Excerpts from the chicagotribune.com:

Aurora Fire Capt. Brandon Matson said firefighters and paramedics go on hundreds of emergency calls a year, but rarely do they hear back from the people they’ve taken to the hospital. So firefighters at Station 8 were surprised when they received a request from Aurora residents Lisa and Ted Yee, who wanted to bring them dinner to celebrate Lisa’s recovery from a crash a decade ago that left her with traumatic brain injury.

On Sept. 10, 2008, Lisa Yee was a passenger in a vehicle that was T-boned at Asbury Drive and New York Street in Aurora. Firefighters and paramedics from Station 8 responded to the crash, transporting her to Rush Copley Medical Center. She was later flown by helicopter to Loyola Medical Center in Maywood.

Doctors had trouble explaining why Yee was in a coma for five days, telling her husband Ted that she should be awake, until later realizing it was due to traumatic brain injury that left her with epilepsy. When she awoke from the coma, she had lost about five years of memories.

She still doesn’t remember the accident happening and gets choked up each time she hears about it, adding that she thinks her brain blocks out the thought of it. With a fractured pelvis, four broken ribs, a lacerated liver, bruised lung and four cracked teeth, she stayed at Loyola for two months and later spent years in extensive physical therapy and rehab.

Now, she is a certified yoga instructor and volunteers teaching yoga at a shelter for veterans and also at Mutual Ground, a women’s shelter in Aurora.

Ted Yee told Matson the names of the people who helped Lisa, and Matson tracked down some of the retired ones, as well as firefighters who now work at other stations, and gathered them for dinner Monday.

“It means a lot to us,” Matson said. “I’ve met patients after the fact and it’s nice to see what happens and see a good outcome. We have all these calls, but sometimes you never know what happens after the fact.”

Until 2015, Lisa Yee had multiple seizures which Aurora paramedics responded to as well. Lisa Yee also received help from doctors at Northwestern Hospital who got her on some neurological drugs, and she has been seizure free for two and a half years.

“In this journey, we learned its crummy circumstances, but every time we got to a bad point, we got a break,” Ted Yee said. “We heard a nugget of information, there was a supporter who came out of nowhere, there was a professional who did their job. It just makes you grateful that as crappy as the situation is, we actually wound up being pretty darn lucky and we wanted to say thanks on this 10th anniversary.”

Tags: Aurora Fire Capt. Brandon Matson, Aurora Fire Department, patient thanks firefighters for saving her life