Two People from Minnesota Who Met in the Hospital After Waking up from Comas Are Getting Married

Zach Zarembinski and Isabelle Richards – credit, family photo

Everyone knows love works in mysterious ways; but rarely more mysterious than in the story of Zach and Isabelle.

Partners in life and partners in podcasting, it was 7 years ago that the two Minnesotans were partners of a distinctly less pleasant kind.

At 18, Zach Zarembinski was rushed to Regions Hospital in St. Paul in a coma after suffering a traumatic brain injury on the high school football field. At 16, Isabelle Richards arrived 9 days later in a coma after a car crash on her way to a grocery store job.

There they lay, shattered, unconscious, and together. Alongside them, their mothers feared the worst, having been told by the medical staff to prepare for the same. But they supported each other.

“I remember she was laying there. She had shards of glass still in her hair and she was unconscious,” Esther Wilzbacher, Richard’s mother, recalled.

“Isabel had to have her right skull piece removed. Zach had to have his left skull piece removed.”credit – family photo

Despite the doctor’s warnings, it wasn’t to be the end of Zach’s journey, and the footballer woke up. Days later when he was ready, he came downstairs for a hospital news conference which was broadcast in Richard’s room, where her father and aunt saw it and suggested they go down to speak with the teen.

Wilzbacher said that Zarembinski told her that her daughter would be fine, and sure enough, she was. After Richards woke up and recovered, the mothers organized a dinner together.

“Said a couple kind words to Isabelle and that was it for six years,” Zarembinski told Boyd Huppert at KARE 11 News’ “Land of 10,000 Stories.”

Zach and Isabelle after they’d both woken up – credit family photo

But 6 years later, the mothers organized a reunion of sorts.

A Facebook friend request, a first date, a year of dates, and then… another hospital news conference.

In Regions Hospital, at the same spot where Zarembinski gave a conference as a teen, the pair of TBI survivors recorded a special episode of their podcast Hope in Healing.

After reading out Joel 2:25 and John 10:10, Zarembinski asked Richards to marry her, and the hospital staff that had ensured they both survived erupted into applause as she said yes.Partners in comatose, partners podcasting, and now, partners for life. Mysterious ways. Two People from Minnesota Who Met in the Hospital After Waking up from Comas Are Getting Married

Read More........→December 05, 2025

Hope Is the Most Impactful Emotion in Determining Long-Term Economic, Social Outcomes

Photo by Carl Hunley Jr on Unsplash

Is hope just “a thing with feathers” as Dickenson wrote, or is it Aristotle’s “waking dream?”

Or instead. is it “a promise we live” rather than a “promise we give” as Amanda Gorman wrote in 2021.

According to new research examining the impact of hope as a positive emotion on long-term economic and social outcomes, it’s very much the Gorman definition.

That research presents evidence that not only is hope the least-studied dimension of positive emotional wellbeing, but that it’s also likely the most consequential in terms of long-term outcomes—beyond things like happiness or security.

Individuals in an Australian cohort of 25,000 randomly-sampled people that were more hopeful had on average improved wellbeing, education, economic, and employment outcomes measures years later, both better perceived health and objective measures of health, and were less likely to be lonely.

Hope in the researchers’ paper was also associated with higher resilience, the ability to adapt, and a robust internal locus of control. Hopeful individuals were also less likely to be influenced by negative life events and adapted more quickly and completely after these events.

Perhaps contrary to others’ definitions, the study authors defined hope as having a “strong grounding in individual agency.”

“Hope is not just a belief that things will get better (i.e., optimism), but the determination to make them better, which reflects agency and determination,” they wrote in their introduction. “The distinction between tragic optimists and hopeful pessimists is another way to think of this.”

Their data was pulled from the Household, Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, which began collecting self-completed questionnaires in addition to face-to-face interviews with members of the Australian public over the age of 15 in 2001.

The data used in the study goes as far back as 2007, and includes the years 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2021. The measurements of hope were simply the reverse measurements for one of the survey questions on psychological distress which read, “In the past 4 weeks, how often have you felt hopeless?”

69% of respondents said “all of the time” over the last 4 weeks, and 18% said “most of the time.”

Not only did they enjoy more positive outcomes in health, education, and economic undertakings than those who were less hopeful on average, but that moving from less hopeful to more hopeful was correlated with improved attainment in these dimensions.

Moving from hopeless to hopeful correlated to better life outcomes credit – Mahdi Dastmard

Moving, for example, from totally hopeless to totally hopeful resulted in a 4% higher probability of achieving a bachelor’s degree in the next 2 years and a 2% lower probability of being unemployed in future years.

In the health realm, higher levels of hope were linked to a lower probability of being obese in the next 2 years, to reductions in smoking levels, and even to a lower likelihood of having a serious illness or injury. Hopeful people were more likely to have more friends, and less likely to be both lonely and being incarcerated in future years.

One caveat with the data follows the tendency typified by the famous “healthy user bias” in nutrition and fitness literature, where data can appear more impactful than it may actually be because of the way that people who are likely to make a choice regarding their health (for example, choosing to exercise thrice a week) are more likely to make further choices in regards to their health than those who avoid making any such choices.

Essentially, there was a 1.5% greater chance that previous survey respondents would undergo follow-up surveys if they were more hopeful, skewing the data slightly towards the hopeful over the hopeless.

The authors claim it’s the first large-scale analysis showing the links between hope and a range of long-term life outcomes.“We believe that better understanding the drivers of hope and its consequences can ultimately inform the ability of both individuals and of public policy to improve people’s lives,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. Hope Is the Most Impactful Emotion in Determining Long-Term Economic, Social Outcomes

Read More........→November 04, 2025