When Sean Wiese awoke one day in late April 2016, he was lying in a dark room. At least that’s what he thought. That’s what he hoped.

“I was lying down, and I was looking around and was like, ‘Well, either this room is really, really dark, or I can’t see.”

By feeling around, Wiese surmised his arm was trapped in some type of bolted contraption — with something similar attached to his head. It was the gown he felt next that helped him piece together the clues.

“Oh, I’m in the hospital,” Wiese recalled.

The last thing Wiese remembered was two weeks earlier, when he was on the phone inside B&B Automotive — the Riverside auto repair shop where he worked — and hung up so he could get back to it. He remembered looking at the shop door and his boss, who was working on a car with its driver-side headlight out. And then nothing.

So Wiese — now in a hospital bed — had questions.

“But I actually couldn’t talk.”

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So he just lay there in darkness, in silence, in solitude, in fear.

“I waited, it felt like forever,” he said. “When I heard the door open, I raised my hand, and someone was like, ‘Oh, you’re awake’.”

Unable to speak or write, it took Wiese a while to glean that his last memory of the shop and his boss and the headlight happened two weeks ago, on April 6, 2016. Apparently, Wiese learned, he had grabbed a tire, and that tire exploded — creating such a blast that passersby outside said it sounded like a grenade.

Debris shattered his elbow and broke bones in his face. When his boss rolled Wiese over, “He actually thought I was dead.”

“Then I coughed, and that’s when he ran out and was screaming ‘Call 911’,” Wiese said. “There were people outside, because of the noise.”

An ambulance rushed Wiese to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, where he was placed in a medically-induced coma.

“The first initial surgery lasted 18 hours,” he said.

‘Pushing a broom’

Although he was only 26 at the time, Wiese already had seen a lot in his life. Born and raised in Iowa City, he started his high school journey at West High, moved over to City High and ended up at Elizabeth Tate, an alternative high school from which he never graduated.

“I was kind of insubordinate with teachers,” he said. “I didn’t take it very serious.”

When asked when he dropped out, Wiese said, “Dec. 17 at 11:36 a.m. 2007.” When asked why he remembers the exact time, he said, “I was arrested.”

He had gotten into a fist fight with another kid at school. And, having turned 18 a month earlier, Wiese was charged as an adult with assault. He spent the night in jail and had to pay a fine — and then started looking for jobs.

“I was just kind of going through the motions,” he said, recalling bouncing around between construction jobs — making inconsistency the only through line in his life, save one passion that had bubbled up at a young age: “I always helped my friends with their cars,” he said.

After applying to shop after shop, Wiese at age 20 in 2010 finally got his foot in the door at an auto repair business — B&B in Riverside.

“I started out pushing a broom,” he said.

Eventually, Wiese persuaded the shop owner to let him change the oil in one car. And then another. “He trusted me more after that,” he said. “He started teaching me other things.”

Over the next six years, Wiese came and went — finding other gigs at times the shop got really slow. But he was back at B&B in April 2016 when the accident nearly took his life.

‘Why not try a real car again?’

Although Wiese — upon awaking from his coma — couldn’t see anything, his doctors initially thought he’d regain his vision.

“They started giving me percentages,” he said. “They started out at like 95 percent sure I was going to see again. A couple months later it started dropping to, I think 75 percent was the next. And then it started going lower and lower and lower and finally they were like, ‘Well, with the severity of your accident, we just don’t know’.”

To date, Wiese, now 34, can see only “dark shadows.”

Doctors also initially intended to amputate his left arm.

“They said if I could at least move three fingers, they wouldn’t take it,” Wiese said. “Once I heard that, I started trying to move all my fingers. And I actually was able to move all five of my fingers.”

He stayed at UIHC for about a month before transferring for another monthlong stint in rehab at UnityPoint Health-St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, where he had been living with his girlfriend. Once he was discharged May 26, 2016, Wiese found himself in a dark place — literally and metaphorically.

“At that moment, I pretty much thought that all the stuff that I used to do was over,” he said. “I pretty much thought I was just going to sit in the house and sit in the dark for the rest of my life.”

But Wiese got restless. He got bored.

“I started messing with stuff,” he said, defining “stuff” more specifically as remote-control cars. “I was like moving things around and messing with stuff, and I was like, ‘if I can do this …’”

Why not try a real car again? So he got one without a motor.

“And I tore it completely apart in my driveway, and then I put it all back together,” Wiese said. “And I was like, ‘Well I don’t have any bolts left. So I still can do this. I just can’t see is the only difference’.”

It was that accomplishment that motivated Wiese to start envisioning his future for the first time.

“I started thinking, ‘Maybe I should go back to school and try’,” he said.

He applied to Kirkwood Community College’s High School Completion Program — through which he aimed to get his high school diploma. It took him longer than he had hoped, given that the pandemic added another hurdle.

“I couldn’t do the online Zoom meeting thing,” he said. “So I had to stop for a while, until they did in-person again. And then I went back.”

But on March 7, 2022 — at 2:35 p.m. — Wiese passed the HiSET, a five-subject high school equivalency test across subjects like math, science, English and social studies.

And he wasn’t done. He applied to Kirkwood’s automotive technology program in 2023, and got in. Given his vision, Kirkwood’s accommodation services department assigned Erin Hoeger as his personal assistant — to keep him safe and help him succeed.

“I was hired specifically for Sean,” said Hoeger, 45, who got a UI English degree but had spent decades caring for others — her grandmother, her handicapped uncle and then her kids. “They’re old enough now that I decided it was time for me to get back in there.”

Still, she said, “I was very, very nervous when my boss told me who I was being hired for.”

But they clicked almost immediately.

“He’s awesome,” she said. “Within about two weeks, we kind of found our rhythm of what he needs from me and what I let him do on his own.”

He’s even worked on Hoeger’s cars. “A Nissan Murano and a Mazda 3, he’s worked on for me,” she said.

Had Wiese not endured the near-death injury that left him without his sight, he told The Gazette he likely wouldn’t have gone back to school. But now, he said, he’s hoping to continue at Kirkwood after he graduates next year — diversifying his skills in hopes of making him more employable.

“My overall goal is to actually own my own shop,” he said.

Hoeger said she’ll stick with him if he does that — reporting she’s not the only one who has found him not only fun to be around, but inspiring.

“Sean has a great attitude,” she said. “He’s a very positive person. You can tell that he enjoys being here, that he wants to be here, and he really does have a passion for cars.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

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