If terrorists had invaded the Upper East Side and done this to several thousand people at once, perhaps we’d have a government fund – like the 9/11 fund, say – try to reduce the bureaucratic load, and make things run smoothly.

However, when it only happens to one person at a time – it doesn’t seem to elicit the same response.

For those not persuaded that the United States needs not only national health insurance – but also disability insurance – consider the case of Susan Barron. If you have any illusions about the weakness of New York’s crime victims compensation system – read this. From Jim Dwyer‘s piece on the front page of the Times of December 22nd, “In an Instant, a Life of Helping Becomes One in Need of Help“:

This was life, until Susan Barron crossed Second Avenue on a Saturday morning two and a half months ago: an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, where she has lived for decades. A fat Scottish terrier that she doted on. A psychology practice treating people with physical disabilities, offering “scholarships” to patients who could not pay full fees.

And she was a fixer — the friend who hunted down a kidney for someone in need of a transplant, mentor to a man starting his own therapy practice, regular volunteer on winter coat drives and at holiday soup kitchens. “That Jimmy Stewart character in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ had nothing on her,” said one friend, a self-described cynic.

Then came the morning of Oct. 6. A few minutes before 11, a deranged man stole five knives from a restaurant on Second Avenue, stabbed the cook, then ran into the street. Ms. Barron, on a walk with the dog, happened into his path at 35th Street.

Screaming at her, the man chopped, hacked and stabbed her head and arms, straddling her after she fell to the street, picking up a new knife when he lost one from the force of his blows. The man, identified as Lee Coleman, was stopped only when an off-duty police officer shot him.

To those who witnessed it, the violence seemed to be a crime of toxic passion; they could not fathom the truth, that one total stranger had simply and suddenly set upon killing another.

They also could not imagine that Ms. Barron would live.

She did. 

And now this is her life: 11 weeks in hospital beds under an assumed name; perhaps 13 separate surgeries, but she has lost exact count, because a few were repeats; a cellphone she uses only at night to save the minutes; a discreet session or two in the hospital lounge with one of her patients; instructions for friends to send the thank-you notes she cannot write herself; a 15-minute visit in an office with her dog, Velvet. One scar runs from her lip to her right ear, along a strikingly youthful face. She is 67.

Sitting in a hospital lounge, she calmly takes inventory of what has been fixed, a finger tracing her lower lip, one of the lesser injuries.

“I can’t smile,” Ms. Barron said. “I can’t make a kiss.”

These are not matters for pity, but the backdrop, she says, to the singular wonder of her life. “The most amazing thing of all is my brain is working,” she said. “The rest of it — it’s all baby stuff.”

Todd Heisler, The New York Times. 

In fact, her psychic resilience may actually be working against Ms. Barron as she gets ready to go home, where she will need help. Although the state provides some compensation to crime victims, they must prove that their lost earnings and expenses are a result of crimes in which they are entirely innocent. They must also show that they have no other way to pay for them.

“The only allowance under statute for someone else to file the claim is incompetency,” said John Watson, the general counsel for the State Crime Victims Board, which administers compensation.

For Ms. Barron — self-employed, living alone and hospitalized with grave injuries for three months — the paper chase has been daunting, though friends are helping.

It could be months before any compensation reaches Ms. Barron, a discovery that galls her friends. She expects to be discharged in a few weeks, but is far from being ready to take care of herself. The services of a part-time aide could cost $1,500 to $2,000 a week, with little covered by insurance. She ran through a nest egg while fighting invasive breast cancer seven years ago, her friends said.

At home, her food may have to be puréed, at least for a while: all her teeth were knocked out, and her gums so damaged that they had to be rebuilt with skin grafted from her thigh. She cannot cook or clean — her arms and hands were slashed, right shoulder broken, rotator cuff and tendons torn. Nor can she get around safely, because a blow to the right ear broke a crystal that threw off her sense of balance.

“What’s the whole point of the crime victims board?” said Rhoda Beckman, a friend of Ms. Barron’s since childhood in Brooklyn. “To have this happen, after all this, seems so cruel and unfair.”

Mr. Watson said he could not comment about individual cases, but said the requirements were set by state and federal laws. The pace, he said, depended on how “cooperative” the victims are.

Valerie Angeli, a neighbor who was with Ms. Barron when she was attacked, has set up a Web site, www.FriendsofSusanB.com. Early in Ms. Barron’s hospital stay, she fretted that her patients would be upset by news pictures of the knives, Ms. Angeli said. She asked after the Jersey City firefighters who saw the attack and pressed aprons — snatched from the same restaurant where the knives had been taken — around the wounds that were pulsing with blood.

“You’re always thinking about other people,” Ms. Angeli told Ms. Barron this week.

“Sometimes I think about other people,” Ms. Barron corrected. “But I always think about myself.”

Her determination, she says, is a matter of temperament, as much as professional training. “Part of wanting to stay alive is I want to do more,” Ms. Barron said. “I love being alive. I wanted very much to stay alive. I didn’t think I would. What my training taught me is that I have to talk about this, that it’s the only way you can heal from anything.”

Once a day, maybe, she cries for five minutes. “Then I say, ‘I have to make this phone call,’ ‘I have to get someone to write this thank-you,’” she said.

She misses her patients. She ran a support group for the parents of blind children all over the country, which met by teleconference. “One night,” she said, “I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to call in.”

Won’t the complaints of her therapy patients seem trivial? “Why make a comparison?” she said. “Yes, I feel what happened to me is pretty terrible. People can complain about the smallest things, but that is their pain. Hopefully, they will never have something terrible happen to give them context.”