DENVER -- For nearly an hour, Lisa Ludwig had worked her way through a physical therapy session led by a therapist in Nebraska who was watching, instructing and encouraging her via Zoom video. After some exercises in the living room of her home high on a mountain near Evergreen, she’d gone outside for walking drills on a wrap-around deck with a stunning view of Mount Evans, cracking jokes and teasing her husband, Dave.
Still suffering from cognitive deficits caused by a traumatic brain injury that she sustained on Father’s Day last year when she was struck by a hit-and-run driver while cycling with friends, she took slow, halting steps — with a walker, with two poles, with one hand on the railing of the deck, and then hand-in-hand with Dave.
Suddenly Ludwig decided to try something that wasn’t on her PT program last Tuesday. And for the first time in 359 days since she was rushed from a roadside trauma scene near El Rancho to St. Anthony Hospital where she lay in a coma for 19 days, Ludwig walked about 20 feet without the assistance of her walker, poles or Dave’s hand.
