It was the Sunday before Labor Day, Sept. 1, 1985. Darrell and his brother, Bruce, lake rats who liked to spend their free time boating, were at Kinkaid Lake with friends for the last hoorah of the summer. It was well passed sunset as the group milled around in the parking lot and everyone agreed it was time to point the caravan toward Pinckneyville.

                Darrell jumped in the front seat of a friend’s Ford LTD along with the driver and another passenger. He was seated by the door.

                They hadn’t gone far on Marine Road when a raccoon shot in front of the car. The driver swerved to miss it and hit a tree, damaging the right side of the vehicle. The car was only travelling at 25-miles-per-hour. The driver and passenger were uninjured by the impact.

Darrell wasn’t as fortunate. He lay bleeding and unconscious. Both of his hips were broken, his right arm and wrist too. His head was also bashed in.

“The whole right side of my body was broken,” Darrell said.

Bruce was already home in Pinckneyville when he got the call about the accident. He rushed to tell his mother, Della Keene.

Della was home that evening writing thank you notes to all the friends who attended the funeral or sent cards of condolences for the passing of her husband which occurred a week prior.

“I knew when I saw Bruce’s face that something had happened to Darrell,” she said. “He was struggling to look calm.”

But they didn’t know how wrong things were with him until they arrived at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital in Murphysboro. When Della saw the doctor’s face she knew things were grim. It was the look she’d seen when another doctor gave her the sad news about her husband.

“They told me that Darrell wasn’t likely to make it,” Della said, but added she wasn’t about to accept that news.

“As long as he is still breathing I am not going to give up on him,” Della thought. “Darrell is a fighter.”

She asked that the MedEvac helicopter from Carbondale be brought over to transport her son to St. Louis. It was unavailable. She demanded that the chopper from St. Louis University Hospital be flown in. It was, and soon Darrell was whisked away into the night sky.

Della, Bruce, Karla Nehring (Darrell’s sister) and Don Nehring (Karla’s husband) piled into a car and sped to the city. It was the longest drive of their lives. By the time they arrived, X-rays of Darrell’s head had already been taken. The neurosurgeon didn’t dance around the issue.

“He told me he had never seen one with so much bleeding,” Della said.

Still, the family wasn’t ready to give up on Darrell; nor was he. The heart monitor continued to blip. The medical team performed plastic surgery on him. His arm, leg and hand were reset.

It had been a busy 24 hours and Darrell had been through so much, but now came the dicey critical decision. Surgeons had to enter his brain to remove life-threatening blood clots. They would also have to take out part of the brain. They told Della that there was a 95 percent chance the operation wouldn’t succeed.

“It was the lowest point,” Della said. “The surgery took almost 10 hours. It was touch-and-go. When he came out of surgery he was in a deep coma.”

That he made it through surgery was little cause for celebration for Della, especially when she approached his room and saw two heart doctors hovering around. They were all too familiar to her having been called in after the same hospital’s medical team couldn’t save the life of her husband.

“Those doctors were part of the transplant team,” Della said. “I knew what they were there for.”

But Darrell’s heart kept beating and the transplant team went away. Della moved into the hospital and didn’t leave it for three weeks. Darrell’s progress was little to none and during that time her spirit sank lower with each passing day. Bruce tried to give her hope.

“He said, ‘He’s been through too much and is still here. He’s going to make it.”

The coma lasted for two months. When he awoke from it his first memory was seeing his mother dressed in a “bee or butterfly” costume. It was Halloween, after all.

It was a joyous occasion and one in which humor was shared.

“My mom said that it didn’t surprise her that I head-butted a tree. She was just surprised that I went through a car window to do it,” Darrell said.

One bridge had been crossed but there were many more challenges awaiting Darrell. He was transferred to St. John’s Mercy Hospital to begin three and one-half months of intense rehabilitation. It was then Della realized how far Darrell still had to go.

“I now knew he was going to make, but to what extent,” she asked herself. “He was still mentally asleep. His speech was impaired and he could only say a few words. He had no use of his left side and his right side was wild. They had to strap him down.”

While he couldn’t articulate it, Della sensed that Darrell was thinking the same way. Still, the mother wasn’t about to admit her fear so she channeled her energy into pushing her son.

“We’d dine together at the hospital cafeteria. He didn’t like going there because he didn’t want anyone to see him spill or miss his mouth,” she remembers. “He wanted me to feed him but I refused. It was a battle but that is where I taught him to feed himself.”

After six months of surgeries, therapies and hospital beds Darrell came home to Pinckneyville. An emotionally and physically fatigued Della admits that she needed help with him. It came in droves from countless friends who were eager to have their “Dangerous” back.

“They would come and get him and drag him to ballgames or wherever the gang was,” Della said. “That kind of friendship gave him the drive he needed.”

While family and friends provided the necessary emotional support, the reality was that Darrell needed a lot more therapy. Della had learned about a program, Rebound, in Gallatin, Tenn., that specialized in therapy for those who suffered head injuries. She was told Darrell would have to spend the next two years there so off he went. But, after seven and one-half months Della’s insurance ran out. She couldn’t afford to keep him enrolled any longer. He came home again, but still in need of more therapy.

Della contacted a representative of the Ill. Dept. of Rehabilitation about entering Darrell in an assisted living center in Carbondale. The man had interviewed Darrell before he had gone to Tennessee and, while he agreed to meet with him again, believed it would only be a courtesy call. Darrell was untreatable, he thought.

“When Darrell came down the hall in his wheelchair his eyes lit up. He never thought Darrell could progress as much as he had,” Della said. “Darrell spent two years in the Carbondale program.”

“I could see my progress, I felt I was getting stronger,” Darrell said of the time there.

Della saw it too but knew he still wasn’t out of the woods. Now, however, he was at home and the rehabilitation was up to he and his mother.

“A lot of it was for him to educate himself,” she said. “It wasn’t important that he missed a belt loop. It was important that he tried to dress himself.”

Darrell was now using both a walker and a wheelchair. Della began thinking this was as far as her son would advance.

“I saw him struggle with that walker and thought, ‘This is my kid,’” she said. “It was the first time I really accepted how drastically his life changed forever.”

Darrell, however, still had a few tricks in store. One day, as he entered the living room with the aid of a walker, Della noticed something different about him.

“He was standing straight. I said, ‘Darrell, let me have that walker and see if you can take a few steps without it.”

“Mom said, ‘I promise I won’t let you fall,’” Darrell recalls.

She took the walker and Darrell steadied himself against the wall, mustering up the courage. He took five steps forward. It was an event as joyous as when Darrell took his first steps as a toddler.

“I knew they were the first of many he would take,” she said.

But for all his progress, Darrell still hadn’t crested the hill. Pain covered him like a blanket. It made him withdraw and want to give up at times.

“He didn’t want to eat in the kitchen, but I wasn’t about to serve him,” Della said. “But I also knew that sometimes he was in too much pain so we made a pact. I told him on a day he was hurting too much he could say ‘this is my day’ and he could shut his door and I’d leave him alone.”

It was a two-way agreement. Della would have her day also, when taking care of Darrell was too much for her. She waited until Darrell had taken his first “my day” off. The next day, she cash in on one of hers. She did so with a goal in mind.

“When I took ‘my day’ he was at my door constantly waiting for me to come out of my room,” she said. “He never took another ‘my day’ after that.”

Ten years after doctors told Della that her son wasn’t going to survive the wreck; Darrell was driving and had enrolled at Rend Lake College. Though the courses were difficult for him and he never obtained a degree, Darrell was proud that he had taken his life that far. He moved into a house alone 1998 where he lived for a few years before moving back with his mother.

Today, they share what was once a duplex. The dividing wall had been removed. Each has living quarters on opposite sides of the house. They share the kitchen and living room.

“In my heart and mind I knew I wasn’t going to give up,” Darrell said.

And no one but a handful of doctors gave up on him either.