Ray Willenberg, Jr., Andrea Romo, and Robert deRose

Survivors Rehabilitation Foundation
For the Romo family, a late-night call was only the beginning of the bad news. It was a Friday, just past midnight, and Cecilia Romo had cleared the last few people from her home after a party. Her daughter Andrea, who’d turn 20 in a week, was still out with friends. But Cecilia wasn’t concerned at such an early hour, and she and her husband went to bed, a little tipsy and happy to drift off to sleep.

Then the phone rang. It was Andrea’s friend, the one who’d been driving that night. There’d been an accident, he told Cecilia. He was fine, but Andrea wasn’t. At the emergency room, Cecilia and her husband felt helpless and panicked.

"They wouldn’t let us see her," she recalls, her voice trembling slightly. "We didn’t know anything. When we finally saw her — we never thought we’d see her like that." Cecilia begged for information, but the hospital staff offered little hope in the days that followed. She only knew that her daughter had suffered a serious head injury and had slipped into a coma.

"All the doctors, they told us that she would be a vegetable, that she’d never recover and that we should disconnect her. They all tried to convince me that there was no hope." But Cecilia, a "stubborn mom," wouldn’t hear of it.

"Parents have to fight for their children," she says, patting the hand of Andrea, now 27 and seated next to her mother at a table in a conference room. You’d never guess that this pretty young woman with dark hair and almond-shaped eyes was once considered a lost cause.

Andrea and her mother have driven to La Jolla from their home in Chula Vista to meet with Ray Willenberg, Jr. and Robert deRose, the founders of a non profit called Survivors Rehabilitation Foundation (SRF). Since 1985, SRF has provided scholarships to San Diego brain injury survivors with a shot at a strong recovery — including patients like Andrea, who awoke from her coma after three months.

Both Willenberg and deRose are intimately familiar with the taxing rehabilitative process that follows a brain injury. In 1985, Willenberg’s sister Renee was gravely injured in a car wreck. A year later, deRose’s daughter Allison, then 13, also suffered a severe head trauma in an auto accident.

DeRose had the funds to pay for his daughter’s long-term rehabilitation at Sharp — considered to have one of the nation’s leading brain injury treatment facilities — but he was haunted by his memory of the girl in the hospital bed next to his daughter’s. Her insurance had run out and she was promptly sent home.

"I just couldn’t forget how she looked as they were wheeling her out," recounts deRose. "Her head was flopped to the side and she was drooling. I thought, 'That poor girl doesn’t have a chance.’"

He decided to start a foundation to assist patients in her situation. When he expressed his idea to the staff at Sharp, he was told that another guy had recently done just that.

They were talking about Willenberg, who’d organized a charity golf drive to help cover his sister’s medical expenses. Willenberg empathized with other families who quite suddenly found themselves in a similar predicament. The two men met and joined forces.

About a million people will sustain moderate to severe head injuries each year in the United States. Those who survive must deal with unimaginable difficulties and deficits, from loss of memory and speech to the inability to control emotions. Some will never re-enter society as functional adults. But others, like Andrea, can enjoy a relatively normal life with the proper rehabilitation.

SRF, which raises most of its funds at an annual golf tournament at the Lomas Santa Fe Country Club in Solana Beach, gives scholarships to patients for whom independent living is a strong possibility. Sharp’s Brain Injury Community Re-Entry Program determines the patient’s status and submits an application to SRF, which has assisted about 300 survivors over the years.

Cecilia can’t imagine what would’ve happened without the helping hand from SRF. When she looks at Andrea, it is with the worried eyes of a mother who nearly lost her little girl. She knows her daughter still grapples with all that’s happened.

"Before a head injury, when you look in the mirror, you see a whole image of yourself," explains Cecilia. "After, it’s like the glass has shattered in thousands of fragments and you must piece that image back together, bit by bit. But there will always be some pieces missing."

Andrea suffers from depression, common for brain injury survivors. She struggles with remembering details, and finds it difficult to make friends and date — things that came so naturally to her before her accident. She looks perfectly healthy and people just don’t understand why she’s so forgetful, why simple tasks can prove so challenging.

But she is alive, and full of potential. Other SRF recipients have gone on to achieve miraculous accomplishments — mothers are able to care for their children, new careers are forged. Andrea Romo might not have exactly the life she’d hoped for, but she is a million times better off than that little girl deRose cannot forget, the one wheeled out into the world as a completely lost cause.
— AnnaMaria Stephens, photography by Vincent Knakal

Survivors Rehabilitation Foundation

Year Founded: 1985

Overall Mission: To help pay for rehabilitation after traumatic brain injury where access to funding has been exhausted.

Current Funding Objectives: To fund all requests provided to us by Sharp Rehabilitation Hospital in the form of scholarships to survivors of traumatic brain injury in need of more rehabilitation.

Donation Administration Cost Ratio: Minimum 75 to 25 donation to administration cost.

Organization’s Biggest Challenge: Getting corporate donors and sponsors.

Contact Information: Dani Willenberg, 858/229-2198, www.sdsrf.org