Читать книгу It’s A Miracle: Real Life Inspirational Stories, Extraordinary Events and Everyday Wonders - Richard Thomas - Страница 9

From the time she was a young girl growing up in Oklahoma, Cyndi Steele was stagestruck. But it wasn’t only the lights and costumes that fascinated her. She had a mad crush on one of the local actors, nineteen-year-old Chris Harrod.

“She was always there,” recalls Chris. “She had these little glasses on and little braces. She was just, really cute, and I remember thinking, What a cute kid.”

In 1992, Cyndi left Oklahoma for New York City to pursue her dream of acting, and it paid off when she landed a role in a stage production of Bye Bye Birdie.

“It was kinda cool to get a chorus thing right off,” Cyndi says. “’Cause I didn’t do that kinda work. And I thought, All I can do is get older and do the character roles, so this was great.”

But during a preview performance, a freak accident changed all her plans.

“We were just standing in the wings,” recounts Cyndi, “waiting to go on for bows, and a friend in the show just flips his head back, and it just knocked me right above my right eye. Instead of falling body first, I fell head first. The back of my head stopped my fall.”

Cyndi was knocked unconscious. None of the actors could revive her. When she finally regained consciousness, she was in a hospital.

Cyndi says, “A nurse came up to me, and she said that I had fallen and hit my head. And I said, ‘Where?’ She said, ‘At work. You were doing a show.’ And she said, ‘Your friends are out there.’ She opened the door, and they’re just waving at me enthusiastically … and I have no idea who they are.

“So I came back from the hospital,” Cyndi continues. “I saw there were photos of my family, and I didn’t know exactly who everybody was…. I knew my name was Cyndi Steele, but that didn’t make any sense to me. Nothing made any sense.”

Cyndi was suffering from severe amnesia brought on by blunt head trauma and a concussion. Unable to remember the simplest things, she began staying at home, alone, isolated from an unfamiliar world.

“I found some journals, and I thought they would help me piece things together. They were disjointed, but it helped. There were still so many gaps,” Cyndi explains. “And I didn’t want to meet people. It was too frustrating.”

A worried friend finally convinced Cyndi to join her for a night out. As they sat watching a movie, Cyndi noticed that something about the man sitting next to her seemed familiar.

“And I just kinda looked at him,” remembers Cyndi, “and I said, ‘Did I know you before?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m Chris Harrod.’”

“We were watching the movie, having a great time,” Chris adds, “and the whole time, I’m thinking, This is strange…. I’m starting to be attracted to somebody who I’ve known since they were twelve. Who doesn’t remember who I am. This is really weird.”

A few days later, Chris spent an evening with Cyndi talking about his acting career and how it had brought him to New York. But he didn’t bring up the past. As far as Cyndi knew, she was meeting him for the first time. Chris was very moved by how hard she tried to act like nothing was wrong.

“Now, I just thought that she was really brave and strong, and I thought, I’m gonna sit here as long as she’ll let me. And then we were just together, we were inseparable,” says Chris.

A few weeks later, Cyndi returned to Oklahoma, hoping her parents could help fill in the gaps in her life.

“And I said, ‘I’m seeing this guy. His name is Chris Harrod,’” recalls Cyndi. “And they just about choked, because the psychiatrist told them, ‘Don’t bring up her past. Just be open to what she’s doing—as hard as that will be for you.’”

And so Cyndi’s parents kept quiet. Then one afternoon, while paging through a scrapbook, she found pictures of the man she’d left behind in New York.

“The more I dig, I find picture after picture of Chris,” exclaims Cyndi. “Cutouts with ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re so cute’ written on them. And I’m just laughing, and when I open the door, my parents are laughing, ’cause they were dying to tell me this forever.”

They told her how she used to hang around the community theater, watching her dad perform … and always hoping to get a glimpse of Chris. The story jogged her memory, and suddenly she remembered how she’d once told her parents that, one day, she would marry Chris Harrod.

“It was just like something clicked. I just went to the phone and called him, and I was like, ‘I was totally in love with you,’” Cyndi recounts.

Chris adds, “And I thought, This is fate. This is what it is, this is fate. I mean, you don’t just meet somebody and then have this happen and not automatically think that there’s something special going on here.”

Chris’s prediction came true on December 22, 1995. And today, the happy couple has added another little miracle to their life: their son, Dalton. Even though Cyndi has recovered only thirty percent of her long-term memory, she believes that she has enough good memories to last her a lifetime.

“The few I have,” confirms Cyndi, “I’ll treasure them. I wouldn’t change it. Something good came out of that accident.”