Pivirotto triumphs over accident
By Rachel Schwartz
There was one student especially excited to start this school year - not because he was a freshman or had traveled abroad over the summer, but because few people expected him to return to Santa Clara as soon as he did.
Junior Braden Pivirotto was critically injured last December after falling asleep behind the wheel of his jeep while returning from a snowboarding trip to Tahoe. The car crashed head-on into a pine tree, seriously injuring Pivirotto and breaking several of passenger Eric Hawkins-Flasker's bones.
Pivirotto only was given a 15 percent chance of survival. Along with a fractured ankle and a dislocated hip, he suffered a traumatic brain injury. He was in a coma for 18 days in the intensive care unit of Sutter Roseville Medical Center.
The outpouring of support for Pivirotto from his fellow students was evident almost immediately. Within hours of his accident, messages of prayers and best wishes began to appear on the former Dunne Hall community facilitator's Facebook and continued for months after, their numbers in the hundreds. Pivirotto keeps a printout of the messages in a scrapbook he made about the accident and his recovery.
"Many of my friends and residents came to the hospital," Pivirotto said. "Even at times when I couldn't even open my eyes, they came and supported me."
Pivirotto's mother Gayle Purdy stayed with her son while he was in Roseville and family and friends joined her at his bedside over the holidays.
"Everyone at Santa Clara was so helpful and so supportive that it was really a big bonus for our family," Purdy said.
Since the accident, memory has remained a major challenge. Pivirotto does not remember anything from two to three months on either side of the accident.
"When I first came out of my coma, I didn't know who I was, I didn't know my family," he said. "I needed to relearn how to eat and drink again."
A major part of Pivirotto's recovery was returning to academics. He had been a straight-A student before the accident and was eager to continue his studies. Well before anyone expected, he began taking classes last spring at Diablo Valley College near his home in Pleasanton.
He took an anthropology class, but did not pass. It was the competition with his sister, Sharla, which spurred him onward to earn a B in a summer psychology course.
"I'm a competitive person so competition with my sister made me work even harder," Pivirotto said.
Pivirotto says the classes at DVC gave him confidence to come back to Santa Clara in the fall; he is currently taking an English and drama class.
"If I had just jumped back into Santa Clara cold, then that timidness I had would have really overwhelmed me and I would have listened to the urges to drop these classes and go into trade school or something like that," Pivirotto said.
Pivirotto was active in the Santa Clara community before his accident as a member of the Sigma Pi fraternity and as a CF.
He has resumed some fraternity activities and hopes to be a CF again next year.
On Dec. 30, 2005, Pivirotto was transferred from Sutter to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, where he began his rehabilitation. Doctors expected Pivirotto to stay for at least three months, but he was discharged after only 28 days. Pivirotto continued to attend therapy at Valley Medical Center until early April.
Pivirotto credits his Sigma Pi brothers for helping him through his rehabilitation. "My fraternity has been super helpful," Pivirotto said. "When I was first injured many of them came to the hospital and supported me."
During his outpatient therapy at Valley Medical Center, instead of letting him drive, Sigma Pi brothers would pick him up from the hospital and let him stay at the fraternity house.
In June, Pivirotto went back to Roseville to visit the doctors and nurses that had cared for him.
"It just made their day to see him back on his feet, from what they had seen when he first came in, that was really touching," Purdy said.
Junior Brent Haase, Pivirotto's big brother in Sigma Pi, was snowboarding with him the day of the accident. Haase spent time with Pivirotto during his recovery at Valley Medical Center.
"Just the way his mentality is, if you tell him he can't do something, he'll try really hard to do it to prove you wrong," Haase said. "It's really cool to see him almost back to where he was."
Although he wishes he were still living on campus, at his parents' suggestion Pivirotto lives with grandparents in Santa Clara and commutes to school for classes.
"It's super inconvenient," Pivirotto said. "It takes a little over 10 minutes to go one way, so if I take several trips between school and my grandparents, I can spend well over an hour in the car, especially considering my situation where I have a really bad memory now."
As part of his continued physical therapy Pivirotto works out in the Malley Fitness and Recreation Center in between classes.
"It's killer being so debilitated now after I was a very, very physical athlete," Pivirotto said.
Pivirotto played soccer, volleyball and ran track before the accident and finds his physical limitations to be one of the most frustrating parts of his recovery.
He will not be able to run for at least another year and can no longer play volleyball or soccer to prevent another head injury.
Pivirotto has between one and two years left in his recovery and he never expects to be 100 percent, he said. However, he does not let that hold him back.
"Life could be worse, I could be missing my legs," he said.
Pivirotto said he realizes that for as much wrong happened the day of his accident, it could have been much worse. When his car went off the road, a truck driver saw the accident and notified police and paramedics. A paramedic and an EMT were driving behind Pivirotto when the accident happened and were able to act as first responders.
Even though he still has many hurdles he continues to face, Pivirotto says he will meet any challenge.
"I don't let anything hold me back; I'm very determined."
Contact Rachel Schwartz at (408) 554-4546 or rschwartz@scu.edu.