She is apparently suffering continuing and further brain damage…
According to Jenna’s dad, who has been talking directly to Jenna’s doctors, Jenna’s brain has suffered even more devastating damage than I had originally or recently thought. While we all hope and pray for deliverance, it appears she is actually getting worse. I was giving him (dad-in-law) a hard time because he can tend towards the pessimistic side, but if he is to be believed, most of her frontal lobe is gone, and there is more waiting to be taken away.
While we were there last weekend, we noticed that her right foot was curling under, kind of as if she had a big sliver in the ball of her foot and she was walking on the outside edge. Except she had no control over it. At the time I thought it was because the shoes she was wearing were sliding off the base of her foot.
Its probable that Jenna is going to continue to decline in brain function, not get better. Its like trying to build onto a sand castle as the tide comes in and sweeps away the base.
The enormous sinking feeling I have right now cannot be described. The cruelty of this injury is not to be believed. Jenna did not deserve this, she doesn’t deserve it now, and she isn’t going to deserve the long slow slide into oblivion she will most likely experience as she gets older and the injury gets worse.
Hope is a powerful tool for getting through something like this. But hope doesn’t make brain cells grow back, and it … I have to be optimistic.
I have tried to be Faithful throughout this situation. It has wavered now and again under pressure from the reality Jenna has gone through, but I haven’t given up on it. I even went to Jenna’s parents’ church which is a hard-core pentacostal evengelical congregation; not exactly my cup of tea under any circumstance. But I went and prayed for Jenna the whole time. That’s all I could do, as I said in a previous post.
For some reason I finished this post on the www.bmw2002faq.com wessbite… im just going to copy it over…
im in the process of writing about this on the blog. somehow talking about it here feels more comfortable, so maybe i will post here and then copy it over.
“Last night, the stress of the Jenna situation came up as it is the giant elephant in the room 90% of the time. In passing, Jenna’s dad (who has the most direct contact with the doctors) told us that Jenna’s entire frontal lobe is “gone”.
Now, this is a nice guy who I think the world of but I also know he is a bit of a pessimist… But what he said was Jenna’s brain continues to shrink in size (atrophying) and most likely she is going to get worse and not better.
For a long time we have been told that she would get better, that after seven or ten years from the initial injury she would begin to improve and regain function as the brain very slowly rewires itself and etc.
This is mind-fucking at its worst. I’ve tried to be hopeful and optimistic and even capital-F Faithful, which is a gigantic stretch for me under any circumstance. Anyway, to have that all stripped away on news that she is in fact getting worse, is likely to get even worse than that, and may very well end up her life in a completely vegatative state is absolutely devastating. I can’t help but picture her eyes, from the last last weekend, she had a distant, blank look. Even the visit before that, she seemed different somehow too, but she has always been a moody person and I didn’t think much of it.
Now that I reflect on that distant look she had, I can even see that she is slowly sinking further into the abyss. God I hope I am wrong when I say that, and hope her Dad is just exagerrating and being expertly pessimistic as he sometimes is. I am trying to hold onto the faith that she will be better, just a little better, any slight piece of better, and not any kind of worse.
She has been through so much, and thankfully in large measure she is unaware of it all. She continually tells me that she is happy this happened to her, because her life was such hell before the accident. In this she is referring to the untreated bipolar that bubbled under the surface and she largely kept in check before the accident, and blew completely out of control afterwards for so long until we realized what was happening. Now she is on high doses of a TON of different medications that are controlling it now that she *cant* keep it in check.
It is just so cruel. The word is cruel. To watch her suffer the internal violence of the unchecked bipolar before the accident, and then to watch it rage totally out of control to the point where I actually considered killing her to just put an end to her suffering after the accident (this is after YEARS of butting heads with multiple incompetent doctors across two states and many facilities and getting nowhere), all I can say is its fucking evil and cruel and just devastating to watch.
Like I said, at least Jenna is largely unaware of it all. She exists on a moment-to-moment basis due to her memory loss. This is hardest on her family, especially on her mother for obvious reasons. Im not going to complain for my own sake (any more than usual), except to say I just feel for Jenna, almost iin her place since she can’t remember or just doesn’t or can’t understand the enormity of what she has lost and what she faces.
Please keep her in your thoughts and yes prayers. Despite everything Im going to go to church tomorrow and see if I can avoid crying the whole time like I did the last time I went. Last week I sent Cooper to pray for his mom since the time before that I was just a mess of snot and tears and nobody wants to see that.
She just called as I was finishing that last paragraph, and she seems happy and content, which is a huge relief. Yes, that she is “out of the loop” is definitely a good thing. I told her parents last night that I consider myself her morale officer and I continually tell her she makes me so proud, she is the light of my life, and the like. I love her so much and just wish she could get better. Stuff like this is definitely harder on the families than the actual victim, sort of. That sounds awful but in a lot of ways its true. Anyway, send vibes, thoughts and prayers. Her address is Robert’s heart, Plainfield, IN….