For a profile in courage, a new challenge
After a brain aneurysm paralyzed her body and silenced her voice, a 14-year-old Gloucester County farm girl named Theresa imagined herself screaming.
After a brain aneurysm paralyzed her body and silenced her voice, a 14-year-old Gloucester County farm girl named Theresa imagined herself screaming.
I'm here.
It's me.
I'm still the old Theresa.
"I had no way of communicating," Theresa Gattuso O'Connor writes in her uplifting memoir, A Whisper From Within: My Life, My Terms. It became available in September on online book sites.
And the self-published author, 44, has plenty to say on the page and in person.
"I was angry with God at first," Gattuso O'Connor declares in a soft, but emphatic, voice. "But there was a purpose in what happened to me, and [part] of that purpose was to write this book."
I'm in the kitchen of the gracious Mickleton home she shares with her husband and high school sweetheart, Joe O'Connor, and their daughter, Samantha, 11. About whom she can't say enough, in print or conversation.
"I've been blessed in so many ways," she says.
The author uses a walker and needs assistance with some tasks.
She also falls frequently, "but I don't let that stop me," she says.
And last year, Gattuso O'Connor underwent a double mastectomy. She included the revelation at the conclusion of A Whisper From Within.
"I worry about breast cancer every day," she tells me. "The reconstruction isn't working, and I'm always in discomfort.
"I needed to write the book to show Samantha that limitations can be overcome," she says, adding that the cancer "is another life lesson to share."
An identical twin, Gattuso O'Connor grew up in a big, close-knit, devoutly Catholic family on a 73-acre vegetable farm in Swedesboro.
In 1986, while visiting an older sister on Maryland's Eastern Shore, the author was stricken with a severe headache and nausea, lost consciousness, and was hospitalized.
Weeks later, as Gattuso O'Connor began to emerge from a deep coma, "all I wanted to do was close my eyes and sleep, to go to a place in my mind where I would wake up and all of this would be a dream," she writes.
"But . . . I knew something terrible had happened."
Written in a conversational style and with admirable candor, the book movingly describes her slow and partial recovery.
Brisk chapter titles such as "Learning to Eat Again" attest to the distance she traveled by the time she was ready to enter Kingsway Regional High School as a junior in 1988.
And later chapters, including "God Tested Me to See How Much I Could Handle" and "Don't Feel Sorry for Me," speak volumes about her deep faith and fierce determination.
"I have two choices," Gattuso O'Connor says. "Give up, or do the best I can."
She writes that while family and friends have been loving, some people can be clueless and even cruel.
At one local fitness center, she was told, "You don't belong here," and directed to leave.
So she joined another gym. "I want to prove them wrong," Gattuso O'Connor says with a laugh.
"People told her she wouldn't get married, or have a kid, or drive, or work, and she did," says Lynne Mason, a certified driver-rehabilitation instructor with the MossRehab facility in Woodbury.
"She keeps pushing the boundaries," adds Mason, who taught Gattuso O'Connor to drive. "That's one of the things I love about her."
"Amazingly strong, mentally and physically," is how Joe O'Connor describes his wife of 22 years.
"She had lived a normal, walking life, and then the whole structure changed," adds O'Connor, 43, who owns a company that provides corporate IT and audiovisual services.
"But she persevered, one challenge after another," he says. "She fights."
Because of the cancer, Gattuso O'Connor has taken a break from her social work studies at Rowan College of Gloucester County.
"I'm going back when I get my breast cancer under control," she says.
The author also is enjoying the occasional autograph request, most recently at the gym.
"It was raining, and this man came up to me with my book in a plastic bag," Gattuso O'Connor recalls.
"He said, 'Do you realize that you inspire me?' "
Her heart leaped.
"To help another," she says, "is an overwhelming feeling."
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