Brooke Ellison, who, after being struck by a car and paralyzed as a young girl, became the first quadriplegic graduate from Harvard University, then built a career as a Stony Brook University bioethicist and stem cell research advocate, has died. She was 45.
Ellison’s parents, Edward Ellison and Jean Ellison, with whom she lived in Stony Brook, said they did not yet know the cause of her death. Ellison died Sunday at Stony Brook University Hospital.
In 1990 Ellison was 11, walking across Nicholls Road on her way home from her first day of middle school when she was hit by a car and left paralyzed from the neck down. A young life filled with soccer, karate, cello and church choir practice ended. Years later, for a story that was published days before her graduation from Ward Melville High School, she told a Newsday reporter that memories of what she called her first life came to her daily.
“I wouldn’t want to repress them,” she said. “The trick is getting past the memories and dealing with the present. Sometimes that can be hard.”
A second life
In Ellison’s second life, she used a battery-powered ventilator to breathe. To move, she used a wheelchair controlled by a sip-and-puff mouth switch. To write, she used what a Newsday story described as a “blowing and sipping technique to spell out the words in Morse code.”
That technique was ultimately, mercifully supplanted by more advanced technology, Jean Ellison said. In recent years, she said, her daughter used voice recognition software to write, along with an adaptive computer interface.
“She used to move the mouse faster with her tongue than we could with our hands.”
Jean Ellison, whose first day at work as a special education teacher was the day of the crash, gave up that career to assist her daughter in school. She later moved to Massachusetts to assist her daughter at Harvard for college and two years of graduate school. Edward Ellison, who worked for the Social Security Administration, cared…
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