They met at a St. Paul hospital. After emerging from comas. They’re getting married.

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Zach Zarembinski fell in love with Isabelle Richard over a head of lettuce.

It happened in October 2024 at a restaurant in Lakeville. Richard ordered a salad that “came out looking like a head of iceberg lettuce, and she didn’t complain,” he said.

“She just started eating,” he said. “She’s so authentic. She doesn’t have a closed face that has to be revealed over time. She’s just herself. That’s rare.”

Even rarer are the circumstances surrounding how Zarembinski, 25, of Apple Valley, met Richard, 23, of Lakeville.

They arrived at Regions Hospital in St. Paul in 2018, nine days apart, after they had each suffered a near-fatal brain injury: Zarembinski, injured in a football game, spent nine days in a coma at Regions; Richard, who nearly died in a car crash, spent 2½ months in a coma at the adjacent Gillette Children’s Hospital.

Zarembinski learned about Richard when her mother came to the press conference announcing his release. The couple met in person in February 2019 when Zarembinski came to Richard’s hospital room after she regained consciousness. They met again last year and began dating.

Last month, they got engaged at the place where it all began: Regions Hospital. They plan to marry next fall.

“It’s crazy, isn’t it? People say it’s just like a Hallmark movie,” Zarembinski said. “We’re so lucky that we met each other.”

He gave hope

Zarembinski was 18 and a senior all-state nose tackle on the football team at Hill-Murray High School in Maplewood, dreaming of playing football in college, when he suffered a massive brain bleed on Oct. 27, 2018, on the sideline of a Hill-Murray football game.

Senior members of the Hill-Murray High School football team celebrate a Mass for Zach Zarembinski on Nov. 1, 2018, while Zarembinski remained in a medically induced coma. (Scott Takushi / Pioneer Press)

Zarembinski took himself off the field during the 28-0 loss to St. Paul Johnson in the Class 4A, Section 3 semifinal and collapsed shortly after. He underwent a craniotomy and was placed in a medically induced coma for nine days and spent 13 days in the ICU.

Nine days later, on Nov. 5, 2018, Richard, a sophomore at Farmington High School, was driving to her job as a cashier at Hy-Vee in Lakeville when she swerved to avoid being hit by a driver who had crossed the center line.

A photo showing the Jeep Liberty that Isabelle Richard was driving on Nov. 5, 2018, when she swerved to avoid being hit by a driver who had crossed the centerline near the intersection of Dodd Road and Franchise Way in Lakeville. Richard suffered a traumatic brain injury and spent almost four months at Gillette Children’s Hospital in St. Paul. (Courtesy of Esther Wilzbacher)

She smashed her Jeep Liberty into a tree — going about 60 mph — near the intersection of Dodd Road and Franchise Way. Richard, who had just turned 16, had to be cut out of the vehicle. She suffered a massive head injury, underwent a craniotomy and spent almost four months at Gillette.

Richard’s mom, Esther Wilzbacher, was watching TV in her daughter’s hospital room at Gillette on Nov. 16, 2018, when she saw a press conference featuring Zarembinski, who had been released from Regions three days earlier. She realized the press conference was being broadcast live from the lobby of Regions.

Wilzbacher, her husband, Brad, and her sister, Elizabeth Brimer, ran to catch the last few minutes in person.

“Right after my press conference, I looked at Esther,” Zarembinski said. “I knew there were other people around, but I only fully remember Esther. Her eyes were just full of tears. I had no idea who she was. Not a clue. I saw her crying, and I said, ‘What’s going on?’”

Wilzbacher explained what had happened to her daughter and that she was in a coma. She told Zarembinski that he gave her hope.

“For whatever reason, I just kept saying, ‘She’s going to be OK. She’s going to be fine,’” he said.

Mothers connect

Esther Wilzbacher met Tracy Zarembinski, Zach’s mother, at the press conference, and the two connected on Facebook.

Tracy Zarembinski also followed Richard’s progress on CaringBridge — and kept her son apprised over the next few months.

“She was like, ‘You know, you’re so lucky. Remember that girl? She’s still in the hospital,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘She’s still in the hospital? … She just woke up?’ My mom said, ‘Hey, you should go try to meet her,’ and my mom started pushing.”

The pair met in Richard’s hospital room on Feb. 18, 2019. A photo of the two of them shows Zarembinski, wearing a Pioneers jersey, crouching next to Richard’s hospital bed. Both are smiling.

Zach Zarembinski and Isabelle Richard met Feb. 18, 2019, a few months after their brain injuries, in Richard’s hospital room. (Courtesy of Zach Zarembinski)

“I said a couple of kind words to Isabelle, and that was it for almost six years,” he said. “But my mom will tell you that in the back of her mind she was thinking, ‘It would be cool if they got together one day.’”

Five and a half years later, on Sept. 26, 2024, Richard’s neurosurgeon gave her the final “all-clear,” and Esther Wilzbacher shared the news on Facebook.

“Thank you for sharing her beautiful progress all the time,” Zach Zarembinski wrote in response. “God does amazing things for great people. Isabelle, your smile shines bright! I pray you continue to stay amazing and fight the good fight!!! We should connect sometime soon!”

Wilzbacher suggested that the families get together and sent Zarembinski her phone number. Two weeks later, they gathered at Gary’s Supper Club in Lakeville.

‘I think I really like you’

Richard said it wasn’t love at first sight for her. “I saw potential, but I just, like, wasn’t really in that mindset yet,” she said.

Said Zarembinski: “I didn’t go in there expecting to get a phone number. I didn’t go in there expecting anything other than to congratulate her on her recovery.”

But as dinner progressed, Zarembinski said he realized he wanted to see her again. Richard’s mother suggested the two connect on Snapchat, he said.

“We started chatting more and more, and I started to like her more,” he said. “I’m like, ‘I think I really like you.’”

Their first date occurred at Panino’s in North Oaks on Oct. 28, 2024. Zarembinski was living in Shoreview at the time, and Richard drove up to meet him.

“I was worried she was going to be a ‘four forks’ girl, where everything had to be perfect,” he said. “But she was OK getting messy. She was a girl that I felt comfortable around — and she felt the same about me.”

Their second date was going to a Sunday service at Richard’s church, ZOE Church in Burnsville, and then out for lunch. Their faith is the foundation of their relationship, he said.

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“I was relieved 100% because Isabelle shares that same faith with me that I have with Jesus,” he said. “Our values are aligned. I grew up with Catholic traditions, so there was a little bit of difference there, but, honestly, we have the same faith.”

Richard credits Jeremiah 29:11 with aiding in her recovery, and she can quote the Bible verse from memory: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

“That is engraved in her heart, in her mind,” he said.

Richard said she thinks she fell in love with Zarembinski on their third or fourth date. “I can’t really remember that far back,” she said. “I just love that he’s not perfect, because I’m not perfect. I kind of need someone that’s not perfect. I love that he loves God just as much as I do. I would say that’s a big one.”

Left-brain, right-brain

Zarembinski says he practiced for hours to make the heart sign with his fingers with Richard. The newly engaged couple hope for a September 2026 wedding. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Zarembinski prides himself on doing all of the little things she loves. He makes her dinner, buys her flowers, opens her car door, makes sure her car is regularly washed, and buys her favorite treats.

Last week, he bought her a package of Goldfish Snoopy Peppermint Cocoa Graham Crackers.

“She said, ‘Why did you buy mint Goldfish? You hate mint,’” he said. “I looked at her and said, ‘I bought them for you!’”

Richard helps clean his apartment, shops for groceries and does the dishes. She tickles him when he’s in a bad mood — “and when he’s not in a bad mood,” she said.

“I love everything about him,” she said. “I love that he helps me with my finances. I’m not the best with money, and he’s really good at it. He’s really good at planning certain things. He’s just better on everything — everything that I’m not good at.”

Richard suffered right-side brain damage; Zarembinski suffered damage on the left side.

Richard doesn’t keep secrets and says what is on her mind, he said. “I’m so grateful for that,” he said. “I’m the same way. I can’t keep secrets. That’s just too hard. I had a brain injury. I forget what I even lied to you about last week, you know? So I’ll say, ‘If I lied, I’m sorry. Here’s the truth. This is what I remember.’ And she does the same thing to me.”

In a post published in September on Richard’s CaringBridge page, Esther Wilzbacher wrote that watching the couple’s relationship grow has been a blessing.

“Both still carry unique challenges from their TBIs, but here’s the beautiful part — their injuries were on opposite sides of the brain,” she wrote. “Where one is weak, the other brings strength. They balance and support one another in ways that only God could have orchestrated. They are both absolute miracles! Thank you Jesus!”

Podcast proposal

Zarembinski, who has worked as a supervisor at a fiber-optics construction company and as a door-to-door salesman, is looking for work. “Isabelle is always here for me in dark times,” he said. “She supports me along the way without hesitation or negativity. She’s willing to sacrifice buying material things so that we can still do the things that matter most to us.”

Richard, who works about 30 hours a week as a cashier at Hy-Vee in Lakeville, drives over to Zarembinski’s apartment each morning before work. The couple work out together in his apartment complex’s gym before going back to his apartment to make breakfast, he said.

“We push each other at least once every other week to run a 5K on the treadmill,” he said.

The couple is currently playing an Uno marathon – the first one to win 100 games has to forfeit a kiss and buy dinner. The score as of Thursday: Richard, 50; Zarembinski, 29.

Isabelle Richard reacts as her fiancé Zach Zarembinski hits her with a “draw four” card as the couple play Uno. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“I try my best, but she’s just better at it,” he said. “We have fun. Honestly, we love to do everything together. There is not much we are willing to do separately.”

Their other major hobby is producing a podcast, “Hope in Healing,” that they launched together in July. “We want to share our testimony of the pain and suffering we went through and how we came out of it,” he said. “It is such a miracle to be alive, let alone share our lives together. We’re going to work on it slowly to where we interview people who have gone through pain and who need help healing or have come out of that already.”

Zarembinski arranged for the last episode of the podcast to be recorded on Nov. 3 at Regions Hospital. A few minutes into sharing their stories, Zarembinski told Richard he had a question.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

Their families and people who had cared for the couple at Regions and Gillette emerged from hiding to join the celebration in the lobby.

Erin Ingvalson, a speech language pathologist at Gillette, helped orchestrate the event, which included a huge red heart made of flowers and “Will You Marry Me?” written in neon.

“Oftentimes when we discharge kiddos, they kind of leave us, and we don’t get to see what happens with the rest of their lives and the successes that they are able to achieve,” Ingvalson said. “This was just really, really special.”

The couple is hoping for a September wedding. “Her birthday is on September 5th. Mine’s the 18th. If we could, it would be cool to do it in between the birthdays,” Zarembinski said.

Richard said she can’t wait to get married and move in together. “He just showed me the plan of the house he wants to build,” she said. “I’m excited for that.”

The couple would like to have three children. They already have names picked out: Selah, John and Noah.

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“I’m excited for just starting a life away from our families,” Zarembinski said. “Just paving a new path with Jesus and not having other people tell us what to do, because that’s been a lot of our lives for the last seven years. … When we become married as one, we’re going to be able to just make that path right down straight with Jesus.”

Zarembinski said Richard has helped him heal.

“I didn’t lose my mental capacity, but I have had pain and suffering over these last seven years,” he said. “Isabelle had a different journey. She doesn’t really remember the first six months. … I continue to bear the burden of stress and anxiety and hurt and pain, but she has none of that. She has none of the hurt. She doesn’t remember a lot of it, and she’s just so grateful for life. She shows up with a smile every single day. Every day I’m with her, I feel joy knowing she truly loves me.”

Minnesota teacher reels in viewers with educational, entertaining fishing videos

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PARK RAPIDS, Minn. — Like many youngsters growing up in northern Minnesota, TJ Erickson (Timothy James, in case you’re wondering) started fishing at an early age in his hometown of Roseau.

At first, his dad was always there, and then with advancing independence as he aged, Erickson was one of those kids you see either walking or riding a bike toward a local fishing spot, toting a fishing pole in one hand and a tackle box in the other.

“We grew up on the Roseau River,” Erickson said. “That was right in my backyard, and so from the time my parents would let me walk down to the Roseau Dam by myself, I would go down there and be casting.”

Some 25 or so years later, he still often fishes by himself, but his audience is slightly changed from just his parents waiting at home, or friends who would later join him in a 12-foot boat.

“All summer long, we’d fish that same stretch of river; we would just never get bored of it,” Erickson recalled. “We’d probably get the same pike, day-in, day-out, but we would do that almost every day, all summer long.”

Desire to film

These days, through technological advancements that were just emerging when he first picked up a fishing rod, Erickson has a virtual audience of almost 25,000 subscribers — and thousands of others who visit occasionally — who regularly check out his YouTube channel, where he shares his fishing adventures and knowledge.

It’s an interesting progression for someone who decided on a college because it was located in an area that had good duck hunting.

Erickson graduated from Roseau High School in 2010. In addition to his passion for fishing and hunting, he played hockey and baseball, and then played baseball at Itasca Community College (now Minnesota North College-Itasca) in Grand Rapids, Minn. At the end of two years, he got an opportunity to continue playing baseball at Mayville State University in Mayville, N.D.

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“The coach said, ‘We’ve got a good education program, and we’ve got good duck hunting,’ ” Erickson said. “And I said, ‘All right, I’m there.’ ”

It was during that time that Erickson bought his first video camera. “I’ve always had the desire to film,” he said. “When I was hunting ducks, I would have a GoPro. I never did anything with that footage, though. … I just liked it and wanted to capture those memories.”

He did, however, have in mind that he wanted hunting and/or fishing to have a role in his life that was more than a hobby.

“My original plan,” he said, “was that I was thinking I was going to teach in Roseau and guide on Lake of the Woods.” But then he and his wife, Alyssa, both were offered teaching jobs in Park Rapids, solidly located in Minnesota’s “Lakes Country,” where they were hoping to live.

Exploring new water

Arriving in a new area with perhaps hundreds of fishing waters to explore within an hour’s drive, Erickson started to explore new lakes. He also took the next step to expand his interest in video from simply capturing footage to learning how to process and edit. And for that, he spent a lot of time watching instructional videos … on YouTube.

In 2019, Erickson launched his fishing guide business and also posted his first YouTube video. Looking back, he says he still had a lot to learn about both guiding and video production, but both efforts improved with time.

A turning point, of sorts, materialized a couple of years later when forward-facing sonar technology was emerging. “I wanted to learn more about this whole Garmin LiveScope thing, or this forward-facing sonar, and I didn’t see a lot out there on the internet, on social media, on YouTube,” Erickson said. “I told my wife I thought there was an opportunity to help people learn about that, so I put out a couple of videos.

“Honestly, a lot of what I was hoping for was just to get some publicity for my guide service, so I could, you know, get my name out there. And that worked very well. I got a lot of business from that, and it got to a point where I was actually too busy to take all the trips, which was an awesome problem.”

Both efforts kept growing for a couple of years until Erickson decided to stop guiding and concentrate on his YouTube productions. Today, he has more than 25,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel (and 15,000-plus followers on Instagram). He has posted more than 160 videos that have attracted nearly 7 million views. One of those early productions on forward-facing sonar use has attracted nearly 300,000 views alone.

Variety of topics

Erickson’s programming covers a variety of fishing topics, including outfitting a boat, where to fish, bait, tips for early ice fishing, and a friendly competition called the Walleye Cup between Erickson and friends Nick Lindner and Brett McComas.

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An elementary school physical education teacher, Erickson credits his background as part of the formula for producing video content that people look forward to watching. Catching fish on camera provides the entertainment, but “a lot of my programs are very educational,” he said.

Comments on his YouTube channel reflect that. Relating to a program released last year on early ice fishing for walleyes, one viewer wrote: “These videos are very helpful. I don’t have a lot of time to scout and move around with 4 kids, so any video that helps me narrow down where to go is extremely helpful. Thanks for the great tips!”

And from the same program: “Awesome video, so much info, a true treasure. Thank you.”

Assessing where he’s at today, Erickson says it’s kind of surreal to have earned the following he has while doing something he truly enjoys. “It’s really kind of cool to see how many people that, I hope, have been positively impacted, might have gotten a little nugget of something that has made their fishing experience more enjoyable, or helped them catch more fish,” he said.

But there’s not much time to reflect and relax. Winter is coming soon, and Erickson is already well into planning his next programs to film when the ice is ready.

Online

Find TJ Erickson’s videos at youtube.com/@tjericksonfishing.

Adrian Wooldridge: The West is facing five fearsome new giants

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The Second World War was won on the home front as well as the battlefield. As early as 1942, the British government pledged itself, as soon as the Nazis were defeated, to slaying “Five Giants on the road to reconstruction”: Disease, Want, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. This pledge boosted morale and provided the template for the postwar welfare state. A “revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching,” wrote William Beveridge, the Liberal grandee who wrote the government report that identified the giants.

Today we are involved in another war and another revolution: an undeclared war against the “axis of autocracy,” led by Russia and China, and a revolution driven by technological innovation. The Five Giants that Beveridge identified have largely been vanquished: Life expectancy across the West is about 20 years longer than it was in 1942. But new giants have emerged: giants that are more subtle than the old giants but no less fearsome. These giants explain why the West is gripped by such a sense of malaise despite relentless material progress and why its citizens’ confidence in the future is fading.

What are these new giants, and how can we defeat them?

Loneliness

More than a quarter of U.S. households consist of one person living alone: cat ladies and cave men. Many workers, particularly in the just-in-time economy, work alone as well as live alone. A quarter of U.S. 40-year-olds have never married, up from just 6% in 1970. Social isolation is bad for individuals, increasing the chances of premature death as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but it is also bad for the species. The German fertility rate is just 1.35 children per woman and the South Korean rate is 0.7.

Addiction

Addiction is a growing problem thanks not only to a new generation of super drugs, such as fentanyl, but also to the skill of supposedly respectable companies in encouraging addictive behavior. Food companies are some of the leading culprits here, engineering their products with an irresistible blend of sugar, salt and fat. More than two in five Americans are obese. Digital companies design clever algorithms to keep us clicking and scrolling. Hence our third giant.

Distraction

The internet has become a distraction machine: Headlines blare, emails drop, special offers ping. But it is only one of many: 24-hour news programs feature “crawlers” that provide yet more information. Cars come with all-enveloping entertainment systems. Young people who were brought up in this buzzing new world find it difficult to concentrate for any length of time or perform complicated tasks. The so-called Flynn effect, whereby average IQ had been rising relentlessly for decades, has been showing signs of reversal since the turn of the century.

Lies

Lies are on the march as never before, thanks to a combination of technological innovation and information warfare. The internet giants are the first big broadcasters to be exempt from strict standards of truth or balance in what they publish. Hostile powers, particularly Russia, are using this free-for-all to inject lies, designed to inflame antagonisms or simply muddy the waters, into the bloodstream of democracy. This is eroding the bedrock of liberal democracy, informed debate.

Complexity

Complexity smothers everything, like Japanese knotweed. Passwords get convoluted. Forms get longer. Government departments get ever more Kafkaesque. Moses’ Ten Commandments have become Ten Billion Commandments, many of them contradictory. Complexity is deeply inegalitarian, acting as a tax on people with low IQs while creating jobs for lawyers; it’s also deeply anti-progress. Scientists devote their lives to making grant applications, or sitting on grant committees, while building companies devote more time to regulations than to pouring concrete.

These five giants support each other. Addiction holds hands with both Distraction and Loneliness, for example: Young people (particularly men) who are addicted to their screens retreat from society into the land of the infinite scroll. Collectively, they create a general sense of a world spinning out of control. We must slay our giants to restore a sense of agency and progress.

Governments need to fight on as many fronts as possible: Departments of agriculture need to think about their role in promoting addictive foodstuffs just as departments of education need to think about opening children’s eyes to information manipulation.

Four policies could produce outsized benefits:

Re-introduce national service

Offer school-leavers a choice between military service or voluntary service. National service would help to address both the division of society into social groups that have little to do with each other and the rising epidemic of loneliness. More than a million British 18- to 24-year-olds are neither in work nor in education, disconnected from society and wasting their lives in electronic distraction. Far-seeing (and Russia-facing) countries such as Sweden and Finland have already reintroduced national service.

Prioritize reading

Reading is the antidote to distraction because it obliges people to focus on a single text for a sustained period. (The great Austrian writer Stephan Zweig defined a book as a “handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest.”) Yet reading is a dying habit. Just 30% of Britons aged 8-18 say that they enjoy reading in their spare time, a 36% decrease since the reading survey began in 2005. Countries everywhere should do everything they can to reverse these trends, from pro-reading campaigns to a renewed focus on the written text in schools.

Tackle complexity

Governments should put their own houses in order by reducing their own addiction to complexity. This will involve taking on interest groups that thrive on complexity such as lawyers and bureaucratic jobs-worths. They should also force private sector companies to prioritize simplicity over complexity and intelligibility over gobbledygook. Governments have occasionally embraced this cause. Cass Sunstein put the reduction of “sludge” in the form of bureaucratic complexity at the heart of his work as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009-12. But complexity-busting needs to be a permanent government priority rather than an episodic enthusiasm.

Crack the whip at digital companies

Wherever you look — at the epidemic of lies or addiction or distraction — the digital companies are at the heart of it. The companies must be forced to deal with the social pollution that we are causing. Start by  repealing Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act which grants them limited federal immunity for what they publish online. They also need to be encouraged to side with the bright side rather than the dark side. AI gives us a great opportunity to tackle the giant Complexity. Algorithms can be adjusted to encourage concentration as well as distraction.

The public sector across the world can often seem bloated and inert. But that is not because it is populated entirely by jobsworths. It is because it is disconnected from the new challenges that trouble the world. Give the state sector a new set of giants to tackle — giants that touch and trouble us all — and it may well surprise us with its energy and zeal.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”

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Vikings picks: Pioneer Press ‘experts’ split on this one

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Pioneer Press staffers who cover the Vikings take a stab at predicting Sunday’s game against visiting Washington:

Dane Mizutani

Commanders 23, Vikings 13: Not sure we can pick the Vikings to win any game the rest of the way with how bad it’s gotten. At least they’ll score a touchdown this weekend.

Jace Frederick

Commanders 24, Vikings 21: Neither team should really want to win at this point, but Minnesota desperately needs a shred of offensive competence. Should find it against Washington’s defense.

John Shipley

Vikings 19, Commanders 17: This appears to be a reprieve for Minnesota, a home game against a team worse than they are. It’s hard to imagine either J.J. McCarthy or Max Brosmer playing well enough to capitalize, but if Jayden Daniels (elbow) remains sidelined, the Vikings’ defense should win this game.

Charley Walters

Vikings 21, Commanders 20: The Vikings are 4-8, Commanders 3-9. Sunday’s game has about the same appeal as an August preseason game.

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