Burn survivor, Duluth native on an odyssey of recovery
Alisa Christensen has been punched in bar fights, shot by criminals and drowned in mud. But in dozens of roles as a Hollywood stunt woman, the Duluth native escaped with only two broken ribs and a two-stitch cut on the head. It was during a simple camping trip that her catastrophic, life-changing injury occurred.By: John Lundy, Duluth News Tribune
- Alisa Christensen
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Alisa Christensen has been punched in bar fights, shot by criminals and drowned in mud.
But in dozens of roles as a Hollywood stunt woman, the Duluth native escaped with only two broken ribs and a two-stitch cut on the head. It was during a simple camping trip that her catastrophic, life-changing injury occurred.
Christensen, 47, lives with a brother in Portland, Ore., but has been back in Duluth for visits with family and friends. Her parents, Glenn and Dorothy Christensen, still live here. In Portland and beyond, her passion is a support group she started, Portland Burn Survivors. Her concern for burn survivors speaks to the odyssey she has been on for nearly 10 years.
After two years as a student at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Christensen moved to Minneapolis and then, in 1987, to Los Angeles. “She’s one person in the group who followed the muse, went off to Hollywood and tried to make a living,” said her friend Howard Hendrickson, a captain in the Superior Fire Department.
Christensen started as an actress, getting “big parts in small movies and small parts in big movies,” as Hendrickson put it. She was filming “Another 48 Hours” in 1989 — she’s in the climactic shootout scene — when she decided to make the switch to stunts.
“This one guy said, ‘Hey, we could use a young blonde on our stunt-driving team. Have you ever thought about stunt driving?’ ” Christensen
recalled. “A light bulb went off in my head, and I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be a stunt woman.’ ”
So she started getting beat up — among other things — for a living.
“I was in ‘Wayne’s World,’ but it was a bar fight,” she said. “You don’t really see me. “ ‘Coyote Ugly,’ too. Bar fight.”
George Clooney pushed her to the floor when she was doubling Sela Ward in “Sisters.” She was kicked out of a window while
doubling Nicole Sullivan on “Mad TV.”
The fire
After all that fighting, Christensen was planning to move to Australia as 2001 came to an end. She was going to go to a Los Angeles dance party on New Year’s Eve, and before that she camped in the Mojave Desert with an ex-boyfriend named Joey. She slept in a sleeping bag next to the fire pit. “The campfire was in a deep pit and the fire was long out, a couple of embers,” she said. “I mean, I’m from Minnesota, for crying out loud. I know how to camp.”
She woke up on fire, the fabric of the sleeping bag melting into her skin. Joey wrapped her in his sleeping bag and drove her to the nearest emergency room, in Needles, Calif. She was airlifted from there to the burn unit at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center with third- and fourth-degree burns on her arms and feet and lesser burns on her thighs. “Just enough to make me really hate my legs,” she said. “I was one of the very few women I can honestly say that I used to love my body.”
Six weeks into her treatment there, she suffered a stroke. She blames her doctor for assigning her care to two interns. All they needed to do, she said, was put her to sleep for a half-hour while they changed her dressing. “Two days later I woke up with a stroke. A massive stroke.”
Christensen said she wishes she had sued the hospital. She did sue the sleeping bag manufacturer, which she said didn’t use the proper fire retardant in the sleeping bag. They settled out of court. Christensen declines to say how much she got, but said she is able to live off the annuity it provides.
Lingering effects
She still had an open wound on her hand three years after being burned. Even now, the effects remain, primarily in her right arm, which is wrapped in a splint. Lingering effects of the stroke include difficulty walking; she uses a cane on anything but flat terrain. She sometimes can’t think of the word she wants to say, and she occasionally stutters. She takes medication to prevent seizures.
The brain damage is the hardest thing to deal with, she said. “I’ll say, ‘Look at my arm. Imagine the same thing going on in my brain,’ ” she said.
Her recovery has been difficult, beginning with three months at LAC/USC. She spent part of 2002 with her parents in Duluth and praises the care she was given at the Miller-Dwan Burn Center. But she’s still angry that two doctors in Duluth recommended that her right arm be amputated.
Later, she considered suicide. “It wasn’t right away, like you would think,” she said. “It was 2½, three years later. ‘Is this as good as it gets? I’m going to wake up every morning in pain? I’m going to always walk with a cane?’ People will look at you funny, especially when you’re alone. It just got to the point where I was like, ‘Why live? Why bother?’ ”
A visit instigated by her brother, Ross, to the Indonesian island of Bali changed her perspective.
“My impression of Bali was: ‘Yeah, wake up!’ ” Christensen said. “ ‘You may think you’re sad and lonely and everything is so bad for you, but in Bali you are thought of as an American princess. So what if you’re burned? You have everything.’ ”
The memoir
She moved to Portland to live with her brother, Kevin, and started working on a memoir titled “gimp: surviving your survival.” It was published in 2008 with names changed, she said, “to protect the idiots.” The ex-boyfriend Joey is Tony in the book; Duluth is called Smallville.
Hendrickson said he loved the book, although he’s not sure how much of that is because of his friendship with the author.
It has made her $47, she said, but she freely gives it away to survivors and their families. She said she hopes it helps them understand that there are better days ahead. The same motive drove her to found Portland Burn Survivors, which is open to burn survivors from anywhere.
“The most important thing I could say about burn survivors is: Think about it as a marathon. Think about it as the long haul,” Christensen said. “It’s going to take years to recover. … Don’t say, ‘God, I’m never going to get any better than this’ after 18 months. Because you’re going to. You are getting better, but it takes so long.”
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