Showing results by author "Bill Schmidt" in All Categories

The powerful and moving memoir by a scientist and mother of three of how she learned to live again after a sudden severe infection caused her to die but then revive with 'locked-in syndrome' - able only to blink an eye. At the age of 38, Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard, a Danish scientist, wife and mother of three, is struck down by an acute bout of bacterial meningitis. She awakes from a coma in intensive care to find herself completely paralysed, unable to show she is conscious except by blinking her eye.

Born in a coal camp in Southview, Pennsylvania, to a German immigrant father who was a coal miner for 37 years, my future looked preordained. I was headed to the coal mines or the steel mills in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was just a way of life in Appalachia, and the measurement of success was just getting a job, eventually getting married, and raising a family--a good life by everyone's standards who worked and lived there.