Radio Curious visits with Dr. Grace Dammann, who is featured in the documentary âStates of Grace,â which chronicles her recovery from a near fatal and life altering car accident.
Barry Vogel, Attorney and Counselor, is the Host and Producer of Radio Curious. Christina Aanestad is the Assistant Producer.
In our last interview we visited with the producers and directors of the film âStates of Grace,â about the life of a woman honored by The Dalai Lama for her medical work at the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, Ca.  In this edition of Radio Curious we visit with that woman, Dr. Grace Dammann. Dr. Grace had a near death experience resulting from a head-on collision on the Golden Gate Bridge in 2008. She awoke 48 comatose days later after multiple surgeries for, as she says, âtrashed bones and internal organs.â  With her cognitive abilities in tact, she began rehabilitation and was able to go home a year later.  Now, in 2014 she has returned to work as the Medical Director of the Pain Clinic at the Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, California, where she had previously worked as a physician for 18 years.  Notwithstanding her confinement to a wheelchair she proudly describes her legal efforts to urge the Golden Gate Bridge Authority to install a dividing barrier intended to prevent future head-on collisions on the bridge.  The installation is scheduled to being in the fall of 2014.  Dr. Grace and I visited by phone from her home at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, in Muir Beach, California on May 23, 2014. We began our conversation when I asked her describe her current station on the continuum of her lifeâs experience.  The book Dr. Grace Dammann recommends is âThe Last of the Just,â by Andre Schwarz-Bart.  Radio Curious is a half-hour, weekly, long-form interview program, now in it's 24th year. We interview people on a curiously wide variety of topics about life and ideas. Our website is www.radiocurious.org. If your station airs Radio Curious please let us know curious@radiocurious.org, we will add you to our list of syndicate stations. We also welcome questions, feedback and program ideas. Radio Curious 280 N. Oak St. Ukiah, Ca 95482. (707) 462-6541.