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Student in severe crash receives blanket from art class
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Melissa Braden, left, presents Sean Cohick with the blanket the art education students made. (Barbara Phillips Long/The Sentinel)
Sean Cohick, a member of the track team at Shippensburg University and a junior this year, was cozy after he wrapped himself in a blanket made by the members of an SU art education class.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s very warm.”
It was a contrast to his condition Aug. 6, when he was driving to work and his car went off the road, rolling about 15 times. Cohick was thrown from the car and was fortunate that someone saw the crash.
He was flown to York Hospital and was in a coma for several days.
Karen Cohick, his mother, said when her cell phone rang that afternoon, it was “the worst call ever.”
The call was from her son’s cell phone, so she answered it casually, then was shocked to get the news about his accident.
Sean Cohick’s left arm was broken in three places. He also had extensive bruising across his chest and lower torso from his seat belt, even though he was thrown free.
“I’ve got a lot of metal in my body now,” he told the SU students.
“It happened in a flash,” said Cohick, who said he’d lost his sense of invincibility. “It’s really amazing being back here (at SU).”
Cohick considers himself fortunate. He is right-handed, and his right arm was not damaged. He is a sprinter and jumper on the track team, and his legs were undamaged.
He had some brain trauma and is hoping the brain injuries don’t affect his creativity. He hasn’t started drawing again, Cohick told the art class.
“I’m waiting for that spark to hit me,” he said.
His mother said it took him a while to recover from the brain injury.
One day at the hospital, Cohick decided to talk Spanish all day, she said. She told him, “I was born in Kentucky. I don’t speak Spanish.”
Her son wasn’t concerned. “Spain, Kentucky — aren’t they close together anyway?” he responded.
In addition to being thankful about surviving, Karen Cohick brought up another consequence of the crash.
“What have we learned about being in a hurry?” she asked her son.
“Slow down,” he replied.
Blanket projects
Cohick wants to become an art teacher. He took the first semester of the class last year, and participated in a blanket-making project then, said Mark Moilanen, assistant professor of art education. Moilanen never expected to be giving one of his own students one of the blankets.
The project generally benefits someone who has experienced a crisis. It is also a group project for the class.
This year, Moilanen taught students in Cindy Pimental’s fourth-grade class at Grace B. Luhrs University Elementary School how to do the weaving technique.
Then he took SU students to the fourth-graders, and had the children show the college students how to weave. The fourth-graders were at an end-of-semester holiday party after the blanket presentation, and they got to talk to Cohick and write on his cast.
Many of the children wore their scarves for the occasion.
“The fourth-graders loved the idea that they would teach college students how to weave,” Pimental said.
Although she worried that the weaving would be a distraction in class, she said Moilanen told her it would calm students, who could weave and listen to her give directions or read aloud.
“He was exactly right,” she said. Many of her students have made two or three scarves. She also likes have college students interact with her students, because so many children spend most of their time with people in their own age group.
“It gives them the opportunity to talk politely to someone a lot older than they are,” Pimental said.
Liana Culbertson said it was hard for her to choose the yarn for her scarf, because she liked several different skeins.
“So I just picked this one,” she said, pointing to her blue scarf. She said blue is her favorite color.
The blanket was made with strips that were woven the same way the scarves were made.
Melissa Braden, a classmate of Sean Cohick’s who has a degree in fine art from Penn State, is attending Shippensburg to become certified in art education. She commutes to SU from East Berlin in York County and is older than many of the students in the class.
Moilanen had Braden present the blanket. She was in class with Cohick last semester, and drives over the same stretch of road where Cohick had his accident.
After each member of the class wove a strip, Braden said, the strips were stitched together. Her mother was always sewing, and Braden ended up teaching some class members how to do a slipstitch to sew the blanket together.
“I’m just quite pleased he’s with us, and he looks great,” she said of Cohick.
