Loren Peterson is 76 and seven children and 30 some grandchildren. He adopted Enerika’s four children and had three more with her. In July 2011 he was pullinginto his driveway as his daughter was about to leave in her own car. While he stopped to wait for her, he leaned over to the passenger side (leaning from the right-side steering wheel to the left window) of the Japanese van. A large tree suddenly came uprooted and fell across both vehicles. The daughter was unhurt, as the trunk landed between the front seat and the back, but Loren was pinned inside the van lying across the well between the eats.
Eventually a neighbor brought his chain saw to start removing the branches while friends and family used machetes and rebar to break into the van, tear off the driver’s side door and pull Loren out. “No jaws of life here,” he explained.
Now it’s early Sunday. My room is clean and quiet except for the small refrigerator, which kicks in occasionally. I hear passing squalls approaching as the rain strikes the foliage near the hotel. I
Loren was X-rayed at the local hospital and diagnozed with two ro three fractured vertebrae. It took four days to get him on a plane to Hawaii. His wife Enerika and a friend went along. Fortunately surgery was not necessary. Instead he wore a brace—he called it a flack jacket—that he learned to lace on. The vertebrae fused as hoped and he was in recovery back on Pohnpei three weeks later.
Then his right eye started giving him trouble and his doctor in Kolonia (either Filipino or Kosraen, trained in the U.S.) sent him back to Hawaii. Three surgeries later, his detached retina could not be repaire, so back home he came. “But what happened next was the worst,” Loren continued: a debilitating case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It went undiagnosed for a while, but friends and family became concerned about his personality change. “I was mean to them. I knew it, and I didn’t care!” Finally, Loren agreed to return to Hawaii a third time. Straub Clinic (where Jack Gillmar had had both hip and knee replacement surgery) would not admit Loren because they had no psych ward. “I just wanted some drugs to put me out of it.” He reluctantly agree to see a psychiatrist at another hospital, a 30 something woman from Eastern Europe. She saw the classic symptoms of PTSD immediately and got a history from Enerika. The doctor started Loren on two medications, and within two days he was acting sane again, so she let him return to Kolonia, knowing that he would decrease the dosage of the stronger medication gradually over a two-week period.
“You must know take responsibility for continuing the recovery,” she said. As Jack and Janet and I listened at the restaurant table in the bastment of the Seven Stars Hotel, Loren counted on his fingers the four prescriptions that she gave him. (1) Get off the stronger medication as soon as possible. (2) Exercise daily. (3) Use your support system of family and friends. (4) If possible, rely also on your religion. For exercise, Loren started swimming at Net Point, having one of his sons act as driver and lifeguard. He also walked a lot. Loren had converted to Catholicism when he married Enerika in 1970, and so with his faith intact, he could follow all four prescriptions. He seemed almost beatific as he described his recovery. It was truly a sacred story.
Loren and Enerika's Family Tree