Douglas Segal Shares His Wife’s Recovery Story in Recently Released Memoir “Struck”
By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief
“Daddy, it’s me … Mommy was just in a car accident.”
It’s the call that no husband, no father, no person in the world ever wants to get. But this is the call that Doug Segal received from his daughter, Alyce, one morning that would change the course of their life as they knew it.
Doug’s wife Susan was hit, quite literally, by a bus. She was driving Alyce to school when a truck rolled onto Hollywood Boulevard, causing a bus to swerve into oncoming traffic, hitting Susan’s BMW.
Alyce miraculously walked away with some bruises and scrapes—Susan would not be so lucky. She suffered 12 broken ribs, several punctures in her lungs with one lung partially collapsed, brain bleeds in three areas and, worst of all, a broken neck.
But, meeting with Doug and Susan in their Alphabet Streets home on a sunny Thursday afternoon, one would have no idea the full extent of what the couple faced together.
“Susan may have been crushed by the bus, but her zest for life, her sense of humor and her positivity was not,” Doug said with a smile, with Susan nodding in agreement next to him.
In fact, Doug took his experience, helping his wife on her journey back to health, and turned it into a memoir, “Struck.” The book is a combination of Doug’s reflections, interspersed with real-time emails that he had sent out to update his family and friends about Susan’s nearly yearlong journey from ICU to the hospital to rehab and, finally, back home.
“The response I got from sending the emails out was so beautiful—and so many people still to this day say, ‘I saved every one of those emails, I have a folder of every one of those emails,’” Doug shared.
Those responses inspired him to publish the updates in a book.
“It was that kind of feedback that made me, not just want to share the story of Susan’s resilience and unbelievable recovery and the miracle of it all, but to help others because I think a lot of it is universal—we all have our stuff,” he explained.
He now refers to the emails as cathartic, almost like therapy, which helped him through the process of nursing Susan back to health.
For Susan, the emails were revealing—she was, at first, embarrassed at the idea of them being shared. Since Doug had sent out the majority when she was recovering in the hospital, she did not have a chance to read them until after the fact.
“I was nervous how I would be perceived and I was embarrassed,” she shared. “I think that it’s so revealing that I was very shook. Then I called people and I asked, ‘Should I be shook?’ And people were crying and applauding and saying how they saved them.”
Susan said these affirmations changed her mind and she now thinks of them as what she described as the “most beautiful thing in the entire world.”
“I credit Susan for being brave and allowing everybody to know every intimate detail of our life at that time and to say this is why we’re doing this: to really be transparent to really show the experience as openly as possible,” Doug explained.
The book, with Doug’s thorough email updates and additional reflections, is often raw. He delves into not only her recovery process, but also how it relates to their marriage and the bigger picture.
The two are nearly six years out from the accident and celebrating 29 years of marriage.
“We were pretty lucky to begin with,” Susan shared. “We had a lot of things in common and we’ve had a pretty good time, all things considered, except apparently when I loaded the dishwasher incorrectly.”
“Which she still does,” Doug interjected with a laugh.
“But I think, for the most part, we’re pretty normal, pretty average, and this journey—it’s so kooky—but how lucky we are that we get to do this together,” Susan concluded.
The two live with Alyce, now a senior at Palisades Charter High School, and a rescue dog, Bruce. Their son, Michael, is away at college.
With the journey, for the most part, in the rear-view mirror, Doug and Susan reflected on what was the hardest part of the process for each of them.
Doug, with a production background, is used to juggling moving parts to make something work. But when it came to Susan’s recovery, it was his biggest project yet.
“It’s not just managing it because I think about the productions that I’ve been in, I’ve managed a lot of big productions,” Doug explained. “It’s that the stakes of this production were so much higher.”
Susan shared that the hardest part for her is the now—where taking care of her health is a full-time job.
The two have always relied heavily on community—whether that is in Hollywood, where they lived at the time of the accident, or Pacific Palisades, where they have lived for going on four years.
“Don’t go through it alone,” Doug offered for anyone facing a crisis. “Wherever that community comes from, try to find it, reach out. The support is so critical—whether that’s church or synagogue or neighborhood groups or friend groups or your book club, whatever it is—don’t just sit and silently suffer.”
Anyone who is interested in learning more abut the Segals’ story is invited to see them speak at Palisades Branch Library on Wednesday, Oct. 24, at 6:30 p.m.
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