I am the total opposite of a good writer, but here goes nothing. I have a story that that I pray no one else ever has the opportunity to experience, but this story fascinates the dickens out me, and that's why I want to share.
Let's start off with a little about me, because I know you're all ever so curious. My name is Tyson, I am now 22, I go to school down at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and I will graduate this coming spring with a BS Chemistry: Biochemistry degree.

-breaks here and there should make this a little easier to read
Enough about me, let's get to the story. My accident happened June 10, 2010. My whole life I've grown up a big bass fisherman with my dad. I had just completed my junior year down at UTC in April, and I was home for the summer. My dad and I are members of a couple bass clubs back home, and we had a tournament coming up that Saturday. But, my dad had given my mom an anniversary present of a get away trip for the both of them, and they were scheduled to head out for their trip Saturday morning. So, my dad was giving permission to take his boat out by myself for the first time. Since it was going to be the first time I had taken the boat out by myself, he took me out to the lake on a Thursday afternoon/evening to show me several places in his mind that he wanted me to try out on the Saturday tournament.

-quite a night
We had told my mom we would be back a little after 9 that night, so she knew when to watch for us. My mom was upstairs doing paperwork for my family’s business, and she said at about 8:30 she decided to come down stairs and play with our dog while she waited for us to get home. My mom has told me her story that she accidentally fell asleep waiting for us, and was woken up by a phone ringing at midnight. She tried to regain some composure and answered the phone. The man on the other end introduced himself as a trauma unit nurse at Vanderbilt, and asked my mom if she knew an "Edgar Ward" Still kind of scatter brained she said, "yes, that's my husband" (He is Edgar Ward III and I am Edgar Ward IV, but everyone calls me Tyson). The fellow on the phone then said, "well he's been in a terrible boating accident, you need to get down to Vanderbilt as soon as you can, but promise me you will not try to drive yourself." My mom then responded with, "umm...OK...I will, but where is my son?" Still kind of groggily, remember she was just woken up. The nurse replied "oh, I'm sure he is next door in the children's hospital" to which my mom responded, "children's hospital? that doesn't make any sense. He's 21 years old." To which the nurse confusedly responded, "umm, actually I have your son" which led mom to say, "well that's good to know, but where is my husband?" The nurse was then able to wrap up the conversation with "I have no idea. Your son was the only one brought here to Vanderbilt. I'm sorry, but I have no idea."
Needless to say, my mom was now a bit perplexed. She said she sat for just a minute to try and regain her composure (remember, it's now midnight) and then called our next-door neighbors to try and ask if they could drive her downtown to Vanderbilt hospital. About 5 minutes later my mom got another call from the same nurse saying that he had felt so bad when he got off the phone, he had spent a while calling all the other hospitals in the surrounding areas to try and find my dad because he felt terrible that my mom was in such a confused state. He had found him at another hospital across town, and the reason why was because Vanderbilt only had 1 open bed in their trauma unit, and they knew I was in the worst shape, so they took me there to get the last bed in the trauma unit, which made them take my dad to another hospital across town.
So my mom went over next door and met up with my amazing neighbors, who had said they would certainly take her to the hospital. She let them know that they had found my dad at another hospital across town, so my neighbor Joe asked her where she wanted to be taken first, and my mom said she was finally able to sputter out the words that she wanted to see my dad first (she said looking back, she is so thankful the nurse had made her promise not to drive, because she was pretty shaken up). So off they went.
My dad's story is his own to tell, but she spent several hours getting to know things where he was, and then at about 5am was taken over to Vanderbilt Hospital. In a weird way, it was a blessing that she had gone to see him first, because she said when she finally got over to my place in the wee hours of the morning I was just coming out of surgery where they had taken my spleen out.

-and then comes me
My mom has told me that when she saw me for the first time, it was sickening. I had tubes coming out from everywhere, my mouth, my sides, you name it-there was some machine hooked up to me doing it. My mom said it scared her because I was freakishly swollen, every square inch of my body was swollen and some color of the rainbow. I'm a beanpole of a guy anyway, I'm 6'3" and weigh 165 soaking wet, but my mom said I was so swollen I looked like I could weigh about 250 pounds.
Initially, I was in a coma, bruised to there and back, not moving, not breathing on my own, not responding to anything, it was not good. My mom has told me that there were several doctors who approached her and told her that first night that realistically none of them expected me to survive through the day, so she needed to brace herself for what was to come. Right off the bat, I had 4 or 5 broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a ruptured spleen, and a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Back tracking a little bit, the reason I was being brought out of surgery when my mom had first gotten there was because my spleen had been ruptured in the wreck, and it was causing a severe amount of internal bleeding, and the doctors had said that if they didn't remove it, it would kill me even quicker than they already expected me to go.

-at Vanderbilt for round one
I've been told that a normal stay in a hospital's trauma unit is 2-3 days, maybe 5-6 for someone in really rough shape. I was there for 2 weeks. I've also been told that you don't get released from a trauma unit when you're all better, you get released from a trauma unit when you're stable enough to where the doctors don't expect you to croak over dead when you've been out of their sight for 5 minutes.

-one step in the right direction
I was released from Vanderbilt's trauma unit to go over to another hospital across town that said they had a plan of things to do to try and wake me from the coma I was still in. So, after 2 weeks in a trauma unit, I was taken over to Select Specialty Rehabilitation Hospital where they said they had therapies they could do with me to draw me out of the coma I was certainly still in. If I have my dates correct, I was there from about June 24-ish to August 15-ish. The whole time I was there, they did heavy therapies and rehabs with me, but that really did nothing. My mom has told me that after the first week in August doctors and nurses from the hospital I was in began telling her to look for a nursing home for me, because they had done everything that they knew to do, and I wasn't positively responding to any of it, so I was just going to have to be taken care of the remainder of my life.
One of the scariest moments in my whole story happened while I was here in Select Specialty Rehab Hospital. I’m told that my collapsed lung had repaired itself enough to where about 1/3 of it was slowly beginning to inflate again. But I had also contracted a dangerous bacterial infection surrounding the lung in the area that was now just a big empty space. Along with the bacterial infection surrounding the collapsed portion of my lung, I had also contracted pneumonia on the inside of my lung that was slowly beginning to reflate. I was hooked up to a machine, which I, for lack of more technical medical jargon, call a big fancy vacuum, hooked up to several different sized hoses that go into my side to try to suck out the nasty infection I currently had eating me up on the inside. My mom has told me that the only way she knows how to describe what was constantly being sucked out of those hoses had the consistency and color of black jello. Doctors told her that the infection on the outside of my lung appeared to be coming from a bacteria found in lake water, so all they could figure was that I somehow ended up inhaling quite a bit of water somewhere through the accident. Along with the marvelous black jello on the outside of my lung, I contracted pneumonia on the inside of my lung. My mom has told me that doctors had me on 3 different types of antibiotics, and I was responding to none of them. The doctors had me on who knows how many and what kinds of antibiotic all week long, and I had shown no response to anything. My mom tells me that it was on a Friday when a couple of doctors approached her, told her what kind of condition I was in, and said to her, “He is not responding to any of the antibiotics, left alone-this pneumonia and infection will without a doubt kill him. We can go in and do surgery to remove the majority of this infection to try and save him, but he is not near strong enough to survive another surgery-so that’s a dead end too. We will give him until Monday, but that’s all the time we can afford, something must be done if he continues in the manner he is in now.” My mom said she went home with this horrible news, called my sister and told her everything that had been said, split her phone book down the middle, and asked my sister to call everyone she knew, tell them my latest circumstance, and ask for very specific prayers that I would respond to the antibiotics I was on.
So the two of them spent hours on the phone, calling and telling a ton of people my latest circumstance, and simply asking for some serious prayers. The following Monday, the doctor approached my mom and said that he had absolutely no explanation for what had happened, how it happened, or when it happened, but I was starting to show signs of responsiveness to the antibiotics, so surgery was thrown out the window. One of my favorite parts of this story is the doctor, not knowing what my mom and my sister had spent all weekend doing, said, “There must have been some serious prayers going up for him, because I have never seen anyone respond to those specific antibiotics as quickly as he did,” he was floored.
Back to it, I continued to amaze doctors being alive. I wasn’t doing anything, I was just kind of a lump in bed, but hey my heart was still beating and that is better than any of them expected initially.
One more thing while I’m still here at Select Specialty Hospital. Someone explained to me that because of the injury I had sustained, I was probably going to lose/did lose quite a bit of weight. I later realized why this was expected. I was told with the kinds of injuries I had experienced, and the severity to which my injuries went, my body was losing 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day. Being in a coma isn’t just lying around in a bed all day doing nothing. A coma is a time when your brain and your body are working serious overtime trying to repair whatever has been damaged. It was explained to me in this way, your brain chooses to go into a coma when your brain is not in good enough shape to keep you in an awake/aware state and repair all your body’s injuries. Your brain is able to intelligently make the choice that your body is in no sort of shape or circumstance to where it would be getting anything positive done by being in an awake state, so your body chooses to stay in a comatose state so that your brain has more energy devoted to it to repairing itself. But when your body is in bad enough shape to make this decision, your brain is obviously going to need some serious repair, which is how doctors could look at my situation, and tell my mom that my brain was burning 2-3,000 calories a day, just trying to get itself back up and running again.

-this is going to be the next fad diet
So, 2,000-3,000 calories is a lot. I had a feeding tube where nutrients and vitamins could be pumped into my stomach every day, but not enough to keep up with that kind of calorie burn. I was already a tall, skinny beanpole to start this whole ordeal. I was about 6’3” and 165 pounds the day after Thanksgiving to start this whole ordeal, which is already a bit underweight, a weight chart online tells me a target weight for a 6’3” male is 179 pounds, which I’ve always been told to shoot for about 180. My low weight, throughout this whole ordeal, was 112. One hundred twelve pounds. The weight chart I’m looking at online only goes down to a 5’1” male, and it says his target weight should be 134.
My mom has told me that when I was at my low weight it made her sick to even come in my room, my legs were about as big around as her arms, and she says you could see every bone in my body protruding out like it was about to poke through my skin. It was bad. That was with doctors and nurses pumping as many calories as they healthily could through my body, my body was just using such an insane amount of calories every day trying to repair itself.

-miracles that nobody can deny
That was a bit of a side story, back to it. As my mom began investigating nursing homes to see if she could find a place that could take care of me for the remainder of my life, miracle #9573284 happened. From the initial wreck, I had an enormous sore on my back/tailbone area. Over the past couple months it had worsened and had evolved into a giant ulcer about the size of a dinner plate on my lower back. One day while my mom was at the hospital a representative from Atlanta approached my mom and told her that he was a traveling representative for a surgeon that actually specialized in a type of plastic surgery. That doctor had wished for a patient suffering from an injury very similar to mine, so that he could do a specific type of procedure on my ulcer/sore/wound/whatever it was called. The representative said he had done his job and had been searching hospitals all over the southeast to try and find a good candidate for his doctor, and I was the absolute best fit he had run across. He did his thing, and looked me over to make sure I was in fact what he was looking for, and once he decided I was a good fit he secured my ride down to Atlanta. I’m pretty sure this whole thing happened and opened up the very week that Select Specialty was telling me that that was the last week they saw any reason to keep giving me a place to stay in their facility.
Of course, with all this my mom was very quick to agree to let me be transferred down to a hospital in Atlanta where this surgeon could do his special surgery on my rear end. I was carried down to Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta for my latest and greatest surgery. But, you would know, the day I was moved down to Atlanta, and the very day the doctor had it scheduled that he would do this surgery on my back, I started doing a strange little thing. I started doing this thing where I would continuously kick my left leg all over the place for no apparent reason. My mom was told it was actually a sign that my brain was continuing to repair itself. My brain had repaired itself enough to where it could send a message to my leg to kick, but it had not repaired itself enough to where my brain knew the correct time to send a message to move my leg, so it was sending this message repetitively, so my leg was just constantly moving with uncoordinated and jerky movements. The doctor was glad he could say that I was, in a strange way, showing sign of brain reconstructive improvement, but was bummed because he said he would not/could not do his surgery because he needed me to lie pretty motionless on my stomach for about 2 weeks to give this wound on my back time to heal.
He gave me a couple days, and my involuntary leg twitch was still happening, but not quite as severe, so he told my mom that he felt like doing the surgery was now ok, I would just have to stay in the hospital for several weeks and I would probably have to be strapped down in my bed and be kept in a location where I would have eyes on me 24 hours a day, just because me doing something as simple as rolling on my back and thrashing around a bit could definitely damage the surgery site beyond repair.
So the surgery happened, and the miracles kept flowing in. They had been rolling all over me for the past few months, so why would they stop now?

-moving down south
Atlanta is home to a place called Shepherd Center, which is known all over the country as one of the best places for patients who have experienced severe brain trauma, whether through Traumatic Brain Injury, like me, or through a debilitating stroke. They had told my mom that while I met all the requirements to be submitted to their facility, they did not have any beds available for me to go there. But, I had gone to Piedmont Hospital for the surgery on my rear end, and Shepherd Center was actually connected with Piedmont, so when they discovered that I had been submitted to Piedmont for surgery, they were able to pull some magical strings somewhere that allowed them to give me a room and a bed for the recovery time I needed.
My mom has told me that as terrible and awful as the sore on my lower back was, it was an unimaginable blessing because without it I never would have been accepted to the hospital down in Atlanta, and she has told me that by that time I would have been living in a nursing home somewhere, since Select Specialty was saying they had done everything they could do, and I had shown no response.

I have been told that while I was recovering from surgery in my bed at Shepherd Center, therapists would take time to do therapies with me (it was a brain injury hospital), but they were getting the same response that the people from Select Specialty in Nashville were getting, pretty much nowhere. But they kept at it, doing their job and doing all they could day after day, to which I owe them the world if I could give it to them.

-surgery? no biggie by now
The surgery and all this jazz happened around the end of August, and immediately thereafter while I was continuing my therapies and such into the month of September. By now, there was actually some kind of routine to this madness we called life. My mom would stay down in Atlanta during the week at a friend’s house, and spent all day everyday running between the hospital I was in and the rehab place my dad was in across town (how did my dad get down to Atlanta also? that was miracle #418975. Again, that’s his story to share, not mine). So my mom spent her week going between facilities tending to the both of us, and on the weekends my sister would come down to Atlanta from her job in Chattanooga, to give my mom some relief, so my mom could then go back home to Nashville to do all the work that needed to be done to keep my families business alive. Yes, that was a normal week for my family, I feel like they had it as tough as I did sometimes.

-my comeback
All this madness kept on going until the day the magic happened. Keep in mind, I was still in a coma until now. My official “wake up from my coma day” was September 17. I like to call that day my second birthday. September 17 was 99 days after the day the accident happened. My mom tells me that she walked into my hospital room that morning, just like she had every other morning for what felt like an eternity for her. She tells me she walked into my room, and I rolled over in my bed, looked directly at her, and said, “Hey mom. Where am I? What am I doing here?” To which my mom said she responded by dropping everything in her hands and just looking at me with her jaw hanging open, and then she got run into by the nurse coming into the room who had been in charge of taking care of me that morning.
Story has it, the nurse who had been in charge of taking care of me that morning was someone off another floor, who didn’t know my story, and was actually coming in my room to introduce herself to my mom because she wanted to have the chance of telling my mom what a good time she had with me that morning, and what a good patient I was. She had apparently not had a chance to really read up on my chart to know that I had been unresponsive, which is why she wasn’t as blown away as my mom was. My mom said she then had to pick her things up off the floor and stammer to the nurse, “He’s…He’s awake. He’s been like this all morning? He’s been in a coma. He’s been totally irrational and unresponsive.” To which the nurse finally started putting it together and realizing I was in a pretty remarkable state.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember any of this time. I learned later about a thing called Post Traumatic Amnesia, which I can now tell affected me until about the beginning of October. It was explained to me in this way, my brain was still in a pretty shaky condition, so simple things took much more power and control then they used to. For rough example, a normal brain might take 1% of its power to regulate the body’s breathing ability, but because mine was still in the early stages of repair, my brain might have been using 10% of its power for this seemingly mindless thing. As silly of an example as breathing seems, my brain really did have to concentrate to get that done. Really similar situations were for my brain to stay conscious, for my brain to be aware of its surroundings, for my brain to recognize things, and especially for my brain to remember how to talk. These seemingly really simple and easy processes took so much of my brains computing power, the doctor told me that making memories seemed like a non-necessity for my brain to be doing. With that in mind, my brain was choosing to concentrate on simple processes that it felt were more important to keeping me alive, more so than the simple act of making memories.


-Chatty Charlie
My mom has told me that she walked into my room that Friday, and I asked her questions non-stop for about 5 hours. I couldn’t get enough, I kept asking questions about where I was, how I got there, I looked at pictures my mom had of the boat, I was blown away. My mom said throughout those 5 hours of me asking questions, nurses came into my room on 3 different occasions, but they were keeping quiet because they could tell I was talking with my mom. She says they came in every hour or so, walked to the edge of my bed, lifted up the sheet on my bed, and looked at my butt. They were simply keeping a close eye on my surgery site, and adding some medicine to it. My mom said it took 3 times before I looked at my mom and asked, “Why does everybody keep looking at my butt?” My mom said it took that to snap her to the reality that I didn’t know anything. She said it sounds silly, but this surgery had been such a big deal for the past month, it really took that for her to realize I knew nothing about it.
This was all on a Friday, and on Friday it was my mom’s normal routine to leave Atlanta about noon so she could get back home in plenty of time to have her staff meeting with our employees, and still have time to start her weekly grind on paperwork. On this particular day she was so infatuated with talking with me about everything that it was finally 3pm before she finally just said to me, “I have to go, but I will be back on Monday.”
My mom immediately called my sister so she also knew the crazy good news as she was headed down to Atlanta for her standard weekly routine. I timed it pretty well, because it was my sister’s birthday that Sunday, so happy birthday to ya Camille, I’m back (Look on Facebook to try and find a video of this, you’ll be able to understand what I mean when I talk about my mish-mash of words)
I still find it immensely interesting to look back on this time to just see the condition I was in, and to be able to see the difficulties I was still trying to overcome. When I first woke up from my coma, I had a really hard time speaking. I’ve been told that the damage to muscles in my throat, the long time of inactivity, and the overall brain damage added up to where I could barely speak loudly enough or clearly enough for anyone to barely be able to understand me. My mom has told me that the first day when I asked her so many questions she had to pull up a chair and literally sit to where she was maybe only 2 or 3 feet away from my mouth to be able to hear my voice. I spoke that softly. She also says she had to ask me to repeat myself quite a bit because I was trying to talk the same way I had spoken for the past 20 years, but I wasn’t able to form words that quickly anymore. It sounds silly, but my speech therapist had to teach me to speak much slower so that I was able to correctly pronounce my words, and people were able to distinguish what I said.

-so where was I through all this?
My mom has also told me something I find incredibly fascinating, but she said throughout all the time she had spent around therapists she had learned that if a day like this ever even came, she needed to ask me a variety of seemingly obvious questions to determine where I was mentally. She said while I was talking with her that first day, in between all of my questions she would say, “now you may think some of these questions are strange, but I just need to hear you answer them.” I believe her questions were as follows:

-What is your name? Your real name and your nickname?
-My real name is Edgar Ward IV, but everyone calls me Tyson.

Alright, I’m off to a good start

-I know I told you you’re in Atlanta, but where are you from?
-I’m from Mt. Juliet, right outside of Nashville.

Two in a row, mom’s feeling good. So far I’m not that obviously brain damaged.

-Well what do you do? Do you have a job or are you in school?
-I’m a carpet cleaner in the summer, but I go to school down at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga most of the time.

Mom was blown away at this point, because she had been told not to expect me to be able to answer any of these.

-What year are you in school? How old are you?
-ummm (I had to think about that one)…I’m 20, and I should be in my sophomore year.

Mistake number one. I was 21, and I had completed my junior year of college. “Are you sure about that?” my mom asked. She said I thought about it for a few minutes, and then said yeah, that was the last thing I could remember. She said she asked a few more questions, and throughout them it became apparently clear, I had an entire year just erased from my mind.

I remember my mom telling me that I was in fact older than 20, I had definitely turned 21. She said I had told her about all the friends I had invited out with me to my favorite restaurant for me to celebrate. I remember being confused because she named a few people who I knew were good friends of mine and I knew I would invite them out, I just had no memory of it. I remember asking, “well if I’m 21, how many birthdays have I had since then? What am I? Like 22, 23? How long have I been laying in this bed?”
My mom said she then had to calm me down and convince me I really was 21. But that was the apparent fact, I had remembered general facts about myself remarkably well, but it was clear that an entire year had been wiped clean from my memory.

-Doctors called them “memory islands”
Doctors were right, over the next year I would have random memories pop-up, and I would have to go to my mom or sister or girlfriend to ask if the memories were real (they usually were) and when and where they had taken place. Right now, about a year and a half since the accident, I have very vague memories of the Spring 2010 semester. Realistically, I have maybe 2 memories per month for January, February, March, and April, I have a faint memory of my sister graduating from college at the beginning of May, and June is a clean slate. My memories then pick up around October; it’s a little weird.

-full-time job
Anyway, after waking up, the staff at the Shepherd Center involved me much more strenuously in therapy. I had quite a variety of tasks every day. I was involved with physical therapy, occupational therapy, recreational therapy, speech therapy, psychological therapy, and any other type of therapy you can think of, I was doing it somewhere. Looking back, I can see how much I had to truly learn to do again. When I first woke up I wasn’t the most aware of what I was and wasn’t able to do compared to what I used to be able to do, my mind just wasn’t really grasping that whole concept yet. My mom has told me how fascinating it was to watch me try and do things. My biggest physical hindrance was a thing called a muscle contracture in my right arm. It limited my right arm to where it could only extend to about 30 degrees, and it had caused me to lose all movement and function control with my right hand as well. Again, my mom told me that was the most fascinating thing for her to watch, it was tough for her to watch me struggle with simple things, but still pretty fascinating. For instance, I had to learn how to brush my own teeth again, but I had so much trouble holding the toothbrush with my right arm that I had to come to terms with the fact that I was going to obviously have to come to terms with learning to use my left hand. There were countless other things that I had come so accustomed to doing with my right hand that I would try to do them that way, try and fail, and have to really concentrate on consciously doing the task with my left hand, with the bizarre thought running through my head that I was pretty sure that was how I used to do it, so I wondered why I couldn’t do it that way now (these thoughts were before I truly even realized what I had gone through, and how drastically it had changed me).

-see you later hospital…kinda
Skip forward a couple of awkward moving weeks, and I was officially released from Shepherd Center inpatient where I had to live in a hospital room. Shepherd Center has this wicked awesome little set up; the inpatient hospital portion is on one side of the parking lot, and on the other side of the parking lot is a giant apartment building they have built specifically for when patients like me are dismissed from their inpatient building, but still have several weeks to finish at their outpatient therapy place 20 minutes across town. I was released from Shepherd’s inpatient place officially on October 20, but only on the condition I would live in one of the apartments they provided with my mom.
What are we up to? Like miracle #2756439? Anyways, my dad was released from his rehab facility in North Atlanta 2 days after I was released, AND we were somehow lucky enough to get one of the very few two bedroom apartments in the whole building, so my mom, dad, and I were able to live in our provided apartment while my dad and I both attended outpatient rehab at a facility about 20 minutes from where our apartment was.
I know this setup sounds amazing, but don’t let it fool you, it definitely wasn’t too luxurious. It was an apartment where you walked into the kitchen/living room (yep, one room. pretty awesome huh?), one bedroom in the back where my mom and I slept (she still was required to keep an eye on me), and another bedroom off on one side where my dad slept (he had the splendor of a provided twin sized bed. I kid, I kid, we really were blessed to stumble across a 2 bedroom apartment in the first place). Oh, I almost forgot. Shepherd was generous enough to bring a hospital bed over for me to sleep in because they didn’t yet totally trust me to stay in a bed, so they wanted me to have rails ☺.

-big goof-ball
Speaking of that, remember I was released from inpatient on October 20. I didn’t start my outpatient therapy until October 22, so the 21st I was able to relax a little bit with my mom. I was still in a state where I couldn’t make it through a whole day without a nap, so at about 4 I got laid down for a nap, and my mom said she would wake me up for dinner. My mom has told me that she came into my bedroom at about 5:30 and told me to wake up, because she wanted me to be able to go back to sleep come nighttime. She said I grumpily rolled over, and then started having a seizure. She was able to get into touch with a hospital very quickly, because luckily we were only about 300 feet from one.
All I remember is “waking up” in another random, dark hospital room. My mom and dad were in there with me (my dad’s facility agreed to bring him over so he could be with us when they heard the stunt I was pulling), and I vaguely remember thinking, “geez, again? How long was I out this time?” But I managed to just barely get across a “what…?” To which my mom was happy I finally seemed to be responding, so she jumped in and told me I was at Piedmont Hospital because I had a seizure at our apartment. I also remember asking, “Have I been here for a long time like the last place?” My mom quietly chuckled and answered, “no, no. It’s still Thursday; do you remember lying down to take a nap at the apartment? You had your seizure then, and it’s still the same day.” It took me several minutes to get the whole previous day to come back to me, but it finally did.
We sat around for a while waiting for the doctors to get finished taking a look at my EEG results, and after a while they came back in to talk to us. They explained to us that people who suffer a traumatic brain injury are very susceptible to seizures, but they further explained. Some people have seizures within minutes of a TBI, and this signifies damage to a particular region of the brain (I forget the big fancy name). While some people have a “long-term” seizure, which can range from a couple days after a TBI, to a couple months after a TBI (that’s me), to even a couple years after a TBI. Long term seizures just show that a different region of the brain sustained some deep damage, so I’ll more than likely be on seizure medication for the rest of my life, because they explained that damage to that region of the brain usually cannot repair itself.
So after spending a couple hours there at that hospital, we were able to return home to our apartment, and I was able to go right back to bed to get some sleep before I had my first day of outpatient therapy at a place across town called Pathways.

-new school, well “school”
I called going to therapy at Pathways “going to school” because that is very much what it reminded me of. It started at 8, I had a variety of different therapy sessions, I had a lunch break every day from 11-12, then I had some more therapy from 12-3. I was totally re-living elementary school again, my mom drove me to school everyday, she packed me a little brown bag lunch everyday, and she picked me up and brought me back to the apartment everyday. I was living the dream.
I guess I need to clear something up real quick, I did not have a driver’s license through all this. If you ever have a TBI, the state takes away your license until you pass a test to have your license reinstated.
So, continuing my normal therapy day at Pathways. I was involved in physical, occupational, speech, recreational, psychological therapies until my ears bled. I felt like I did everything. Some of the most memorable things that still stand out to me was physical therapy when I would get strapped into this giant frame that fit around a treadmill so I could try to walk for 10 minutes (my maximum, I hate to admit that) to slowly build up strength in my legs. Another was with my speech therapist. She explained that I was having so much trouble speaking loudly and clearly because the muscles in my throat had become so weak through months of no use, that she got me a little device I had to breathe into everyday while it offered resistance to build back muscle strength in my chest. For my recreational therapy, one day we were taken to a mall and split into groups and we had a scavenger hunt throughout a mall with questions like “in (some random store) what is the cheapest woman’s shoe” and even “in (such and such) arcade, which prize requires the most tickets, and how many tickets?” Fun stuff like that where they could watch us to see if we could read a map to figure out where to go, ask people questions, etc.

-my grand exit
My therapy at Pathways continued until December 23. I was released from Pathways because they felt like I was ready to finally be back n my home environment, but they still wanted me to continue some therapy at Vanderbilt once I got settled in back home. I have some extended family that lives down in south Georgia, and the rest of my family that lives all over the country were going to their house for Christmas with the excited anticipation that my family was going to get to join them. We were able to drive down south from Atlanta on Christmas eve, and spend a few days down there with my whole family who had seen me 6 months earlier, and they were all able to admit they never expected to see me in the environment I was in, after they had seen me in the hospital with 10 different doctors saying they didn’t know how long I would survive.
We then headed home just a day or two before new years. It was great being home again, because I felt like it had been a lifetime since I had been there. As soon as I got home, I was quickly enrolled in some speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy down at Vanderbilt. I had fun saying I had officially made my full circle, because I was finally back to the same place I started.

-continuing issues
In February I had arm surgery to try and take care of that arm problem I spoke about earlier. The surgery was called a contracture release, and it took a few hours and was then followed by a one night stay in the hospital (no big deal by now). The surgery made my arm go from a maximum extension of about 30 degrees to a maximum extension of about 100 degrees. It was a great improvement, but not perfect. After surgery I was put in a specific occupational therapy to continue to improve my arm, and I think my best was maxed out at about 120 degrees.

-more surgeries than a Hollywood celebrity
A few more months of therapy, and in May I had my last surgery. It was an eye surgery because I had a double vision problem caused by my brain injury. The surgery in May helped the problem, but like the arm issue, surgery didn’t fix it entirely. So I had to get a special thing in my glasses lenses called a prism, which helped to correct the remaining issue I was having with my eyes.

I took a week or so break to get over the surgery, and I began realizing that I had to tell myself that what I could do was probably the way I now am. It sounds depressing when I word it like that, but the fact of the matter was many things in my life were now much different, I had to come to trust that God had showed his power and strength through this whole ordeal, and in the words of Popeye “I am yam what I yam.”

-I’m sick of hospitals by now, so let’s leave!
So this story has been really depressing so far, so let me brighten up your day a bit. May was my last surgery, so during the months of May, June, and July of 2011 I was able to take several summer courses at MTSU because it’s a school pretty close to where I am back home and I wanted to ease my way back into the whole school scene since I had been gone from it for a solid year. Coincidentally, I still had several general education classes remaining for me to graduate college, so I was able to take 3 of those classes over summer. I still didn’t have my license back, but my incredibly loving mom drove me to school everyday, because it made her so happy because about a year ago me going to school was the absolute last thing on her mind.

-back for my victory lap at college
In August, I got moved back down to Chattanooga so I could finish out my undergraduate degree at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. My sister lives and works down in Chattanooga, and her lease ran out that summer, so she agreed to look for a place where we could live together. She found a perfect place really close to UTC’s campus, where she could easily take me to school everyday on her way to work (I’m still non-licensed ☹).
It was a dream come true for me, I was finally able to return to UTC to be reunited with a lot of friends. School kicked my tail, simply because I felt like I spent all my time trying to gather old information from the back of my brain, because it felt like it had been about 200 years since I had used any of it.

-awesome huh? you have no idea
All this sounds pretty awesome huh? Well, it gets even better. I know I didn’t mention her much during my story up there, but I had a long time girlfriend that I had been with since my senior year of high school. We had been together for about three and a half years before the accident, and as bad as the accident got she was as solid as a rock. I have enjoyed talking with her about this whole experience, and she had stood her ground and been a light for Christ with the strength she showed through this whole ordeal. Back to it, I had totally gone behind her back and communicated with one of her best friends who lives way out in west Tennessee. We had developed a master plan for her to come into town late one night and then surprise Jenna for breakfast at one of her favorite restaurants there in town. The surprise went great, and the whole rest of the day went so great that I was able to propose to her later that morning, and then surprise her with lunch with her parents that afternoon. But she’s a whole lot better at telling love stories than I am, so I’ll let her tell it if she’s interested.

-back to school
That first semester went well, I passed all my classes even though they were 5x tougher than they ever were before the accident, and I felt like I had to commit 10x the work time for each of them, too. Over December 2011 I was back home for our Christmas break with my family, and I’m not done counting the miracles yet. Over Christmas break I was able to sign up for the classes I have to pass to have my driver’s license reinstated, and pass I did. Now I’m back in Chattanooga for the spring semester, with the hopes and expectations of graduating this coming May.

-I will give the glory to God and no one else the remainder of my life
I should be dead after such a horrible accident like this one, and after all the trauma my body went through. Doctors EVERYWHERE said that. Yet after all these things I am alive (I was told I never would), I’m walking (I was told I never would), I’m talking (I was told I never would), I’m able to feed and take care of myself (I was told I never would), and I’m back at school finishing up a college degree (NO ONE saw that ever happening).
Someone told me this, and I think they were absolutely correct. They said, “There’s not a doctor in the world who can say they are the reason you’re alive. You’re survival is nothing short of a God given miracle, and for you to not tell people that is an insult to him.” I agree with this completely. I’m not saying that I’m still alive because I’m a Christian, I had another good friend who said, “You’re not loved by God a bit more than I am. You were just given a story different than the story I have. Never think that God loves you more because he kept you alive through this whole accident, you are loved by the same God that loves me, and I am loved to the same incomprehensible capacity that you are.” I loved what he had to say as well. I had a strong urge to write this story while it was still fresh in my mind, because I’ll probably amaze myself at the amount I can forget after 5, 10, 25 years. I love this story, and I agree that for me to be given such a remarkable account of God’s power, and not share, is simply me showing my true human like selfishness.


So there you go, please never be afraid to ask me questions. The worst I’ll say is “I don’t know” so don’t hold back. The only section I left out is the story of the night the accident happened. I was given the chance to meet one of the guys on the boat that first responded to us. If the response is positive, that will be my next writing endeavor.

I have never even attempted to make a website before, so hopefully this turns out ok. I hope everyone has a blessing filled day. keep on keeping on.