Emerging: from Coma to Presence is in fact two books in one. Part One is about the years that followed a catastrophic car accident, which left Angie Dortch with broken bones from her head to her toes, a traumatic brain injury and a central nervous system disruption that continues today. Part Two is the curriculum and research that supports Learning HOW to Age(TM)?, a wellness program for aging adults which Angie developed and teaches. Both of these books offer you inspiration to act and arm you with practices to achieve.
Emerging: from Coma to Presence begins with a quote attributed to C.S.Lewis, Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn
This matter-of-fact, unsentimental quote kept Angie focused through many trials and errors. Abide is the first chapter and takes the reader through the accident, her experience while comatose and her beginning emergence. Angie's first person account of her coma morphs into a combination of her recall, family member's recollections and medical, emergency room and emergency medical responder's documents as she becomes more present in this world. The schedules, time, and data demanded in this world slowly usurp the hallowed, peaceful existence she knew while comatose. Abide walks us through the earliest days of emerging from a coma and the toll those days take and on family and friends.
Chapters two and three cover the 25 months immediately after the accident. It is during this time that doctors believe a person recovering from a traumatic brain injury will complete their rehabilitation. If you haven't recovered what was lost by then, you aren't going to. In addition to her brain injury, her multiple breaks required surgeries, followed by non-weight bearing for 12 weeks, followed by 12 weeks of physical rehabilitation. The anesthesia used for each surgery not only depresses your consciousness for surgery, it can also depress your mental capabilities post surgery. So, every 3-6 months, she was starting over again. It was during this time her breath prayer, a lifetime raised in the church, and years of study of physical movement and mental agility and focus exercises yielded fruit.
The final two chapters and the epilogue of part one cover her legal battles, the numinous iris, being called to create visually what words could not, and creating the wellness program that makes up part two.
Part two contains the program Learning HOW to Age(TM)?, a concept that is gaining prominence now, but in 2012 was considered experimental. After her art exhibit in 2010, she continued to look for ways to serve. Realizing God had prepared her for 2004, she sifted through her past experiences for wisdom and truth. How had God armed her to recover from such a devastating accident and could other people benefit from her experience? The largest population in this country was the aging baby boomers, and the generation before them had already reached their golden years. But story after story of elder abuse, isolation caused from physical deterioration, and loss of friends and spouses had put this generation in an other than ideal predicament. Not the easiest, most accessible or even open-minded group, this was the population Angie felt called to serve. Using her mother as the model (herself a senior and a widow with chronic health issues), Angie spent the the next two years developing and testing this program. Relying on the structure she had used in the classroom, she developed a program that could be tested and implemented with or without a facilitator. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Angie began videotaping the lessons and posting them on YouTube and made them available through the website learntoage.org. Some of the lessons in the book were adapted to single participants and many newly developed exercises can be found on YouTube and learntoage.org, but the philosophy behind the program and basic goal of the exercises remains the same. There is also a glo
