Weathering Any Storm

During a recent storm, a tree fell onto the home Kimberly Ramsey shares with her husband, Radney, in Montgomery, Alabama. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but their home needed repairs. Kimberly waves off the damage and repairs as an inconvenience — she says the benchmark has moved for her and her family.

“You can replace drywall. You can have carpenters come in and fix it. We were working on fixing a brain there for a while. That's different,” she explains.

The brain Kimberly is referring to belongs to her son, Hawthorne. In August, the 26-year-old, who lives in Franklin, Tennessee, fell and hit his head during a brief illness that had caused his sodium levels to drop. A neighbor found him soon after his fall and called 911.

After transferring from a small local hospital, Hawthorne spent 19 days in Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s ICU, and for 10 of those, he used a ventilator to help him breathe. He had three skull fractures along with brain bleeds.

Kimberly said three things pointed them toward Shepherd Center for Hawthorne’s rehabilitation. A friend who worked at Shepherd texted them to check in and see what she could do. A co-worker whose husband had sustained a traumatic brain injury years before called Kimberly to recommend Shepherd. And the trauma surgeon who worked with Hawthorne also recommended the hospital.

She remembers the day they arrived at Shepherd for the inpatient Brain Injury Rehabilitation Program.

“Our first nurse was Bob Suter … He was awesome … He was so helpful and informative. We had literally just followed an ambulance from Nashville to Atlanta. We had not been in our home in five weeks. We have been living in Franklin, Tennessee. My sister would ship us boxes because we packed in a minute and a half, thinking we'd be back in a few days based on the information we had, and we got up there, and we didn't go back home. We just didn't. So, Bob was super helpful. He gave us the grand tour. He was able to tell us what was what, and we were able to get moved into the Blank Residences. That was a godsend for us.”

Hawthorne’s brain injury led to increased anxiety for him, so even with housing down the street, Kimberly and Radney took turns sleeping on an air mattress in his room.

“My husband and I would just swap out. One would go sleep in the Blank Residence, and one would sleep on the floor in his room. He was still on a feeding tube at that point… still on the trach…

“Therapy started almost immediately,” Kimberly says. And that's what the trauma surgeon mentioned as one of the reasons that Shepherd was so important to him … he could start therapy. He could go ahead and start a lot of the things that would help him get better, even while still having the trach.”

Hawthorne worked on balance, memory, verbal processing, reaction time, and fine motor skills. He could walk without assistance but wanted to get back to running, something he did often before his injury.

Initially, Hawthorne’s medical team thought he’d need four to six weeks of inpatient rehabilitation. But Hawthorne improved so quickly that he graduated from the inpatient program and moved on to Shepherd Pathways, Shepherd’s outpatient brain injury rehabilitation program, after just 11 days.

At Pathways, he continued with physical, occupational, and speech therapies and began vocational rehabilitation to prepare for a return to work. After his discharge from Pathways, he attended speech therapy and completed return-to-drive testing closer to his parents’ home.

Just seven months after his injury, Hawthorne is living independently again, has returned to work full-time, is back to running, and has returned to driving. Kimberly has had some time to reflect on the journey she has been on as a parent.

“It's unlike anything I've ever experienced — seeing your child injured in that way,” she says. “I mean, we've had broken bones. We've had the normal kids’ stuff. We've had surgeries. … This was a new level, I think, having absolutely zero control as a parent of how this is working for your child and how they are healing and what is happening to them. Letting go of that for me personally is difficult. I'm a type triple-A … but I had to learn that I was in the best hands in the country for what was happening to us.”

Caring for Yourself as a Caregiver

Kimberly says their family really pulled together and supported each other, and that friends were also a huge support.

She remembers Hawthorne’s nurse at Vanderbilt telling her that he needed her to sleep and to remember to eat. “He said, ‘I’ve got him. I promise I’ve got him…But I need you to not pass out on my floor…I don’t need to be taking care of you, too,” Kimberly recalls.

“So, after that, that was in the forefront of my brain. So, we made some decisions based on that to help us make it the long haul, you know, this is a marathon, not a sprint,” she says.

Once Hawthorne transferred to Pathways, Kimberly started exercising again, sometimes with him once he was cleared to walk outside.

“I'm a four-day-a-week exercise person, and that got shut down immediately. And I could feel that. I could feel my stress levels, you know? So, I made sure that that got back into my life as quickly as possible as a way for me to just kind of cope,” she says.

“I also journaled a lot. I decided that this was too much information to build up every day, with what we would learn in rounds every morning from the five specialists who were his team. So, I would do a brain dump into a journal of all this information. I haven't gone back to read it, but I did that all the way through Shepherd Center, every day, just to kind of clear my head a little bit.”

She has shared what she learned about taking care of herself with other parents she knows whose child is facing illness or injury.

“I have been giving this advice to parents,” she says. “‘I don't know what care looks like for every person but sleeping and eating are a given. … Please find out what it looks like to care for yourself, even though it feels like it's nearly impossible because you are not your focus. Your child is your focus. But as Shaba (Hawthorne’s first nurse) said, if I don't take care of myself, I'm not going to be able to take care of him.

“‘So, looking through that lens, remember to take care of yourself somehow, whatever that looks like. If it's just going for a walk for 30 minutes, or if it's just going to a restaurant and getting something to eat in a different setting than a hospital. Let the medical team do their job and … that gives you, hopefully, permission to, in small ways, take care of yourself.’”

Written by Ruth Underwood