Originally, the plan was to postpone my Senior year of High School for as long as a year, until I was capable of completing it. At this point, doctors believed that I would be about 80% in a year and finish my full recovery of all brain function in about 18 months total. As you'll see, this didn't happen, but the idea of postponing my high school graduation was given to us by my Doctor and Psychologist.
I competed at a national 4-H competition the year before, and at the time, the local newspaper had done a story on my team. Since the owner of our local newspaper had seen me and spoken to me on repeated occasions, they sent a columnist to interview me and do a story on my injury and recovery. The young woman they sent happened to be the same reporter who had done a story a year before. She came in my room (about a week before my release) and began a fairly extensive interview on what had happened. At this point, emotion (and vocal inflection) had just come back. The reporter asked me to walk her through the evening of my accident.
Up until this point, I could remember up until about three hours before the accident. I was traveling with my horse judging team, and I we were driving through LaPine, and that was all I knew. When I started to talk to the reporter about that night though, I remembered everything. Distressed, I started to cry as I told her the whole story.
At the conclusion of my trip, we had decided to go out to dinner, but when we got to the restaurant, I realized I had left my wallet in the glove box of the rental car, which was being returned by the chaperone of my trip. I called her, and we decided to meet about 15 minutes away and pick up my wallet. My mother and I went to get the wallet, and by the time we returned to the restaurant Dad was almost done with dinner. We had a little bit of food, and then I wanted to go home to ride my horse. It was nearly dark, and I had a horse show in two days so I wanted to use the daylight. Mom and Dad let me have one of the cars, and I drove home with my brother and started to tack up my horse.
That’s all I remember.
The particularly distressing part about this whole episode is that I remember that I felt bad that night. It was terrible. Everyone seemed displeased with me (my coach, my Dad for missing the dinner, and my parents for forgetting my wallet) and I was mentally resolving to make it up to all of them later. But instead, my parents drove home and then about an hour later had to watch me being loaded up into a helicopter.
While my Mom told about how heart-wrenching it is to see your daughter shaven, stitched up, and in a coma, I cried more.
When the newspaper article came out, it was a wonderful representation of what had happened, and the success that we had seen in the hospital.
And we had seen success. My physical therapist didn’t see me for about a week, and when she returned she couldn’t stop talking about all the amazing improvements I had made since she left. Of course no recovery speed was fast enough for me, but I began to understand how unusual my recovery really was. I went on a field-trip to the local High Desert Museum just a few days before I got out. My driver was talking to me before we left. She told me, “You know, I think I’ve honestly seen about as much progress in you in a week as I see in most head patients in a month.”
One of my friends who came to visit me said she was in a plane (her Dad’s a pilot) with a couple of medical personnel, and one of them turned to the other and said, “Did you hear about that Shoffner kid?”
Also, one of my Dad’s employee’s wives works for the hospital. They were at a party where there were a lot of medical personnel, and the employee said that I had come up in conversation repeatedly.
Quite probably the most amazing part of my recovery (for me and everyone else) was my positive attitude and my parent's believing. My mom put Bible verses on the walls in my room, and we prayed every night before I went to bed. My parents and I only spoke positives while I was recovering; we told all the therapists that I wanted a 115% recovery, instead of just 100%.
With all the positives that we spoke and all our prayer, God blessed me greatly. It is not uncommon for brain patients to curse (which I did) and be rude to hospital personnel (which I never did). Many brain patients are extremely gloomy and even violent, but I was only ever bright and cheerful. I am so thankful to God for the remarkable strength that I had during the hospital portion of my recovery, and for the AMAZING process that I showed throughout my stay (and at home).
No comments:
Post a Comment