Accident victim’s remarkable recovery

OAKLAND — The last time Greg Lowrie could string sentences together and move his legs, he was riding his bicycle to a West Oakland clinic from the RV he shares with his mother behind a tall steel gate in the Lower Bottoms.

At a nearby intersection, he was struck by a pickup truck driver. As he lay unconscious, people on the street took his wallet and the wallet of the 80-year-old driver, and ran off.

A remarkable tale has sprouted from the lows of that day two months ago in January, when he came to Highland Hospital with severe head trauma and little hope of surviving.

Three weeks ago, he awoke from a coma, his mother, Maggie Lowrie, said. On Thursday, he spoke for the first time since the accident.

He knew his name. His age: 25. And he had been listening to his mom speak for weeks, asking him to say hello when he could.

Maggie Lowrie flashed a smile on Friday at the East Oakland hospital as she recalled getting off an elevator a day earlier. Excited nurses called her into her son’s room.

“He said, ’Hi, mom.’” Until then, “I wasn’t sure he knew who I was,” she said.

His ordeal began Jan. 13 when Greg Lowrie was struck by a pickup truck driver at Adeline and 8th streets, not far from his RV at Pine and 10th streets. People who were nearby walked up and took his wallet as he lay suffering from a bad head injury.

The theft case is still open and no one has been arrested, Officer Frank Bonifacio said this week. The truck driver, who remained at the scene, was not arrested.

Lowrie was rushed to Highland Hospital, where he scored a 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, used to measure a person’s level of consciousness.

“To put that in perspective, it’s as low as you can get,” said Gregory Victorino, the hospital’s chief of trauma services. “It’s like a rock. A rock would have a GCS of 3.

“Those first couple of days to weeks, I wasn’t sure he was going to make it.”

The head wound was just one issue. Lowrie also had a cervical spine fracture, his spleen was bleeding, and his pelvis was fractured, Victorino said.

To complicate matters, Lowrie was born with a heart defect. Surgically repairing his pelvis was too risky, and the bone is healing on its own for now, Victorino said.