Francesco Clark is squirmy.
“I had stem-cell surgery two-and-a-half years ago, so I’m starting to feel my butt now,” he said with a grin. “And I’m always kind of wiggling around.”
The same cheerful restlessness seems to pervade all areas of his life. In the last six years, since becoming quadriplegic, he has started a skin care line, Clark’s Botanicals; written a memoir (“It’s 95 percent finished,” he said); learned Spanish to communicate better with some of his caretakers; and researched and managed his recovery. Recently, he became a national ambassador for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation and makes regular appearances on its behalf.
Most successful 30-year-old entrepreneurs do not live with their parents, let alone share a roof with extended family (Clark’s Italian grandmother, Enza Spaggiari, spends eight months a year living with and cooking for the household).
But Clark is not most people. Indeed, he was never ordinary, although his distinctiveness was somewhat less pronounced before a balmy Friday evening in June 2002. Clark, then 24, had just arrived for his first weekend at a summer share on Long Island. He didn’t know the other guests very well.
“They were all friends of friends of friends,” he said. “But you get to this great place, and it’s warm out, and you see this pool and you want to go in it.”
The pool was not well lighted.
“The second I dove in, my chin hit the bottom and my head snapped back,” Clark said. “It felt like an iron rod slamming against another piece of metal; this loud pang reverberated through my entire body. I knew exactly what had happened — I was fully conscious the whole time — but at that second I didn’t think: I might die because I’m underwater. I actually scolded myself, something like, Oh, no, do you realize how much therapy you’re going to have to do now? One of the people saw me and flipped me over, and I said, ‘Call 911.’”
Two months later, Clark left the hospital and went home to his family’s antique-filled house in Bronxville, New York. He had been a fifth-grader when they moved to the US from Italy, and back then, the tight-knit Bronxville community had been slow to welcome a boy who had grown up picking mushrooms in the foothills of the Dolomites in northern Italy.
“I felt like the new kid until 11th grade,” he said.
Now the community embraced him.
“After my injury, I feel like the whole town has been looking after me,” he said.
More important was the attitude of his family.
“My mother and my father, they don’t treat me like a kid,” Clark said. “They’re almost like my accomplices. We try new restaurants, go to museums. We do whatever we want.”
No one would ever wish to be confined to a wheelchair, but under the circumstances, the Clark household was a fine environment in which to recuperate: The family is close without being smothering, concerned without being worrywarts, and well-to-do enough to afford top-notch treatment.
It also helped that Clark’s father, Harold, comes from a long line of doctors. In his practice, Harold Clark combines traditional medicine with alternative medicine, homeopathy and vitamin therapy. Clark’s mother, Mariella, is a nutritionist and phlebotomist. From them, he inherited a creative outlook toward healing.
“You have to approach recovery in a multidisciplinary way,” Clark said.
All the same, the first years after the accident were quite bleak. His days were filled with drives back and forth to physical therapy, and visits to doctors whose underlying message to Clark seemed to be that he should accept his fate, curb his expectations and get used to living on the margins.
He refused to conform to their script. To the uninjured, such indefatigable hope can seem provocative, even unsettling. But having nearly lost his life, Clark doesn’t waste time worrying about whether other people are comfortable with his attitude.
Before long, he grew frustrated by physical therapy sessions whose duration was dictated by insurance coverage. He had always been active, both physically and intellectually.
He read enough to realize that regaining movement and sensation in his body was possible. He also believed that recovery was not an end in itself, but a means to pursue other dreams. He signed up for clinical trials, researched innovative treatments — such as the stem-cell surgery, for which he traveled to Beijing — and surrounded himself with people whose outlook matched his own.
“The best therapy for me was to be treated as though I have a right to want to get better and to have fun and to live,” he said.
Two years ago, Clark installed a gym in his family garage. He spent US$35,000 converting the space and buying state-of-the-art equipment, then hired trainers from local gyms. The investment has paid off. Before, he was paying about US$350 a day for therapy, plus the cost of the commute.
Now, “it costs about US$90 a day and I do five hours of therapy per day instead of two and don’t waste hours in traffic. But most importantly, I am seeing better results and am leaving the medical community dumbfounded on my progress,” Clark said.
Running a business was never on his to-do list. Clark’s Botanicals evolved naturally from Clark’s efforts to relieve his skin of a host of problems: dryness, acne, rashes.
“My skin couldn’t sense hot and cold and know when to sweat,” he said. “I wasn’t releasing toxicity.”
He and his father experimented with 78 botanical extracts and discovered jasmine absolute, a jasmine derivative that, Clark said, is naturally rebalancing.
“I began making lotions for myself,” he said. “Some of my dad’s patients started using them and liked them.”
Former colleagues from Harper’s Bazaar, where Clark had worked as an editorial assistant, liked the products, too, and publicized them in the magazine.
Sales have doubled every year for the last three years; Clark’s Botanicals products are available at Henri Bendel and C.O. Bigelow in the US and and Fred Segal Beauty in the US and are sold in Europe and Asia.
The company is based in the house’s former sun porch, which also serves as Clark’s bedroom.
“It’s all windows, so I’m looking out,” he said. “It’s like that with my injury. It’s not just looking inward at my body, but looking outside.”
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