The Background Is an Ad I Found in a Sports Illustrated Magazine for the 2004 Olympics

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When I started this PowerPoint, I decided to make it more personal in order to make it more interesting. So this is my story, and it revolves around my good friend Jolene who suffered a severe Spinal Cord Injury last summer. This is a glimpse of the trials she went through, a sample of the crosses she bore, and how I suffered through them with her.

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The background is an ad I found in a Sports Illustrated Magazine for the 2004 Olympics.

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Persons with an incomplete injury have some spared sensory or motor function below the level of injury – the spinal cord was not totally damaged or disrupted. In a complete injury, nerve damage obstructs every signal coming from the brain to the body parts below the injury.

While there's almost always hope of recovering function after a spinal cord injury, it is generally true that people with incomplete injuries have a better chance of getting some return.

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Spinal cord injury involves damage to the nerves within the spinal canal; most SCIs are caused by trauma to the vertebral column, thereby affecting the spinal cord's ability to send and receive messages from the brain to the body's systems that control sensory, motor and autonomic function below the level of injury.

After injury, nerve cells, or neurons, of the peripheral nervous system (PNS), which carry signals to the limbs, torso, and other parts of the body, are able to repair themselves. Injured nerves in the central nervous system, however, are not able to regenerate.

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There are four regions of the Spinal Cord: Cervical, Thoracic, Lumbar, and Sacral.

Jolene’s injury occurred at T4 and it is complete, meaning that she lost all sensation and control of the muscles below her chest. She has since regained some control of her abdomen and is expected to regain more in the first couple of years after her injury.

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While Jolene was in the ICU, the main goal was stabilization. In the accident, she lost one of her kidneys and her spleen. One of her shoulder blades was broken and she suffered a small fracture to her C1 vertebrae. She lay flat on her back while wearing a C-collar (neck brace), had two chest tubes to drain the fluid in her abdominal cavities, a tube in her throat to help her breath, numerous IVs and feeding tubes, and her face and head were wrapped in bandages. Her blood pressure was dangerously low during the first night. She could barely open her eyes. But the first time I went to visit her on the day after the accident, she squeezed my hand while I was talking to her and I knew that she knew I was there.

The second time I went to the hospital, I was not allowed to see Jolene. She was too unstable. As of yet, no one was explicitly telling Jolene what her condition was, but her mom told me that day that Jolene had said to her sister, “Am I a paraplegic?” And her sister said yes.

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After about a week and a half in the ICU, Jolene was stable enough for back surgery. For the surgery, Jolene had to wear a “halo” to keep her spinal cord aligned. The halo was screwed into Jolene’s temples, and Jolene had sores there for a long time. During the surgery, the doctors placed two titanium rods in her back to connect the five vertebrae from T4 to T8. They also fused some of her ribs back to her spine by grafting bone from her hip. After her surgery she was fitted for a back brace and was then able to begin sitting up. Once she was stable enough from the surgery, she was moved off ICU and onto the Med-Surg floor.

Physical therapy focused on Jolene’s upper-body strength, even though the c-collar limited her movement and she had a weight restriction on one of her arms because of the broken shoulder blade.

Occupational therapy taught Jolene how to live again, how to do the things that had once seemed automatic. They taught her how to do laundry, how to cook, how to simply get around.

When Jolene moved to Rehab only 23 days after the accident, it was a miracle. When she had first gone into the hospital, the doctors said she would be in ICU until August.

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Since the staples went up so far on Jolene’s back, her c-collar had started to irritate it, so it was a very good thing when the staples were removed.

July 14 was Jolene’s first outing. She went to a movie with one of her therapists and her boyfriend.

During one visit in July, Jolene wanted to visit the nurses who took care of her while she was in ICU, the nurses who saved her life. I was leading the way with Jolene and her mom, and her mom said, “When your visitors know the hospital as well as you do, it’s been too long.” And I agreed. It had been too long.

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These pictures are from before Jolene learned how to transfer herself. The nurses would put the straps around Jolene and the EZ Lift would pick her p like a sack of potatoes and swing her over to the bed and lay her down.

Now she uses a small board to transfer herself. One end of the board rests on her chair and the other end rests on her bed, or a car seat, wherever she is moving to. Then she simply picks up her legs one at a time and scooches across the board.

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The nurses had been trying for a long time to get Jolene in the shower, but there were always little complications: nausea, dizziness, blood pressure. But she finally made it.

Jolene used to swim in high school, so when she was able to go swimming, I was so happy for her because it used to make her so happy. She was wheeled down a ramp into the pool, and then she simply floated out of the wheelchair. She wore special booties on her feet to keep them from sinking, but her therapists said they had never seen anyone look so good in the water as Jolene. It was natural to her, it was home.

I thought about not including the fact that she cathed herself in here, but then I realized that it was a major feat and it was something that she was very excited about and very proud of; she’d been trying for a long time to accomplish that. The first thing Jolene said to me when I walked in that day was, “I cathed myself today!” She knew it was something she was going to have to master, and she did it.

As happy as the thought of going home was, it was also scary. Jolene knew that she could manage in the hospital with the nurses and therapists, but now she had to see if she could survive at home.

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When Jolene went home at the end of August, she continued going to therapy three times a week. In January she went back to school as a sophomore at the University of Michigan. Her major is psychology. There is a shuttle on campus that will take her anywhere she needs to go at any time, but she usually gets around on her own. She will be done with therapy at the end of the semester. She got engaged in February to her boyfriend of five years.

When I was home for Christmas I went to visit Jolene at school. She told me later that she was sorry if things seemed weird, that she has a hard time being herself since the accident and that it would be like we would have to become friends all over again. I knew what she meant, because the old Jolene was crazy and unpredictable, and Jolene now is striving to define herself in the confines of a wheelchair.

I remember so many days in the hospital when Jolene would be in a bad mood. I could tell she was down, or crabby, or not feeling well. And she still has those days, but not as often as before. Considering her circumstances, she should be allowed as many bad days as she wants, but somehow she still embraces the world with a smile.

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This background is a painting my sister did last semester. It is now hanging in Jolene’s dorm room.

The quote is from Nick Buoniconti, who started the Bouniconti Foundation after his son became a quadriplegic. The Buoniconti Foundation does a lot of work with the Miami Project, which is one of the largest research projects on SCIs in the nation.