DATE: Saturday, November 8, 1997            TAG: 9711080323

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH                        LENGTH:   75 lines

NURSE'S SNEEZE LANDS HER IN ELIZABETH RIVER

All Mary Lou Brisson planned to do Tuesday afternoon was settle beneath a shade tree at Hospital Point on the Elizabeth River, eat her lunch at a picnic table and work on her book on emergency rooms.

Instead, the registered nurse of 40 years wound up living an unplanned chapter in the story.

The Portsmouth resident was parking her car when she sneezed, hit her head on the steering wheel and inadvertently slammed her foot on the accelerator, launching the car into the river.

As the Ford Thunderbird settled in the cold water, Brisson found herself trapped inside.

Briefly, as it turned out: A woman dived in to rescue her, two hospital corpsmen from the nearby Naval Medical Center jumped in, too, and the owner of a passing sailboat brought Brisson to safety in his dinghy.

``They were all just fantastic,'' Brisson said Friday as she recovered from bumps, bruises and a slight concussion.

The Navy will recognize three of her rescuers at 12:30 p.m. Monday at the naval hospital. They are Billie Spencer, a civilian lawyer working on the hospital expansion project; Petty Officer 3rd Class Steven Kendrick, a hospital corpsman; and Seaman Aaron Julien, a hospitalman.

The ceremony will be ironic for the Brisson family. Two weeks ago, Brisson's son Joseph was awarded the Coast Guard Lifesaving Medal for a daring rescue on another section of the Elizabeth River.

Joseph Brisson, piloting a tug that was moored under the I-64 bridge, dived into the frigid water to save a bridge worker who had been hit by a car and knocked in.

``Mom,'' Joseph Brisson said to his mother in the hospital Tuesday evening, ``didn't I tell you the water was going to be really cold?''

Tuesday's rescue was somewhat less dramatic than December's, but it was impressive, all the same. Spencer was taking her daily lunchtime walk around the hospital grounds when she saw Brisson's car sail into the water, officials said.

``She jumped off the seawall and had to swim out to me because the car was 25 feet out in the channel,'' Brisson said. ``I had gotten a good bit of my body up and out of the car, but I couldn't get my right leg out. It was caught in the steering wheel. No matter how I pulled I just couldn't seem to get it undone.

``I finally got back in again and tried turning in a different direction and I was able to get it loose and she pulled me out of the car.''

Another woman who saw the accident ran to the old hospital building and alerted the two corpsmen.

``Miss Spencer had me in the regular (rescue swimmer's) carry position, pulling me in, and the two corpsmen assisted her,'' Brisson said.

But getting out of the river was tougher than getting in. Large rocks form a 10-foot-tall bulkhead along the point's shoreline.

That's when the sailboat owner, Paul Hanson of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., jumped into his dinghy.

``He told his wife, who didn't know how to sail, to just keep going in circles, which she did,'' Brisson said.

Once everyone was in the dinghy, Hanson and the rescuers made for a nearby dock, where other rescue personnel took Brisson by ambulance to the naval hospital's emergency room. She was released later Tuesday.

To be on the receiving end of a medical emergency felt a bit unusual, she said.

``I was not planning to write a new chapter in my book that day,'' Brisson laughed. ``I was writing about how I got started in nursing and the different things that happened in the emergency rooms I worked in.''

She laughed about the coincidence of her son's recent rescue.

``He said he figures that the guardian angels really are watching us, and is happy somebody saved his mother,'' she said. ``Both of us promise to stop doing this.'' ILLUSTRATION: VICKI CRONIS/The Virginian-Pilot

Mary Lou Brisson was pulled to safety Tuesday by four brave and

helpful folks after ``the mother of all sneezes'' caused her to

stomp her accelerator, sending her car across a lawn and into the

Elizabeth River.

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