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"Part I: Whatever Happened to Eugene Torri?"

The 1992 Hendrick Hudson High School Baseball Team won their league title and earned a #1 seed in the Sectional Tournament.  Though we had a few standout players, we like to think that our success was due more to a strong sense of teamwork and camaraderie.  One of the strong points of the team was its pitching staff, which included a spot-starter / reliever named Eugene Torri. 

Diminutive in stature, Eugene was never going to strike fear in the hearts of opposing hitters.  But armed with a repertoire of pitches that included just about everything you can think of, Eugene’s craftiness, control, and a deceptive fastball that had you wondering, “How does this guy throw that hard?” earned him much success.  I remember after he struck out a notoriously strong hitter, I once asked him, “What did you throw there Gene?”   “Screwball,” he replied. 

Eugene and I were good friends.  We were on the same team and we had the same summer job as camp counselors.  We were the type of friends that always just got along, but for whatever reason we wouldn’t be calling each other on the phone to discuss which girl we thought was cute or anything like that.  In the years after high school and college, had I ever run into Eugene in the street, we would’ve certainly grabbed a beer and happily reminisced about the good old days.

In 1995, rumors began to circulate that something had happened to Eugene.  The rumors were of an accident – Eugene had fallen out of a dorm window a few stories and was badly banged up.   I never knew what to believe – if it was just a rumor or if it were fact.  I remember thinking that I should stop by his house because if it were true, he could probably use a friend at the time.  But I never did.

In generations past, that would have been the end of this story.  I would’ve never heard from Eugene again and never knew what had actually happened.  But in this day and age, we have things like Facebook, and acquaintances from years past can be reunited.  It was about a week ago when I received a friend request from “Gino Torri” – an innocent enough gesture and an opportunity to put the rumors to rest.  What I heard was an astonishing story.

An established writer already, Eugene Torri, Jr wrote a poem called “Feet to Wheels” that was accepted to an exhibition called “One Heart, One World” and displayed at The United Nations.   He has agreed to write a series of letters for the “A Letter A Week” project addressing his experiences.  This first letter is to all of his old friends – not necessarily the close ones that have been there every day, but the ones like me who always wondered, “Whatever happened to Eugene Torri?”

-----------------------

To all my friends,

 

The only thing I can remember about the late spring and early summer of 1995 was that it was hot out on Long Island. I remember walking outside of my college dorm at Hofstra University one day in May, and getting bludgeoned with a humid breeze. I immediately walked right back into the dorm to check The Weather Channel, and the little temperature gauge in the right hand corner of the television screen read 95 degrees!  Being the responsible student I was, I dropped my books, collected some friends, talked them into skipping a few classes, and we headed for Jones Beach. Yeah, I was a great influence on everybody.

My junior year at Hofstra was the most carefree, and by far the best year of my life. My grades were fine (we only blew off classes that one day, folks), I had a holy host of great friends, and was in a long-term relationship.

After finishing my junior year, my friends and I spent a few days near Baltimore. From there, we took off for a trip to my favorite vacation resort, Ocean City, Maryland. I was at the pinnacle of my life, but, as the Grateful Dead said in their song Uncle John’s Band, “When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door.”

The friend whose house we stayed at in Baltimore played on the Hofstra tennis team. We played a few sets, and I went up two games to nothing immediately. I got a little too cocky, and he subsequently took about thirty whole minutes to trounce me 6-2, 6-0. The next day his parents took us on a boating trip where we were supposed to travel down the Severn River and into Chesapeake Bay. We made it as far as the Naval Academy, and the engine gave out. We then decided to raise the sails and just head back home. One small problem, there wasn’t much of a breeze that day.  At least not until the lightning started and thunder began to peal around us.  There I was, holding up the sail mumbling to myself “I’m going to die on a boat.”

Well we made it back safely, and the rest of our vacation was wonderful. However, that tennis match and boating adventure were foreshadowing the turn my life was about to take.

When we returned to New York, I spent the day with a friend who was letting me crash in his dorm room at Hofstra. As a favor in return, I took him and a group of friends out to a bar. That was the last thing I remember about June 4, 1995. In fact, I am at a loss trying to remember anything that happened for the next month.

The tale has been relayed to me in various versions. I can only give you what we do know about the last day I would spend outdoors for the next year:

After drinking too much and arguing with a few people over absolutely nothing, I wound up in the student lounge of my friend’s dorm.  There are varying theories as to what happened next, from suicide to a fit of anger where I threw a huge desk towards the window and the momentum carried me out.  Falling out of the window of a dorm lounge sounds like no big deal at first… but this particular lounge was on the 14TH FLOOR!

Lest to say, the sheer physics of falling from a height like that, desk or no desk, would have me dead.  I would spend the next month in a medically induced coma.

Throughout that month, I can only give you the details the doctors and my family members have passed on to me:

When the public safety officers found me after the initial fall, they figured there was no hope. They slapped the oxygen on me anyway, and I started to breathe in “gurgling sounds.” I was then airlifted to Nassau County Medical Center, where two doctors began the process of trying to save my life. One of them I have never met, for it was his very last day at Nassau County Med.

After initially stabilizing me the best they could, I was sent in for various MRI’s and other tests. The doctors were amazed to see that I did not have any traumatic brain injuries, even though I had severed my spinal cord at the T6 - T7 level. It would render me a paraplegic for life, but I was spared the use of my arms. The only thing I can remember from that first month in the hospital was hearing the cries of various family members and friends, and trying to fight out of the medically induced coma to try and tell everyone how much I loved them. I can only remember being successful at it once.

I was eventually taken out of the coma, and I spent the next year in the Intensive Care Units of both Nassau County Medical Center and Westchester County Medical Center. I would only see the outdoors one time over the course of that entire year.  That was when I was transferred from Nassau County to Westchester County. They had done all they could do for me at Nassau County Med., and I was subsequently placed under the care of a real wizard of a doctor named John Savino, who worked out of Westchester County Med. Don’t ask me how he did it, but he was able to put me back together again.

Before I even qualified for rehabilitation at Helen Hayes Hospital in Rockland County, I had to be cured of so many ailments that even the doctors cannot remember all of the treatments I received.  I eventually lost most of my hearing from massive doses of strong antibiotics like Vancomycin, used to cure constant infections. I couldn’t eat or drink anything for months at a time. Pancreatic fistulas that wouldn’t close, a platelet count next to nothing where the medical staff worried I was going to bleed to death, breathing on a ventilator, needing kidney dialysis, constant trips to the operating room, and a few holes in my intestines, are just a few of the problems we encountered.

I do mean “we,” for my family was there every step of the way.  Being in the hospital was a lonely experience.  The nights were just terrible. The only thing that kept me going was seeing my father come into the room every morning. There was even a time when I was having a rough go of it one afternoon, when a nurse in the ICU called my father on the intercom, “Dr. Torri, please report to the ICU….”  No, he’s not a doctor, but he learned a lot about the medical profession from the year and a half he spent with me in the hospital. My mother and brother would visit, sometimes taking the weekend shift. My extended family visited often. My friends from Hofstra visited me everyday while I was in Nassau County Medical Center. With all of their help, with two amazing medical staffs, and after many miracles, I was finally able to go to Helen Hayes Hospital in Rockland County for rehabilitation.

I think I broke the record for the longest stint at Helen Hayes; half a year. A top notch facility that provides every kind of inpatient and outpatient therapy, Helen Hayes is not your ordinary hospital. It is situated on a hill that overlooks the Hudson River. When I looked across the Hudson, I was able to see my ultimate goal, home: Westchester. Specifically, Croton Harmon Station (I was going for something a bit more dramatic here, but I’m not going to fib and say that you can see my house in Buchanan from Helen Hayes). At least I knew that my home was a little further north. Hey, the food wasn’t too bad either. They even had a gourmet chef who volunteered to cook for the patients once a week.

Helen Hayes Hospital was one of the facilities Christopher Reeve used for his rehabilitation after suffering his initial injury. I bumped into him, almost literally, while wheeling down a hallway where he was getting his wheelchair modified. In a television interview Reeve once admitted that it took him a long time to acquaint himself with the controls of his motorized chair. In fact, as an inpatient he accidentally brushed into a grand piano, and pianist, during a concert given in the hospital’s rotunda.

I was discharged and allowed to go home on my twenty-second birthday. I eventually returned to college and finished my undergraduate degree by commuting back and forth to The State University of New York at Purchase. The teachers, students, and other faculty at SUNY Purchase were very understanding of my situation. I had a few students volunteer to take notes for me, one of whom helped me in the library when I had to do research, for some those books didn’t just magically fly off the top shelf. You should have seen me trying to make copies; I must have wasted five dollars worth of coins trying to center the pages! I graduated at the end of 1999. You’ve heard of the five year program; I was on the nine year program, making a few stops along the way.

The years following that ill fated night of June 4th, 1995, have been filled with numerous challenges, setbacks, and triumphs. The one constant throughout that time has been the outpouring of hard work, friendship, and love I have received from family, friends, and people in the medical field. Without such help, I would not be here today sharing this story. Within the next several weeks, I hope to introduce some of these amazing people to you in a series of letters I will write to the various individuals who have helped me throughout my struggles. Some of whom I have not seen in well over a dozen years. It should be an extremely interesting journey; please feel free to follow along by reading my upcoming series here at A Letter A Week.

Best wishes,

Eugene Torri Jr.

 

Eugene would like to thank William Stroock for his contributions to this letter. If you would like to comment on this letter, Eugene can be reached at etorri44@yahoo.com. You can find him on facebook as "Gino Torri".

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