ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606110007
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV_17 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
Doctors never expected Gail Sanders Langley to survive the head-on car crash. So at first they just wrapped her wounds in gauze and waited.
Twelve hours. Twenty-four hours. Three days. A week. Twenty-seven days. Langley was alive.
More than a year after her May 18, 1995 accident, Langley, 54, is still beating the odds. She has pulled through several operations, including one in which her left leg was amputated. She has begun responding to her three children and husband. Her movements are slight - a squeeze of a hand, a facial grimace, a turn of the head.
While the victories are small, they are victories nonetheless.
For the Langley family, life is no longer marked by monumental events. Faith and patience have guided the past year. And each day is measured by the progress of Gail Langley's condition.
"I never thought I'd survive this," said 31-year-old Tracy Langley about her mother. "But it has made us stronger. Maybe it's a strength I didn't want. But it's made us humble and sympathetic to others' pain. ... I listen harder to her now than I ever did in my life."
The Langley family had always been close. Telephone conversations always ended with an "I love you." The three siblings never missed a chance to get together with their parents.
"Mom was the strongest link in the family," said 30-year-old Nancy Langley. "When this happened, it was that minute of watching the strongest link break in front of you."
Now, the siblings find strength in each other and their father. Where one falters, the other supports.
"To be left in stalemate for a year is very tough," said Jimmy Langley, Tracy and Nancy's 25-year-old brother. "It's like living it over again and again."
The night of the accident, Gail Langley was taking her 78-year-old mother home to Clarkesville, Ga., after a visit in Vinton. She had made the trip many times before.
Langley had rented a larger car with dual airbags. She and her mother were buckled in.
But on this night, the two were victims of something they could not control. Fifteen miles from their destination, an oncoming pickup truck crossed into their lane. The driver of the truck and Langley's mother, Bertha Sanders, were killed instantly. Langley survived, but barely.
Keith Canup said it was one of the worst accidents he has worked in his five years as a trooper with George State Police. The 80-year-old driver, who had a blood-alcohol level of .19 percent, was using a recent DUI ticket as his driver's license, Canup said.
The impact carried such force that it twisted Langley's brain, bored a hole in her upper arm the size of a fist and left her in a vegetative state. She was given a 10 percent chance of survival.
"I now know there is something worse than death, and I think my family is going through it now," said Gail Langley's husband, Jimmy Langley Sr. The couple has been married for 32 years.
As a dispatcher for the Vinton Police Department and a former member of the town's rescue squad, Nancy Langley had seen car wrecks before. Her sister, Tracy, is a detective in the violent crimes unit of the Richmond Police Department. But nothing prepared them for what happened to their mother.
"When you see it happen to another family, you always say, `Thank God it's not my family,''' Tracy Langley said. "It's one way to remove yourself from the situation. But when it touched my own family, there was no way of walking away from it. The hardest thing for me was that I had no control over this. All I could do was just sit and wait."
The first thing Nancy Langley did when she saw her mother was search for something that looked recognizable. But her mother's body was so swollen, she had to search for two days.
"I remember walking ... in and looking at something that literally made your heart stop," Langley said. "She was inhuman looking." She finally found the familiar in the curve of her mother's eyebrow, the angle of her nose and the shape of her big toe.
The tangible has become inspiration for Gail Langley's children: touching their mother's hair, caressing her hand. They talk to her, even though she cannot answer.
"She fights as hard as she does to hang on; we owe it to her to fight just as hard," Nancy Langley said. "There are times we're in the room with her and the connection is so close. It's like reaching out across a creek and you're inches away from jerking her back to reality."
But reality remains a hospital room in Richmond. Tracy visits her mother every day. Nancy, her brother and father plan their weeks around trips to the hospital. The pain doesn't dull; rather it gets manageable.
"Sometimes the hardest thing to understand," Nancy Langley said, "is that life will go on."
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