Edsall is flying high with fearless memoir by Carol Schmidt Even though he was a successful businessman and a passionate pilot, medical professionals predicted that Wayne Edsall would spend the rest of his life debilitated after he sustained a stroke following bypass surgery in 2000. But the professionals didn't know Edsall, a determined man with a backbone as rigid as Montana bedrock. Nor did they understand the tenacity of Edsall's daughters, Susan, '82 Engl Lit, and Sharon, who refused to rewrite their family's history and instead helped revise medical expectations for victims of strokes. The story of how the Edsall family transformed tragedy into high-flying triumph is detailed in Susan Edsall's book, Into the Blue: A Father's Flight and A Daughter's Return. Since the memoir of a resolute family that refused to take no for an answer was published in July by St. Martin's Press, Susan has appeared on several national talk shows including "The Jane Pauley Show," "Oprah," CNN and "The O'Reilly Factor." "I think the reason it got national publicity is because it is a story about this notion of recovery," Susan said. It is also the story of a Montana family, as steely and strong in their love for each other as they were in their conviction that Wayne Edsall would recover and fly again. Those family expectations were largely discounted by medical professionals who advised the Edsalls that Wayne might be able to be retrained to do simple tasks such as playing checkers or making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In the face of such devastating news, Susan made an audacious promise to her father. He would, she predicted, fly again in a year. In the end, Susan's prophecy was way off. Instead of a year, Wayne flew in less than three months. The story of his recovery is remarkable, as is the system that Susan devised to retrain her father's mind. Committing to alternating two-week intervals, she and Sharon returned to their family home in Bozeman from Vermont and North Carolina to tutor their father. And when research revealed no resources or tools to be used in therapy of stroke victims, Susan devised her own from a basic phonics workbook, thousands of homemade flashcards and basic math drills administered with unflinching pragmatism. The Edsalls' greatest breakthrough came when Susan urged her father to visualize the tongue twister, "The big brown bear ate the big black bug and the big black bug bled blue blood." Wayne was able to successfully use visualization in other tasks. "It helps that I was creative," Edsall says now. "Creativity is part of my work, so I was able to imagine something that I didn't know existed, like a rehab process." Edsall says that the system that she developed may not work for all stroke victims. "Everybody's situation is different," she says. Her advice to families of other stroke victims is posted on her Web site, www.susanedsall.com. Susan said that today, more than four years after the stroke, her father continues to thrive. "He flies every day," she says. "He has figured out how to fly over my house in Ennis to drop off the Sunday New York Times." And Susan is flying, too. Her father's rehabilitation led her to take a fresh look at herself and make some life-changing decisions. She has become a pilot, bought her own plane and moved back to Montana. An aspiring writer "who wished she could write but didn't have anything to say," Edsall is living the writer's fantasy. She landed a top agent, editor and publisher for a first book and is working on her next book, cutting down on work commitments to allow her more writing time. In those, and other respects, she says her MSU education has served her well. "I learned how to think and how to write at MSU. Sara Jayne Steen, John Bean, Bob Ramage Michael Becker and Bob Rydell, among others, were the beginning of my love of reading, my desire to write and my ability to think critically."