Documentary Follows SF Doctor’s Horrific Car Crash and Recovery
It started with a crash.
In 2008, Dr. Grace Dammann, the founder of Laguna Honda hospital’s AIDS unit, who had signed more than 6,000 death certificates at the height of the AIDS crisis, brushed up against her own mortality when she was hit headlong by another car on the Golden Gate Bridge. Dammann was catastrophically injured; doctors doubted she would live. She did, and continues to practice medicine, though from a wheelchair. Her story of pain and recovery is the subject of a documentary film premiering at this year’s Mill Valley Film Festival.
“There was hardly anything that wasn’t broken,” Fu Schroeder, a Buddhist priest at the San Francisco Zen Center and Dammann’s longtime partner, says in the movie States of Grace, which screens Sunday.
