An incredible comeback story

Incredible:

She had what she calls “moments of being dead” during the ambulance trip to the hospital, but was revived and reassembled in the first of what would be more than 100 operations.

“I still carry around all the rosaries that people put on the hospital bed,” she says. Pierson did not actually see any of those visitors, having been in a drug-induced coma for 18 months. When she woke up, she was blind, bald and, at 64 pounds, had lost nearly half her body weight.

…As a teenager in Huntington Beach, Pierson didn’t collaborate, radically or otherwise — she was able to teach herself to swim and solve complicated math problems just by watching other people. She enrolled at UC Berkeley at 16, and was quickly spotted by military recruiters. “I was a starving student,” she says. “I had an opportunity to get three meals a day and I took it.”

Pierson went from Berkeley to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro near Irvine, a 22-year-old Marine with a fitness regimen that included regular 13-mile runs, when one of them ended with her shattered on the ground.

The car that ran over Pierson sliced open her throat and ripped her chest apart. Her left leg became entangled in the wheel well when the driver began furiously attempting to flee, and by the time the car finally spit her out, Pierson’s heart and lungs were fully exposed.

One passerby massaged her heart with his bare hands, while another ventilated her collapsed lung and opened her windpipe with a couple of Bic pens.

After a year on a breathing tube, Pierson says even her doctors gave up on her. By 1985 she was viewed as a “gomer,” harsh hospital slang for “get out of my emergency room.” It wasn’t until the senior citizens took her on as a reclamation project that she began to plan a way back to the life she had envisioned as a cardiologist. “I thought that was my path, and I wanted to get back on it,” she says. “My big obstacle was that I couldn’t see anything.”

That ruled out cardiology, so Pierson embarked on a new path. To her, forging ahead meant not looking back — she never even bothered to find out the fate of the drunken driver who nearly killed her.

ACADEMIC JOURNEY
Pierson relearned to read at the Braille Institute, then went to guide dog school so she could return to college, led by a resourceful German shepherd named Annie. Colorado Northwestern Community College in Rangely, an oil-field town, is about as deep in the academic boondocks as you can go, but for Pierson it was about “putting one foot in front of the other.” If it wasn’t the path she set out on, then that just meant anything was possible now.

When Pierson went to restaurants, Annie would glide right past the hostess, leading Pierson to a table already filled with people from the school. “She forced me to be social,” Pierson recalls. “I think that’s why the college kids adopted me.”

In northwestern Colorado, weekends were often spent scaling local peaks. “As a sighted person, I was afraid of heights,” Pierson says, “but what you can’t see can’t kill you, so it was interesting to take up rock climbing. It was like Brailling the wall. I could feel and map out my path.”

When the school’s custodian rescued her following a spill, the two became fast friends. “She was full of energy and gettin’ after it,” says Naomi Hoops, now 81, “trying to get everything she could out of life. Ramona never wanted pity, not at all. I’ve learned to look at handicapped people differently. She taught me that.”

The next stop on her odyssey was Fort Lewis College in Durango, where she completed work on her undergraduate degree in psychology in two years. Pierson began going on tandem mountain bike rides once a week, and soon friends were competing to see “who took the blind girl out” on the world-class trails that descend sharply through red rocks.

She also could feel her path unfolding before her, bump by bump. She then spent three years ending in 2000 working on a doctoral degree in neuro-clinical psychology at what was then the Stanford Consortium — now Palo Alto University — that would lay the foundation for Pierson’s first startup venture seven years later, an educational software company called SynapticMash, which she sold in 2010 for $10 million.