Cyclist Battles Back From Brain Trauma

ALEXANDRIA, Ala. - Last June 28, while he was racing in the Olympic cycling trials in Blaine, Minn., Bart Bell flew over the handlebars of his bike and kept soaring, into a journey filled with haze and wonder.

"Don't ask me where or why," he said. "I just know I got a round-trip ticket."

Bell, a country-music aficionado from Alabama, had come to Minnesota only to ride his bike. Instead, he lay in a coma for two weeks in a Fridley, Minn., hospital.

Only the beat of Bart Bell's heart did his talking. Tubes fed him. His brain bruised, Bell swerved over what doctors call "islands of memory" - blocks of mental data - that would later allow him to remember details about his first-grade teacher, but not about anything that occurred between June 24 and August 5.

"I can remember swimming with my cousin Luanne when I was a little boy, but I can't remember racing in Minnesota," Bell said recently. "Why would the brain save one and not the other?"

As his unconsciousness endured, as his 6-3 athlete's body shrunk from 208 pounds to 177, somehow, deep inside, Bell grew.

"I think I'm a better person now, more subtle, calm, appreciative," he said. "Does that make sense?"

After five weeks - including three when his blue eyes were open but his stare was blank - Bell "woke up." He was airlifted to a rehabilitation center in Birmingham, Ala., but he didn't know why or where.

"Bart, you were out in left field," said his stepfather, Bobby Cobb. "And you were in the real tall grass."

Bell had forgotten how to urinate, how to tie his shoes, who his mother was and why everyone was calling him "Bart."

"I thought I overslept," said Bell, 25. "People tell me it was five weeks. They know more than I do. I thought I was asleep for five minutes."

He sought only to make an Olympic team, but Bell faced an inordinately larger - literally mind-blowing - challenge: He had to be reintroduced to himself.

"I heard everyone talking to this Bart guy," Bell said. "I was thinking, `I know who I am, but who's Bart?' I heard that Bart was hurt, but who is he? I got to learn that he had been a good friend of mine. Bart was all I had. I asked God to send me back as Bart, not as Arnold Schwarzenegger, not as Miss America. I asked God to allow me to be content with myself."

Bell, still handsome, chattier than ever, celebrated the coming of a New Year at his Alexandria, Ala., home, where people believe in miracles.

"Bart has seen things," said his mother, Charlotte Cobb. "Bart has been to another plane."

On a pleasant Sunday afternoon, the right side of Bell's forehead - at the eyebrow, just beneath the lip of his undamaged helmet - whacked into the infield of the National Sports Center velodrome at a speed of about 40 mph.

He was steering a tandem bike in the first of the best-of-three national-championship series. Riding with him was longtime partner Tom Brinker. Bell attempted to move inside the other bike, ridden by defending champs Marty Nothstein and Erin Hartwell.

On the final lap of the race, Bell saw Nothstein and Hartwell inch out of the inside lane. Bell, determined to win, shot for the inside in hopes of passing his opponents.

Sitting in the living room of his mother's home recently, Bell showed no emotion as he watched video of the race filmed by his aunt, Myra Deason. His front wheel collapsed when it seemed to brush against a pedal on the other bike. The video records Bell going down and out.

The images are simpler than the consequences. His brain was pushed back inside his cranium. Nerve cells were punched like never before. Bell was sent reeling into a transformational experience.

If you'd never met Bell, you'd probably never feel a need to ask about his residual losses. They are, at first meeting, difficult to identify.

You wouldn't imagine that it took him two months to get out of hospitals and $300,000 of insurance coverage to pay for it all.

Oh, his left leg drags a bit when he walks. His left arm remains stiff, forcing the natural lefty to write with his right hand. He favors his left eye when he reads. You might think he had a childhood illness that he's outgrown or a very slight birth trauma, but you'd never think he was once a candidate for total vegetation.

His speech seems quite normal, even if he finds himself stuttering sometimes, even if during a long day he has a tendency to repeat himself. He has lost the ability to tell if he's hungry. He's lost his taste for milk.

He is lucky. During therapy, he met men who are "18 going on 6," he said. "They'll never come back."

Bell came back with his Southern charm and athlete's determination intact.

"Stay out of trouble," a nurse said to him on his final day of therapy at Spain Rehabilitation Center in Birmingham.

"That'll be a full-time job," Bell said in his lovely Alabamese.

"You're back to normal," another nurse said.

"Right, normal," Bell said, "whatever that means."

The exchanges came amid his last sessions of speech, physical and cognitive-remediation therapies at Spain Center, where he'd gone for three months, three times a week, remolding and retraining his brain, paving new paths for responses because of the detours his injury created.

In his final meetings, he was measured for progress and received instructions for at-home exercises.

Bell told cognitive specialist Sandy Caldwell of his plans to return to college to complete a biology degree next fall, about dreams of attending medical school.

But only after he spends time in California making a comeback as a cyclist.

"I need one more year of racing," Bell told her. "I can't handle being thrown out of the sport on a stretcher. I may never get back to riding 42 mph, but 38 is OK."

Caldwell's face filled with concern. She explained that his attention wanes, that he continues to have "visual scanning problems." She offered "memory strategies" to him. She said that when he returns to school - probably Jacksonville (Ala.) State, not far from his mother's home - he might need more study time than before, that he might have to accept his "limitations."

Bell sat expressionless.

"Who wants to be in therapy for a head injury?" he blurted out to no one in particular. "Raise your hand."

Bell promised Caldwell he'd write a letter to her monthly. But he left her office coolly, and his anger grew as he slowly, with a wobble, walked down the three flights of stairs, refusing to take the elevator.

"They set limits," Bell said of his medical advisers. "Don't set limits on me and not expect me to fight back. What right do they have to set limits on me?"

Bell and restrictions don't get along. He has sought to "chase the world" the past eight years. He was a standout baseball and football player while growing up in Jacksonville. But his parents divorced when he was 12, and he marks that as a time when he searched for something new, something defining.

Watching the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Bell saw Mark Gorski defeat Nelson Vails for the gold medal in the track cycling sprint event. Bell found what he was looking for.

"It was just Mark against Nelson," said Bell. "It was simple. The winner is the first one to get across the line."

By year's end, he had made contact with the U.S. Cycling Federation. He was invited to an introductory training camp. By the spring of 1985, he was headed to Europe. He was 17 and on his own. Cycling would consume him.

By 1988, he and U.S. national team member Brinker won the U.S. tandem title. The tandem - the most dangerous kind of track race - isn't an Olympic event, but it is contested at the world championships. Three years after taking up the sport, Bell, with Brinker, finished fifth at the world tandem championships.

"Who would have thought a kid from Calhoun County, Alabama, could do that?" Bell asked.

Bell became more consumed. He beat Gorski, he beat Vails. He pointed toward the 1992 Olympic trials. He hoped to be the one man to represent the United States in the sprint event, the one-on-one flat-out burst on a 400-meter banked track.

Stuff happened. He had a falling out with U.S. cycling officials and trained with his own coach in California.

Two weeks before the trials, "in the best shape of my life," Bell was hit by a pickup truck while on a training ride near Ramona, Calif. He mangled his left thumb. His ability to hold handlebars was limited.

Then he went to Blaine, finished ninth in the sprints and his hopes for Barcelona were dashed. To salvage the week, he asked Brinker if they could reunite for the tandem title, something to get him back to the world championships.

The next scene was the intensive-care unit. Doctors told his family that the coma would pass in three or four days. Day five came and went. Day six. Day seven.

There was a new, ghastly diagnosis on that Saturday, July 4th. A theory developed that Bell had a brain-stem injury and would never recover.

"We might have to give him up," Cobb remembers thinking. "It was the low point."

But then, it turned. Marty Murrell, a woman from Blaine, had come to know Bell's family in the waiting room. Her father was an intensive-care patient, too. When the news was so glum, Bell's stepmother, Bev Bell, called Murrell. Bev Bell sensed it was time for a special prayer.

Murrell brought her twin daughters, Jodi and Jami, 21. They brought friends. The Bell family - Charlotte, Myra, Bev, father Bob Bell, some of Bart's sisters and Brinker, who was visiting - met the Murrells in the glass-enclosed ICU.

They simply invaded and took over. The nurses were overwhelmed. There must have been a dozen people in a room that was generally off-limits.

"I believed in my heart that something was going to happen," Jami Murrell said.

The Murrells stood on Bell's left side, with Bob and Bev. Charlotte Cobb, Myra Deason, Brinker and others were on his right, at the foot of the bed. Some touched Bart while others linked up with those touching him.

Marty Murrell started, then Jodi, then Jami. The second twin began speaking in tongues, her mind unable to control what her heart was saying as the words spewed from within her.

The Bell family cried in unison. The room filled with emotion and spirit.

Bart Bell, supposedly closer to death than ever before, moved violently, his waist lifting up from the bed, his right arm, which was tied down, raising itself up as if to touch the sky.

"You believe what you want to about miracles," said Charlotte Cobb, "but I took that as a sign."

The next day, Bell's condition improved. Doctors postponed plans for a tracheotomy. Two days later, the respirator that had been helping him breathe was removed.

Later that week, he opened his eyes and wiped water away from the left side of his face, a side that previously seemed void of feeling.

A week later, his face still frozen in a blank stare, Bell spoke. In ICU room No. 3, a friend asked Bell, "What are you thinking about?"

Speaking so softly that the man had to place his ear to Bart's lips, Bell said: "Independence."

Inspiration is another key word. He is shy and cautious when it comes to religion. "I am not an expert," he said. "But I have an opinion."

His opinion is this: "I was told to come back from wherever I was. I heard it. Don't make me out to sound crazy, but, without a doubt, I felt full-tilt boogie love and understanding. I don't know if it was one second, one minute or one day, but it felt wonderful."