‘I have a  responsibility’

WJLA reporter Kathy Fowler almost became a statistic at 18.

By Matthew Greenberg

To this day, Kathy Fowler flinches every time she hears an ambulance siren.

The wailing of sirens, the crunching of metal—even the buzzing of mosquitoes—all remind Fowler of the night 20 years ago she and her twin sister spent seven hours in the darkness waiting for help after a horrific car accident left the sisters nearly paralyzed and killed two of their friends.

Fowler, medical correspondent for WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., and a resident of Rockville, confronts the painful memories on a regular basis. She stands in front of teenagers at high schools across Montgomery County and tells them her story in hopes of opening at least one pair of teenage eyes to the fragility of life and the consequences of decisions.

“I dread the assemblies because I hate going back there,” says Fowler, tears welling in her eyes. “You have no idea how long lasting the emotional pain is. But I have a responsibility.”

As a reporter, a parent and a victim, Fowler knows the stats all too well: Motor vehicle accidents are the No. 1 killer of teens in the U.S., according to a recent study in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Add in high speed, a male teen driver and other teens in the car—all factors the study says increase the risk of an accident—and Fowler’s car crash was nearly text book.

Fowler was 18 years old on a hot July night in 1987 when she, her sister, Vicky, and her best friend, Stacey Guy, sat in the back seat of a friend’s Camaro Z28 as it sped down a dark country road outside their hometown of Richwood, Ohio. In the front seat were two local boys—just a group of high school friends enjoying a summer night. The speed of the car—estimated later by police at 85 mph—made Fowler uncomfortable, “but I didn’t want to seem overly dramatic,” she says, so she quietly put on her seatbelt.

Moments later, she saw the driver tense up—then lose control of the vehicle.

Sliding off the road around a sudden curve at a high speed, the car hit a tree and caromed into the woods. The driver and Fowler’s friend Stacey were killed instantly. Fowler, her sister and the front-seat passenger survived. Fowler, bleeding profusely with fractured wrists and punctured organs, managed to climb free of the car. Her sister, slipping in and out of consciousness, was trapped under the bodies of the victims.

Not sure if her sister would live, Fowler tried to crawl back to the road but ran into a fence. With a summer night’s worth of mosquitoes buzzing and biting, she yelled for someone—anyone—to help. But it was almost midnight and dark—and the car had flown far enough from the road to go unnoticed for almost seven hours.

When a passing motorcyclist finally happened onto the scene after sunrise, he took one look at Kathy, the blood and the wreck and promptly threw up. Injured, bleeding, mosquito-bitten and still stuck behind brush and a fence, Fowler had to beg the man to gain enough composure to call for help.

It wasn’t alcohol that caused the accident, says Fowler, or even bad weather. It was the tragic teen cocktail of overestimating skill and underestimating speed. Fowler’s twin sister, Vicky Endicott, now a licensed social worker in Marion, Ohio, specializing in counseling teenagers, calls it “adolescent immortality”—a phrase all parents of teens understand even if they’ve never heard the term.

A 2007 study at the National Institutes of Health on brain development in teenagers found that the portion of the brain that oversees emotions and socialization actively develop during puberty, but the risk/reward decision centers don’t fully mature until a person is about 25.

“Teens feel like bad things won’t ever happen to them.… I felt that way myself,” says Endicott.

Recovery
The sisters spent a year enduring multiple surgeries, long hospital stays and grueling physical therapy. Both had lost so much blood in the hours before they were found that “it was touch-and-go,” Fowler says. Endicott, who endured a fractured neck, nerve damage and head and spinal injuries, is not so circumspect: “My neurosurgeon told me I should be dead, or at least paralyzed from the neck down.

“A lot of people prayed for us,” says Endicott. “I strongly believe that it made all the difference. I think God had a plan for us.”

Indeed, that one horrible night and the ensuing year of pain and recovery—a year Fowler refers to as a “big fog”—have helped bring a clarity of purpose to Fowler’s career.

“If I can give people information that will improve their lives,” Fowler says of her decision to move from Baltimore to become WJLA’s medical correspondent in 2001, “that’s the best job in the world.

“I know what it’s like to be a patient and to face death.... I’ve been really, really sick for a really, really long time,” she says, leaning forward. “It was medicine that saved me.”

While Fowler covers the usual panoply of medical news—health studies, drug approvals and more—stories about paralysis, neurological research and spinal injuries become personal. “I thought I might not walk again,” she says of her recovery. “I look at these stories now and think, ‘That could have been me.… I could have been paralyzed.’”

The memory of her accident also has encouraged Fowler to turn a spotlight on patients’ rights.

“When you’re lying in the hospital and you’re facing death, it gives you a new perspective [on health care]. You have to be your own advocate.” It’s an area she feels strongly about bringing to the airwaves, “because I’ve been at the other end of the system.”

Sharing her story
In the winter of 2006, the Washington, D.C., region suffered a spate of more than three dozen teenage deaths from car accidents. At WJLA, editorial staffers debated how to approach the subject on air. “Many of our staffers are parents,” says WJLA spokesperson Kathryn McGriff. “The losses were becoming personal and frightening.”

Someone remembered Fowler mentioning she’d survived a car accident as a teen, and she was assigned to do a first-person story on the accident. She wasn’t even present at the meeting to object, she says with a laugh.

Soon after Fowler’s story aired, WJLA inaugurated a series of school assemblies in Montgomery County and other area schools aimed at curbing risky teenage driving. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow as more schools ask to be added to the schedule—close to a dozen assemblies will be held this school year, according to McGriff.

“They’re high school students,” Fowler says, describing the usual scene before she takes to the podium. “They’re messing around and chatting with their friends.…” Then Fowler shows the video of her story, describes the wreck, the blood, the surgeries, the pain and how quickly teenage lives can change. Sometimes she takes questions, at least from the students who aren’t crying.

Fowler says she never tells the kids what to do during the assemblies. Instead: “I say, ‘I’m going to tell you what I did, and you can decide if you want to follow that path.’ I want them to see me as a peer.”

And Fowler focuses on what she calls the domino effect of a teen’s risky behavior. “A mistake in half a second can change not only your life, but the lives of everyone around you,” she explains. The emotional burden can sometimes be too much for the survivors and their families, Fowler says. When you risk your life in the car, Fowler tells the students, you’re threatening friends and family with “a terrible emotional prison of pain.”

WJLA anchor Leon Harris moderates the assemblies. “Leon says you can hear a pin drop when I’m done,” says Fowler. And with a laugh of self-deprecation, she adds: “I bring a lot of liveliness to the room.”

Even if she didn’t retell her story on a regular basis, Fowler must constantly contend with the physical and emotional reminders of what she lived through.

“I have rods in my back and pain every day,” she says. “And you can pop pills all day long or you can just live with it.” Fowler has chosen the latter route, supplementing her resolve with yoga, exercise and the occasional visit to an acupuncturist.

Some pains, however, do not dissipate with stretches and yoga poses. Fowler has never shaken the sound of the car hitting the tree—“you never get that sound out of your head”—and enclosed spaces make the otherwise gregarious journalist uncomfortable and quiet. But the most emotional thoughts bubble to the surface whenever Fowler looks at her 8-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter.

“At that age (18), you don’t realize how fleeting life can be. But I was given a second chance and now look at every day with them as a gift. Not a day goes by that I’m not thankful for the time I had with them that day. And I tell them I love them so many times, they probably wish I’d stop,” she says, laughing.

Fowler is unapologetic about how she’s going to handle the day her own children climb behind the wheel of a car; she and her husband, television host and media consultant Marc Silverstein, will issue strict, unflinching rules. “First, they’re going to watch my story.…”

Motioning to her 8-year-old son as he wanders past the living room, Fowler sighs and whispers, “I’ve got eight years of good sleep left.”

Fowler is hoping to avoid the kind of phone call her parents received 20 years ago. Paul and Lana Fowler, who still live in Richwood, Ohio, not far from where the accident took place, have given DVD copies of their daughter’s broadcasted story to the local high school.

“We’re proud of her for doing it,” says her father. “We think it can help.”

But when talk turns to the accident and its painful aftermath, Paul Fowler becomes taciturn. “We’re glad it turned out the way it did,” he offers quickly. “Glad” may be a relative term though, when he’s asked about the moment he thought he might lose both his daughters. Talking about the accident still puts a catch in his throat. “Hopefully, the more we talk about it, the easier it will be, but I’ve been saying that for 20 years.”

In fact, a reluctance to dwell on the accident is something of a Fowler family trademark. “Here’s the thing about Kathy,” says her husband. “She doesn’t talk about it much because that’s not her.

“If it was me, it’d be my trump card for everything,” Silverstein jokes. He doesn’t even remember when Fowler first told him about her brush with death. “We met three years after the accident, and you wouldn’t believe it.…She just got on with life.”

And at those school assemblies, where Fowler says she’s forced to relive “the worst part” of her life?

“She doesn’t like to make it about her,” Silverstein says, “so for her to go out and share this…it takes some doing.”

“The news business is a tough business and she’s done very well,” adds Silverstein, himself a former TV reporter. But the pressure of television news is such that “every once in a while, you have to ask yourself, ‘Am I doing it? Am I making a difference?’ Kathy is.”

Fowler believes she has a responsibility to speak up.

“Why did I live and Stacey didn’t? Because a few minutes before [the accident] I made a choice that totally changed my life.” She put on her seatbelt. “When you get so close to death, you look at life as a gift....I feel a responsibility to do something with the gift that I got.”

She is also compelled to honor her friend; Fowler was as close to Stacey’s family as she was to her own parents and sister.

“Kathy lost her best friend,” says her sister. “They were so close and did everything together. It took me longer to heal physically than Kathy, [but] I think it might have been more difficult on Kathy emotionally.”

“Stacey always wanted to help kids; she wanted to be a therapist,” Fowler says, tears in her eyes as she recalls her friend’s thwarted dreams. “Well, Stacey is saving lives now. She’s doing what she wanted to do.”

Matthew Greenberg is a writer and editor. He lives in Silver Spring.