Brooke Ellison Overcoming Challenges for New York

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Overcoming Adversity as a Rallying Cry By MARCELLE S. FISCHLER. Sunday, Dec. 4, 2005 BROOKE ELLISON'S message beat a familiar theme: hope in the face of adversity, persistence when confronted with challenge. ''The events in my life have been fairly unique and have taught me many things about the nature of difficulty and people's ability to overcome it,'' Ms. Ellison said on a recent morning. Sitting in a wheelchair, wearing a lavender sweater with a matching afghan covering her lap, Ms. Ellison, 27, breathed through a respirator and read in a raspy voice from a speech mounted on a music stand. Kneeling beside her, Ms. Ellison's mother, Jean, held a microphone to her mouth. ''What marks me as different from others is the very thing that marks me as the same as others,'' Ms. Ellison said. The chicken-soup-for-the-soul speech, at a pancake breakfast at the Polish Hall in Riverhead, highlighted Ms. Ellison's first public appearance since announcing in October on her Web site, www.brookeellison.com, that she would run for the State Senate next year, against the two-term Senator John J. Flanagan, a Republican from East Northport. ''My candidacy is one based on the idea that people from diverse backgrounds and with unique circumstances can all make a difference, and with that bring enlightenment and encouragement to others,'' she said. The power of hope is propelling Ms. Ellison, a Democrat, into the political sphere, her latest commitment in a journey that continues to beat the odds and defies all bounds. On Sept. 4, 1990, Ms. Ellison was hit by a car on her way home from her first day in seventh grade at Robert C. Murphy Junior High School in Stony Brook. She lapsed into a coma. If she survived, the likelihood was slim that she would have any cognitive function. But when she awoke after 36 hours, paralyzed from the neck down, one of her first questions was whether she would ''be left back'' at school. Until that day Ms. Ellison's life had been like that of many other children. She played baseball and soccer and took karate lessons. She was a dancer and a cellist and sang in the church choir. After six weeks in the hospital and eight months at a rehabilitation center, Ms. Ellison returned to school, although in a wheelchair and on a respirator that gave her 13 breaths a minute but not the ability to sigh or take a deep breath. She went to Harvard, earning an undergraduate degree with honors in cognitive neuroscience, a combination of biology and psychology, and a master's in public policy. ''In 1990 we were living in a time when people in situations like my own were not necessarily embraced by society and the path towards understanding was only beginning to be forged,'' said Ms. Ellison, who has emerged as a national spokeswoman for the disabled. She said she wanted to counteract misconceptions. ''I didn't want people to focus on what I had lost in my life, but rather on what I still had in my life,'' said Ms. Ellison, who uses a tongue-touch keypad to operate her wheelchair and a voiceactivated computer to write. "Thankfully my accident did not rob me of my ability to think, reason or remain a vital part of society. My body would not respond, but my mind and my heart were just the same as they had always been.'' Ms. Ellison's odyssey inspired Christopher Reeve to make a movie about her life, based on the memoir ''Miracles Happen: One Mother, One Daughter, One Journey'' (Hyperion, 2002), which she wrote with her mother. A&E; showed it just weeks after Mr. Reeve's death in October 2004. Ms. Ellison spends much of her time giving motivational speeches. She is temporarily putting aside studies toward a Ph.D. in political psychology at Stony Brook University to pursue the Senate seat, she said. While she has been urging state financing of stem-cell research, she insisted she is not a one-issue candidate. Ms. Ellison said she wants to help overcome local obstacles in housing, employment and education as well as tackle increasing traffic and transportation problems and issues like dwindling open space. ''Hope can sometimes be elusive, and we have to encourage it when we see that it has been lost,'' said Ms. Ellison, who wrote her senior honors thesis at Harvard on the role that hope plays in overcoming obstacles. ''Those in positions to make decisions for our world and society as a whole have to do it with a focus on growing ways to foster hope, maximize potential, provide opportunity and alleviate difficulty, because those serve in the most profound ways to improve the world that we all share.'' Ms. Ellison said she hoped to invigorate the Senate with ''a refreshing change.'' But the challenges of being a quadriplegic can be daunting. It takes four hours for Ms. Ellison just to get dressed. She cannot do it alone. Jean Ellison, whose first -- and last -- day as a special education teacher coincided with her daughter's accident, said she would continue to serve as Ms. Ellison's right hand. ''I am her arms and her legs and she is the mind,'' said Mrs. Ellison, who, as her round-the-clock nurse, accompanied her daughter back to junior high and high school and lived with her in dormitory suites outfitted by Harvard technicians with a hospital bed, a hydraulic lift and an electronic door opener. Ms. Ellison said she was laying the groundwork for a campaign, meeting as many people as she could and ''learning what their lives are like.'' She declined to discuss how much her grass-roots effort had raised. After she makes an official announcement early next year, Ms. Ellison said, she will methodically lay out her campaign initiatives and preliminary policy plans. ''It has been directly through the challenges that I have faced that I have come to the realization that we all have a responsibility to the betterment of people's lives, that we all can contribute something,'' Ms. Ellison said. ''That's why I am involved in politics. It is so very important and so very necessary.'' Darren Johnson, a spokesman for the Integrity Party, which was formed last year and was the first to endorse Ms. Ellison, called her ''the ultimate underdog.'' ''She has already had stardom, had fame, and working in Suffolk County politics, in state politics, would be small potatoes for her,'' Mr. Johnson said. ''She is above the fray.'' Mr. Johnson compared her political future to that of Representative Carolyn McCarthy as ''someone who turned something tragic into something that is very altruistic for a lot of people.'' Ms. McCarthy was first elected in 1994 while pushing for a ban on assault weapons after her husband was killed and her son was injured in the Long Island Rail Road shootings. ''This is a start,'' Mr. Johnson said, speaking of Ms. Ellison. ''Maybe Congress or the U.S. Senate is down the road for her.''