AFSCME District Council 48 Dale Rebernick Profile

Workers
Serving
Milwaukee

Glendale Road Worker's Lonely Battle
After Car Crashed Him Into Brain Injury

By Dominique Paul Noth
September 2001
Dale Rebernick is a big guy - 6 foot 4, 230 pounds. Too big, you'd think, to qualify as a poster boy. Inadvertently, he has become just that - in several ways.
The first and most traumatic way -- Dale became the Milwaukee summer's prime demonstration of why motorists need to be more careful around outdoor road and maintenance workers.

It was a big day at the rehab institute when Dale's family -- son Gregory (left), wife Sandy and brother Russell -- was allowed to bring along the family dogs, camera shy Bentley and Rocket.

     Then, more quietly, without fanfare, without spectacular footage of the accident that knocked him into critical coma, Rebernick has become a testament to what emergency and rehabilitation medical services can accomplish - and also a testament to why final resolution unfolds very slowly in cases of head trauma, what sacrifices and little victories families have to go through largely alone, and how much patience and fortitude the road back requires.
     Dale invited none of the roles. A public works employee for the city of Glendale (Local 1261, for which Dale served on the bargaining committee), his private life was built around wife Sandy, teenage son Gregory, and Rocket and Bentley, the family's two dogs.
     Dale was simply doing his job early on the morning of June 7, riding his mower and cutting the grass in the median of Port Washington Rd., opposite Bay Shore Mall. He never saw what hit him. "That might have been the lucky thing," said his youngest brother, Russell, also a city of Glendale employee, echoing the comments of several others. "He was faced away from the accident, so his body never had a chance to get all tensed up."
     A black Hyundai heading northbound lost control, careened into the median, hit Dale and his mower and continued to the other side where it hit another car heading south. Debris from all this also struck a minivan.
     The only serious injuries, though, were to Dale, who was rushed by Flight for Life to Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital in Wauwatosa. Emergency personnel worked on him intensively as fellow workers as well as family poured into Froedtert and asked for news.
     For a long time, there wasn't much to tell. Dale was in a coma for weeks. His family was convinced he was responding through his movements and reactions. It was decided to move Dale to the coma unit at Sacred Heart Rehabilitation Institute.
     At first, the media was all over what happened to him. It struck several empathetic chords in all of us.
    The accident occurred within days of the launch of a major TV ad campaign financed in part by AFSCME District Council 48 and other unions representing maintenance and road construction workers. It had been decided by the unions as well as the state that a full-court press was needed to combat inattentive and thoughtless drivers on our roads and highways. The last decade has seen a series of near misses, bad injuries and even deaths from cars plowing by work areas and through construction zones. The TV and radio ad campaigns ran Memorial Day to Labor Day, used humor as a weapon and were extensively shown by TV stations throughout the state.

Dale's brother Robert signs the guest calendar in his rehabilitation room as Dale and Sandy explain the purpose -- a further memory aid as Dale works on his memory gaps.

The image of what had happened to Dale served as a grim backdrop to the campaign. The crash got lots of media attention, often in ironic conjunction with the ad campaign. In today's TV news game, few traffic accidents get more than a mention or even a photo. Both the proximity to Bay Shore Mall and the carnage at the scene, combined with the promotional push to "give workers a brake," led to extensive television coverage by all of Milwaukee's TV stations with news departments. Almost all featured Dale's totally pancaked mower.
As Dale lingered in a coma, though, as is common in the news business, few media outlets followed up on what was happening to him. Only District Council 48's website provided running updates on his condition.

Dale and Sandy talk about his recovery.

     "The worst day for me was actually the day he was transported from Froedert to Sacred Heart," recalled Sandy, his wife. "He was still in a coma, there were tubes in his throat and stomach, his hands were in restraints and here was this big guy just laying there."
     Within a week after arriving at Sacred Heart, though, Dale was awake, the tubes were out, he began to talk and, while there were gaps in his short-term memory, his long-term recall was strong. His broken bones -- a fractured shoulder blade and chips in the collar bone --- healed nicely. Physicians could now take time to work on the less obvious, less immediately life-threatening damage, including some disc injury and further neurological investigation.
     And Dale, still picking words carefully and taking in his circumstances piece by piece, could respond to visitors, including Rocket and Bentley, who were brought to the rehabilitation center and would climb up next to him in his wheelchair.
     Perhaps mercifully, he remembers nothing of the accident.
     As striking as his emergence from coma was, there is no quick happy Hollywood ending here. The full resolution of Dale's recovery won't be known for months. From the physicians, he and his wife hear guarded forecasts as he undergoes intense therapy on multiple fronts - physical, speech, reading and writing, social integration, psychological. This is a slow, tough, uncertain ride into the future that Dale is facing.
     That's not just hard on his family - he falls in the middle of six brothers, all still in the Milwaukee area - but on Dale himself. His life was built around activity and his family describes him as something of a workaholic, with a little time thrown in for hunting and fishing. With brain injury, though, every patient and every recovery period is different, and patience is the hardest virtue to come by.
     "The problem is the coldness in my right leg and this numbness in my right arm," Dale said in an interview at Sacred Heart. The leg and arm problems stem from the brain injury. When he is reminded how close he came to not being here at all, he almost tears up with conflicting emotions a visitor can only guess at: Disbelief, frustration at the slowness and uncertainty of his fight back, perhaps anger at what was visited upon him through no fault of his own.

Dale and Sandy credit nurses Sharon (left) and Mary (on phone) with keeping him focused on recovery.

    Still, by late August, Dale kept breaking through plateaus. He could get around in a walker with help. He mainly uses a wheelchair, doing as much as he can on his own - even more, sometimes, than his nurses want.
    He was transferred in late August from Sacred Heart to the brain-injury recovery program at St. Mary's Nursing Home, 3515 W. Hadley, where he can concentrate on specific therapies, life skills and getting him back where he wants to go -- home.
     Talk to the medical experts in such rehabilitation from brain injury, and they'll tell you that Dale's frustration is typical. As things start coming back, patients tend to focus not on what they've accomplished but on what's not yet there. The physical and mental focus needed in therapy is arduous. The psychological anguish is deep. For active workers, the snail pace of the recovery is difficult to endure.
     It's tough on the family, too. Gregory is entering his sophomore year at Wisconsin Lutheran High School. Sandy works in Wauwatosa. The family lives on the far South Side. For his wife and son, the summer has been one spent constantly in cars, grabbing fast food on the nonstop trips trying to maintain an orderly life on the one hand and visit Dale every day on the other. Sandy constantly runs interference for Dale, hovers over him, keeps him on task.
     So do his nurses. Dale insisted that if AFSCME was doing a story about him, they had to include photos of Sharon and Mary, the two nurses at Sacred Heart, he credits with much of his improvement. "They really help me," he said. And push him? "Dale doesn't need much pushing," laughed Sharon. "He's a hard worker."
     In Dale's recovery room, there is a wall of photos with a daily calendar for visitors to sign. This helps Dale (he remembers many of his co-workers and friends, but occasionally there are gaps he needs to fill in) but it is also a reminder how important the community of visitors can be in his recovery.
     As the public poster boy, Dale was a reminder of how perilous the work world can be. His private battle is less likely to be noticed. It is slow, tough and measures gains in inches.
    Then again, tell anyone who saw the aftermath of the crash, tell them about Dale -- and they are amazed how far he has come back in so short a time.