Back online again…
Lost my internet connection for a couple of months so I haven’t been able to do updates (obviously).
First, thank you from the bottom of my heart to those who actually follow this story and give a poop about the trials and tribulations of my little wounded family. I know of at least a few of you still out there!! 
I am *still* stuck here in Alabama. For some reason I sent my father home before the project was finished, something I am regretting doing now. The reasons for doing so are complicated, but suffice it to say, he needed to get back to California to get back to his regular doctors’ appointments, and I was getting a little tired of having him here. I wont go into the details, much of which are kind of stupid (a specialty of mine) in retrospect, but I thought I could send him home and then finish the last details here on my own.
Unfortunately, I threw my back out shortly after he left, and I developed a seperate issue in my upper leg/ass area with my sciatic nerve and piriformis muscle battling each other with my ability to move around the main casualty. That and fairly severe depression/thoughts of suicide have kept me largely immobile the last couple of months.
It must strike the casual reader as awfully selfish to think of killing myself, but for a while I was thinking that would be the greatest gift I could give everyone around me. As I said, I am at times rather stupid, and combined with the irrationality of depression, it all made sense at the time. I know Cooper needs me, as does Jenna, as does my wonderful Mom, among others, but the mind is sometimes a confusing place to live.
The week before last, I missed Cooper’s preschool graduation ceremony up in Indiana, and that fact was both a terrible blow (reminding me that I have now missed roughly 30% of his earthly existence so far due to sending him to Indiana when I had Jenna in California, and now the past year (!!!) here in Hellabama) and a huge kick in the ass as far as getting things wrapped up here finally.
Jenna for her part is doing well, considering. She is on a new medication, Ritalin, to help her with her moods and energy levels. I asked them about putting her on Ritalin a few months back due to her complaining on the phone to me in a desperate-sounding plea for coffee. She kept telling me “I need it for my mood” and “it calms me down!” which is what made me think of Ritalin. They give Ritalin to little kids all the time to help them calm down, so I figured that they could try it on Jenna for the same reason. Which they finally did. She has only been on it since last Thursday, but every time I talk to her since, she sounds upbeat and happy, and reportedly craves less coffee. We will see if it lasts. In other words, whether she develops a tolerance to it or something along those lines.
I talked with her case manager on Friday for about an hour and a half, and we talked about her possible outcomes, none of which include a 100% recovery. That dream is dead, I hate to admit. All the manic God and healing talk, I see now, was very naive of me. But at least I gave it a shot. Maybe I didn’t do everything right, but in the darkest of the dark days it helped me get through the worst of it, and gave me the ability to do everything I did do. I believed in Jenna’s God because it was Jenna’s life on the line. It was kind of a borrowed faith, if you will.
Back to the outcomes things, we are talking about Jenna staying in the Carbondale facility on a long-term basis, at least for a while. It is a sort of graduation from the active program that she is in now, meaning that she wont be in the active recovery phase of treatment anymore. It is an assisted living arrangement where she would still be going to therapy but not as much as she is (supposed to be) going now. I say supposed to be because I learned that she has only been attending 50% of her sessions, which is unacceptable to me. Hopefully with her being on the new medication she will feel up for more actively participating in her own recovery. Her case manager went with her to the doctor’s appintment and when Jenna was asked what could be done for her, she replied that she wanted something to make her feel “more normal, not just like a bump on a log.”
I made it very clear to her case manager that I want Jenna to be given every opportunity to stay in the active program and get better before she is “graduated” out into the assisted living situation. Whether it is the Ritalin or something else, until she is able to go to more than 50% of her sessions, I don’t see how anyone can say we really tried to get her better there.
I had extremely high hopes for her stay at this facility, and I am reminded constantly that it is the “best in the country” for this type of injury, but if this is the best our country has to offer, we have a lot of work left to do. I wonder about that flood of TBI patients coming back from Iraq. Where do they end up? I guess in VA facilities that Jenna would never have access to. I dont know if that is a good or bad thing. With VA facilities in the news and not for good reasons, probably a good thing.
Whenever I get down on the whole faith, God, 100% recovery hopes, etc., I have to remember how far Jenna has come. From that neurosurgeon telling me “Its like a forest has been mowed down by bulldozers, we have to wait and see how many trees will grow back,” to now, I still have to be grateful she has come back at all. Remember she was hit in the side of the head by a 4,000 lb. truck doing 65 MPH, so it is fairly miraculous that she survived at all. Even if she never returns to 100% like her former self, can I really call that failure? She is still with us, and still has her punk-rock personality, knows and is very proud of who Cooper is, and, I am determined, will someday return to us and be Cooper’s mom again. And not just on paper, I’m talking about that apron-strings relationship that right now she and he are both missing out on. That is the deepest wound for me, that loss of the mother-son relationship. I have to be grateful for Jenna’s mom taking on that role, but at the same time it embitters and depresses me each and every day that Jenna is not able to take on that role herself. I think that once that is achieved, we can really talk about a 100% recovery.
Tags: recovery, survival, TBI, traumatic brain injury