By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer
Harvey Desgrosseilliers has had to relearn some daily tasks most people take for granted.

MINOT – Harvey Desgrosseilliers is walking again, his legs steady.

He can see, a bit.

He can do laundry and cook lunch, feeling his way over dials highlighted with bright, textured paste.

His humor? Intact. The other day Rachel, his wife, discovered he’d put dirty dishes back in the cupboard. He thought they were clean.

“She said, C’mere,’ and slapped me around a bit,” said Harvey, a tall man with thick, white hair and a near-permanent smile.

Fifteen months ago, Harvey fell down the stairs in his house, in the middle of the night, knocking his head into a metal door. Afterward, he couldn’t see. Couldn’t walk. He didn’t remember a thing, except Rachel.

A well-known local businessman – the Desgrosseilliers ran the Gooseberry Barn in Auburn for 20 years – he couldn’t so much as tie his shoes.

He’d had a stroke, causing severe brain injury and almost total loss of sight. After months of rehab and hospital stays, Harvey recovered enough to come home. He spent nine weeks at the Eastern Blind Rehabilitation Center in West Haven, Conn., this spring. The Veterans’ Administration hospital serves former servicemen from all over the East Coast.

There were classes everyday, all day long. How to use the telephone. How to play cards. How to sign his name.

He came home in June.

“It was great; it was unreal,” said Harvey.

They sent him home with extra-long oven mitts, a talking blood pressure cuff and a telescope to see across the street before crossing.

They sent him home able to read four lines down on an eye chart, using a “sweet spot” in his left eye. Before, he was stuck on the big E.

“I think it’s nothing less than a miracle,” said Rachel. “I have my husband; his mind is there. He’s just as crazy as he was before.”

Struggle begins

The night of April 15, 2005, Harvey was bundled up from cataract surgery. Rachel led him around the house. After she settled them both in bed he got up while she slept, and pitched down the stairs.

That night began their struggle. Rachel turned down every recommendation to put her now 71-year-old husband in a nursing home. Harvey’s initial treatment was at Maine Medical Center, then the New England Rehabilitation Center of Portland and finally, the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Massachusetts.

She’s still incensed over the lack of brain injury care in Maine, the hurdles. With injured soldiers returning, she believes it’ll only get worse. Rachel wants to put together a brain injury symposium and present something to the congressional delegation.

Harvey says repeatedly he’d just like to make one person’s recovery easier than his own.

Because of the lingering effects of injury, she tries to keep him busy. It’s good for the brain.

Rachel is executive director of Museum L-A. She calls him a couple times during the day from work, asking, “Harvey, have you….”

He has a standing Tuesday outing with a grade-school friend. He’s started sketching with charcoal and hopes to take lessons.

He’ll join a ski program for the blind in the winter.

Harvey walks around now with a cane in a leather case dangling off his belt. He also has sunglasses to keep off the glare. Rachel has rearranged their house, turning a spare room into his walk-in closet and placing baskets around the house. He can empty his pockets, put anything in a basket, and know where to find it.

She closes a gate at the top of the stairs at night, just in case.

“I feel like we’re starting the next phase now, toward a little normalcy,” she said. “They told me now I’m the one who needs to back off. It’s hard. For a year and a half I’ve been right behind him.”

Harvey was a passionate arborist with his own business before the fall. He says – out of Rachel’s earshot – that he hasn’t ruled out going back into the woods someday.

“I think we can do anything we want to do. You’re going to make mistakes,” he said. “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not doing anything.”

The couple has been married almost 21 years. Preparing to go off to the intense school in Connecticut, they sat down and worked out a list of goals. Things like playing card games.

The very last in a list of 30: “How to become more handsome than I am.”

He said it as a joke. Rachel wrote it down anyway.

“I wanted them to see his sense of humor. They got such a kick out that,” she said.

Besides, it worked.

He was more rested when he returned, Rachel said. “He looked to me like he was more beautiful than ever. It was such an amazing thing to get him back.”

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