Norval Fletcher has no memory of the entire month of September 2006, although his mother, Edrice, says the 18-year-old U.S. Marine joked with hospital visitors three weeks after the car in which he was a passenger slammed into a tree.  Fletcher, a warehouse clerk at Paris Island near Beaufort, S.C., was critically injured.  The driver, a friend and fellow Marine, died instantly.  Fletcher had a lacerated liver, bruised lung and broken left leg.  But his most severe injury was to his brain.

His first memory, nearly a month after his accident, is of being flown to Willow Grove Air Reserve Station on the first leg of his transfer from Memorial Hospital in Savannah, Ga., to Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital.  "I woke up and didn't know where I was or where I was going," says Fletcher, who moved with his family to Philadelphia just four years ago.

During his next three weeks as an inpatient in the Brain Injury Program, therapists worked hard to get him back on his feet while helping him sort out jumbled memories. "Physical therapy has been hard, but not nearly as hard as basic training in the Marines," laughs Fletcher, whose goal is to return to the Marines and train as a computer technician or aircraft mechanic.

 "I like to work with my hands," says U.S. Marine Norval Fletcher, as he builds a small wooden wagon in the new Brain Injury Unit gym, helped by therapist George Keiser.  Fletcher next attended the Day Treatment Program as an oupatient, where his goal is to return to active duty. 

2006 Annual Report