew.

ALAN LUNDGARD: It was sort of like a weird prophetic kind of thing where I think it was the first day that the schools had a snow day. It was snowed out. It was kind of like this past blizzard, you know, sort of like the city shuts down magical kind of thing.

JAD: He'd gone out with some friends just as the snow was coming down.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And we were trapped at this party.

JAD: And that's where he bumped into Emilie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Pint-sized, these big, like, iridescent eyes, and a very kind of—I have trouble describing her voice. It's almost as if—and I know you guys are audio people, but it's like stereo, almost.

JAD: Truth is, they'd known each other for a while, but that night, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Fireworks all of a sudden. And it felt right.

JAD: So you had a—you had a feeling this wasn't just a thing. This was a thing!

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right. Or the thing.

JAD: The thing.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right.

JAD: The thing?

ALAN LUNDGARD: The thing.

JAD: The soul thing?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yeah.

JAD: All right.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Well, Emilie, there have always been boys around Emilie.

ROBERT: That's Susan Gossiaux, Emilie's mom. She says at first when Emilie told her about Alan, she thought, "Okay, so that's another boy." Emilie seemed to have that effect on boys, perhaps because she didn't really seem to need them.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Here is someone who's been obsessed with art, and has given up everybody in her life for art.

ROBERT: At the age of six ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She was creating her own comic books.

ROBERT: In junior high school, she took drawing classes every night. And then in high school ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She left us, friends, boyfriends ...

ROBERT: To go to a high school of the arts in Florida.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: No one stands in the way of her art. It's all she sees. It's all she focuses on.

ROBERT: But then she visited Emilie in May, a few months before the accident, and she met Alan.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I met Alan, and he was delightful. But there was a different look that I'd never seen in Emilie's eyes before when she looked at him, and I didn't like it.

JAD: Tell us about the accident from your perspective?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: From my—from when I ...?

JAD: Yeah.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I was at work.

ROBERT: You're in New Orleans?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Metairie, which is a suburb of New Orleans. And I get a telephone call. And I looked and I saw it was Alan. Alan has never called me before. I answered the phone, I said, "Hello, Alan." And he said, "You have to come. Emilie was hit by a truck."

ALAN LUNDGARD: A 18-wheeler semi-truck.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And I took a breath and I said, "Alan, is Emilie dead?" And he said, "No, but you need to get here as soon as possible."

JAD: Six hours later, her and her husband, Emilie's dad, were at Bellevue Hospital here in Manhattan.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They brought us into the—her room in the surgical ICU.

ALAN LUNDGARD: We all went in, and she was just lying in bed.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And there were tubes.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Tubes down her throat.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Coming in and out. And ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Her face was so swollen.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Emilie ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: Covered in blood.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: ... weighed probably at the time of the accident about 100 pounds, and she then weighed 128. She had swollen 28 pounds.

JAD: Oh, wow!

ALAN LUNDGARD: She had multiple fractures in her leg and her pelvis and the left side of her face.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They had opened her abdomen, and they had taken her intestines out and put them on top of her body so that she could breathe.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And she was just lying completely still, you know?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: That first 48 hours, nothing moved. Not—nothing.

ALAN LUNDGARD: We took up shifts. You know, her mother would be there in the day and her father in the evening, and then I would be there with her at night.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Her eyes weren't even flickering.

ROBERT: And as she sat there watching Emilie not move, she says she kept thinking, "Why? I've got these four kids and everything bad seems to happen to Emilie."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Starting at six months, ear infections, then sinus infections, then asthma.

ROBERT: By kindergarten, Emilie was losing her hearing for reasons no one could quite figure out. She had to get hearing aids.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: On both sides.

ROBERT: But somehow, her mom says, all this just made Emilie more fierce.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: If anyone can conquer this, it's Emilie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I think on the second day, they started to take her off her medication, expecting to see some sort of reaction from her.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And nothing. Nothing. There was a nurse, and the nurse said that Emilie was gone, and asked me about organ donations. And I said, "Yes." And so I worked up enough courage to go into what they call the track room, which is where the residents usually are. And there was one woman resident sitting at a computer, and I went and I said, "When are you gonna let Emilie go?" And she said, "We will have a family meeting tomorrow morning and we'll talk then." And so I said, "Okay," and I left. And I went back, and I'm sitting with Emilie, side of her bed, and I'm telling her—Emilie and I read the book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, when she was a sophomore. And I remember the ending of the book. "There's a land of the living, there's a land of dead, and the bridge is love. And that love is the only thing that survives." And it's kind of the way it goes. And so I was sitting there with Emilie, and I was telling this—I was saying this and talking in her ear and saying this, and talking to her and telling her that I would love her eternally through all time, that our love would never end. And Emilie raised her left hand.

ROBERT: What was ...

JAD: Oh my God. What was ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It was chaos! I was yelling for the nurse, "I saw it! I saw her move!"

ALAN LUNDGARD: That was really one of the really abrupt moments.

JAD: Now they knew.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Emilie was not dead. Emilie was alive.

JAD: But how alive? Over the next few days, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She slowly started moving more, not really in response to anything. She'd writhe in bed, scratch her leg where there was a wound.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: We would hold her hand down and she'd slap. She'd slap our hands away.

JAD: But when they'd tell this to the doctors, the doctors would say ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: That's not indicative of any kind of mental functioning.

JAD: It could just be a reflex, really. So the medical team began trying to determine just how damaged was she?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The ophthalmologist teams were coming in, and they were trying to get Emilie's eyes to—eye pupils to respond. And they weren't responsive, and so I knew what that meant.

ROBERT: What did that mean?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It meant she could be blind. So Emilie couldn't see, couldn't hear.

JAD: Because remember, she wore hearing aids.

JAD: And why didn't you just put those in?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: We tried.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I mean, we tried many times to put it in, but she just wouldn't allow it.

JAD: What would she do exactly when you did it?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Flail her head, shake around.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Kick. And she would hit. Had a lot of bruises on my body where she'd kicked me and pinched me. So we stopped.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Right.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Every once in a while, we would go back to it, but there was the question, you know, maybe she couldn't hear anymore.

ROBERT: What do you do to a person who's—you don't know what's going on inside her and you can't get to her?

ALAN LUNDGARD: You send her to a nursing home and, you know, that's where she would have remained.

JAD: And after several weeks in the ICU, Emilie ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She was stable.

JAD: That meant they had to make a decision.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Once you become stable, then you have to move off surgical ICU and out of the hospital to either a rehabilitation or to a nursing home.

JAD: So that became the new question: where would she go? Could she be repaired, so to speak, in which case she'd go to rehab? Or is this it for her, in which case, she'd go to a nursing home?

ROBERT: Now making that call medically ...

MICHAL EISENBERG: Is sometimes tricky.

ROBERT: That's Dr. Michal Eisenberg. She's a physician at NYU and it's her job to make that call. She says one of the key criteria for getting someone into rehab ...

MICHAL EISENBERG: To do rehab on somebody, you need to have them reacting to you. A person needs to be able to participate in a meaningful way for three hours of therapy a day.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: They have to be able to follow commands because that's how you rehabilitate someone. If the person can't hear, if the person can't see, then there's no way to communicate with her.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And so they made the assessment that she could not go to rehab.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And that Emilie should go to a nursing home. So I sent my husband back to New Orleans to look for a nursing home.

ALAN LUNDGARD: That they could bring her back to. They just kept it all a secret from me that they were gonna take her away from me.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I mean, how do you tell someone who loves your daughter that much that we're taking her away? But it was not just one life that we had in our hands, it was two lives. We felt that that would be the best thing for him, and Alan could hate us maybe as a way for him to bridge and let go of that grief.

JAD: But then as the doctors were prepping Emilie to move her to a nursing home, they had to remove her tracheotomy, which was helping her breathe.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And she all of a sudden started talking.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: She spoke?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes.

JAD: What was she saying?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She would curse, "Don't touch me, you blankety-blank." You know?

ALAN LUNDGARD: She would say stop.

JAD: This is in response to someone touching her?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: To touch. Touching her.

JAD: And if she wasn't cursing, says Alan ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She would call everybody Miss Dashwood.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Certain people that were touching her were Miss Dashwood.

JAD: What's ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Is it ...?

ALAN LUNDGARD: From Sense and Sensibility.

ROBERT: You're quoting Jane Austen?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh yeah, we had watched the movie, like, a couple months previous to this.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: So somehow she was locked in the movie.

ALAN LUNDGARD: And it was just the assumption of the doctors that she was just sort of mentally damaged.

JAD: But if she's calling people Miss Dashwood, doesn't that at least mean something?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: No. It wasn't enough to say that Emilie could follow a command like "Sit up, raise your right hand."

JAD: So the plan was still the nursing home?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Right.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I mean, no. Every possibility had not been exhausted.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: I can see him. He was sitting across the room, and his jaws were just clenched.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I just was not gonna give up.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And he was saying, "You have to give her a chance. She—you have to give her the chance."

ROBERT: Did you have a plan?

ALAN LUNDGARD: No, I had no plan whatsoever.

ROBERT: No?

ALAN LUNDGARD: I was lost. This experience was just completely traumatic to me emotionally, but at the same time, I was going to help her in whatever way I could. The only trajectory I had was to help her.

JAD: And one night, just a few days before Emilie was gonna be discharged to a nursing home away from him.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I was there alone with her, and it was 3:00 am or something.

JAD: And she was calm.

ALAN LUNDGARD: Like, she wasn't trying to fight me away or anything. I had helped her fix a thing that was wrong with her mouth wiring. It was like a wire that was poking her, and I fixed it for her.

JAD: And he says at that moment something occurred to him.

ALAN LUNDGARD: It really just was like in the recesses of my mind.

JAD: He thought of the story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. He'd read about it a few days earlier online, and he thought, "Hmm, what if I tried what Annie Sullivan did with Helen Keller on Emilie?"

ALAN LUNDGARD: I took her left hand with my left hand, and I leaned over, and using her wrist as the baseline for the words.

JAD: And his finger as the pen.

ALAN LUNDGARD: I just wrote, "I," waited a second, "L," waited a second, "O," waited a second, "V, E," waited a second, "YOU."

JAD: Then, according to Alan, she said to him ...

ALAN LUNDGARD: She said, "Oh, you love me? Thank you."

JAD: She literally replied immediately to it?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes, she replied immediately.

ROBERT: Does she know who you are?

ALAN LUNDGARD: No, she has no idea who I am.

JAD: But now he had a way to get to her so he could figure out how much of her was actually there, and maybe even prove it to the doctors.

ALAN LUNDGARD: You know, I had to have something that was conclusive to present to them. The following evening, I took out my cell phone. And it has a record function on it, and I started recording question after question to determine her cognitive ability.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: What is your name?]

ALAN LUNDGARD: What. W-H-A-T.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: What ...]

ALAN LUNDGARD: Is. I-S.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Is ...]

JAD: You fingerspelled every letter?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yes.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Car. What is your—what is your name? Emilie! Let me spell it for you.]

ALAN LUNDGARD: She's writing her name on the palm of my hand.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: E-M-I-L-I-E. Emilie.]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Alan called me at four o'clock in the morning. He said, "You have to come now. I have proof."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: I'm now going to ask her what year it is. What ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: What ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Now I'm gonna write, "year."]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... year ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: ... is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... is ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: ... it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: ... it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Question mark.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: 2010.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Very good, Emilie. Very good. Very, very good. Do you know where you are?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: I don't know. I don't know where I am.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Okay, right now I'm gonna write "hospital."]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Got there about 4:45 in the morning. Alan is over there by the bed continuing to fingerspell and talk to her. And—and she calls him Alan. She knows that this person who is fingerspelling on her hand is named Alan, but Alan can't get her to understand who he really is, that it's her Alan.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: I'm just gonna write my name again, "Alan."]

ALAN LUNDGARD: But she just couldn't make that mental jump to connect her past life with her present.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Emilie Gossiaux: Alan, what ethnicity are you? Are you Asian?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alan Lundgard: Am I Asian? I tell her no.]

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The next thing I hear her say is "Pull me out of the wall."

ALAN LUNDGARD: She kept saying ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Pull me out."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Please pull me out of here."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "It's dark in here."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Pull me out."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Help me."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "I know you can do it."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: "Pull me out of the wall."

ALAN LUNDGARD: I kept saying I can't. I would write on her hand, "I can't."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: Alan starts to sob and I'm crying too.

JAD: What are you thinking at this point?

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It wasn't enough.

JAD: That wasn't enough.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: It wasn't enough. And I said, "Alan, ask her about her hearing aids."

ALAN LUNDGARD: And ...

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: So he fingerspells, "Hearing aid."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Hearing aid." And she said, "Okay."

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She agreed to put the hearing aid in for the first time.

ALAN LUNDGARD: So we put it in and switched it on.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: He said, "Emilie."

ALAN LUNDGARD: "Emilie, can you hear me? It's me, Alan." And immediately ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Everything came back to me. I was there. I remembered everything.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: The door opened and Emilie stepped out.

ALAN LUNDGARD: She was back.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Yeah, it was just by hearing his voice. I knew it was him, and then he said my mom was there.

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: And I heard her say what I'd been waiting for her to say all those weeks.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I screamed, "Mommy, mommy!"

SUSAN GOSSIAUX: She said, "Mama."

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: You know, I couldn't believe they were there the whole time.

JAD: We asked Emilie, before she came back, where was she?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I didn't know where I was, if I could see at all. I mean, all I knew is that I was sleeping and I was always dreaming.

JAD: She says people would come to her in her dreams and say ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: "Don't—don't touch that."

JAD: "Stop scratching your wounds."

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: My dreams, they blended with reality.

JAD: She said she knew somehow that there were people around her, but she couldn't get to them. And that she also knew she was in a dream ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Why am I still sleeping?

JAD: ... that she couldn't somehow wake up from.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I felt helpless. I felt really helpless.

JAD: Were you waiting for someone like that? I mean, were—because ...

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: I was waiting for some communication, you know? And I was relieved. Alan, he's a miracle to me.

JAD: Emilie is now at the Rusk Institute, which is one of New York City's leading rehab centers. And on the day we visited her, she'd just had a breakthrough.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Today was the first day I could stand on both legs and walk, actually walk. I walked a hundred feet today.

JAD: After rehab, she'll be moving into an apartment in Lower Manhattan with Alan. She's blind, and the chances of her seeing again are slim, but Alan plans to spend his time helping her cope and helping her find a new way to make art.

JAD: Emilie, can you introduce yourself?

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Do you want me to say "My name is Emilie Gossiaux?"

JAD: Yeah, just so we have it all on tape.

ALAN LUNDGARD: They asked me if I would have a title and I couldn't think of one, but I thought of one.

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: A title?

ALAN LUNDGARD: Yeah. I'll do mine. My name is Alan Lundgard. I'm "the boyfriend."

ROBERT: [laughs]

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: My name is Emilie Gossiaux. I'm the girlfriend. [laughs]

ALAN LUNDGARD: You're the star of the show!

EMILIE GOSSIAUX: Oh, that is …

JAD: If you want to know more about Alan and Emilie, go to our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: I guess ...

JAD: We should go.

ROBERT: Yeah. Thanks for listening.

[AUTOMATED VOICE: You have reached your destination.]

JAD: Oh, and thanks to Karen Jacobson.

[ALAN LUNDGARD: Oh, this is Alan Lundgard. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Tim Howard. Our staff includes Soren Wheeler, Ellen Horne, Pat Walters, Brenna Farrell and Lynn Levy. With help from Douglas Smith and Jessica Gross. Special thanks to Alice Gaby, Dave Pewter, Molly Webster, Mark Coyne, Jordan Bowen, Susan and Erick Gossiaux, George Martin, Craig Anderson and Garret Cook. Thank you. Bye-bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of mailbox.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.