by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

February 12, 2009

It happened last Sept. 30 at the start of the Rosh Hashana holiday. Essex County Freeholder Pat Sebold was carrying food in her daughter Risa’s home in Livingston when she fell, seemingly without explanation.

“Apparently without my realizing it, I became unconscious. I’m not quite sure what I did. No one was home except the dog,” Sebold recalled.

Sebold’s three grandchildren were in school and her son-in-law was at work.

“I either fell down the steps to the family room or collapsed on the floor,” she said. “I became unconscious and hit my brain on the right side of my head.”

When Risa arrived home 15 minutes later, said Sebold, “she found me lying in a pool of blood which had come through my right ear.”

Sebold was rushed to the trauma unit at Morristown Memorial Hospital, where she spent the next four weeks.

That stay was only the beginning of a traumatic and even life-threatening medical odyssey for a woman active both in local politics and Jewish communal and philanthropic affairs.

Although she cannot remember much of her time in the hospital, she does recall being “hooked up to all kinds of tubes. Then, on day eight, I got pneumonia.”

Sebold said, “My family tells me I was talking to them, but not necessarily making any sense. The doctors told my family they did not expect me to live.”

They were wrong.

After four weeks, she was transferred to the Kessler Rehabilitation Center in West Orange. “I was apparently very heavily sedated when I got there. But I came to on day two or day three. I was at Kessler for about five weeks, with speech therapy and occupational therapy and physical therapy as soon as they could get me out of bed. For the first part, my leg was paralyzed.”

After her five-week stint at Kessler she was moved again, to the Inglemoor Care Center in her hometown of Livingston. “I was in the rehab area there for four weeks,” she said.

After returning home, Sebold was under nursing care for two weeks. Three days after the nurse left in late January, Sebold fell again.

“I was in the kitchen and all of a sudden there was a thud and I was unconscious on the floor in a pool of blood.”

This time, she cut the whole area above her right eye. Her husband, Burt, and daughter rushed her to Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston. “I was stitched up and put on the cardiac floor for five days,” she said. “They put me under a lot of tests and found that I had low blood pressure that fluctuated easily. That’s what they think made me black out.”

Now, many painful weeks later, Sebold is struggling to regain her full strength and full life as an active woman. She moves about with the aid of a walker and visits Kessler for outpatient rehab three times a week.

“Her accident was horrible, just horrible,” said Merle Kalishman, chair of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ’s Community Relations Committee and a friend since they were teenage waitresses together at the NJ YM-YWHA Camp in Milford, Pa.

Since then, she said, “our paths keep crossing, whether it is politics or the CRC or the Jersey Y Camp or Temple B’nai Abraham” in Livingston, serving together on campaigns and causes for some 50 years. Sebold is a member of the UJC and CRC boards.

‘I was fighting’

Now, Sebold said, she is “determined to resume my normal life, which I had to give up totally. I had never been sick like this before in my life.”

She is struggling to learn about the months she missed.

The accident “affected my memory a lot at the beginning, but I’d say my brain is about 95 percent recovered,” said Sebold. “For a long time I didn’t read or watch TV. But since I got home I’ve read all the Jewish Newses and West Essex Tribunes from January. I’ve caught up on my reading, and I watch CNN.”

She said she is ready to reenter her busy and committed life. “It has been a nightmare. No one expected this. I want to go back to my life where it was before I got sick. Up until this week, I was too tired and not able to do anything. I really am looking forward to resuming my life — going places with my family and doing things in terms of my active life.”

High on Sebold’s agenda are the duties of her elected office and her volunteer work in the Jewish community.

“It has been hard being so sick, but now I look forward to freeholder meetings, and this was the first time in about 15 years that I didn’t show up to make phone calls on Super Sunday,” the annual fund-raiser for UJC MetroWest NJ, held in December.

“A lot of doctors have said they are amazed that I have recovered as well as I have. I was fighting the whole time,” she said.

Kalishman said she is happy to have Sebold back in action.

“It is wonderful to have a friend for over 50 years,” she said. “It is a gift you don’t always get in a lifetime.”

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