A costly distraction: Taking control

This is part three of the Costly Distraction series. Read part one: Close to death and part two: Rebuilding a life.

Outside Genesis Center for Occupational and Outpatient Rehabilitation, Stephanie Latier walked up and down a small stretch of sidewalk bathed in the hot sun of early summer.

Tara Kuzma, the physical therapist, told her to focus on walking with a sturdier gait, avoid wobbling back and forth on her hips, and swing her arms. Since Stephanie started walking on her own, her stride became more of a waddle as she worked to build strength in her legs and stability in her hips.

“Your foot placement is too deliberate or it looks too deliberate,” Kuzma told her as Stephanie paused to receive instruction.

She went back to walking as Kuzma looked on. Heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe. Stephanie mechanically swung her arms at the elbows, fists clenched like she was pulling weeds from a flower pot strapped to her waist.

Kuzma then took Stephanie inside where she laid flat on her back with an orange physioball under her feet, which were dressed in black and red socks decorated with snowflakes.

Struggling to keep her knees together, Stephanie dug her heels into the ball, using her core and hamstrings to pull the ball closer to her tailbone, then slowly pushed it away and repeated.

The ball shook wildly as Stephanie’s muscles trembled and her knees tried to pry themselves apart moving the ball back and forth along the padded bed.

“Control, control,” Kuzma said.

Support system

Pam and Rick fed Stephanie until she got to the point at which she could hold a spoon. She also had difficulty swallowing.

Pam had to bathe her.

Walking presented a number of challenges. At first, Stephanie could not walk anywhere by herself without someone supporting her back. After that, someone would hold her by an arm.

Her daughter Emma, 12, volunteered to be that person whenever possible. When Stephanie returned to her parents’ home after being released from the hospital, Emma hardly left her mother’s side. She opened doors. She got food for her. She wouldn’t fall asleep until she knew her mother was in bed.

“I would go up and tuck her in and she’d follow me downstairs and tuck me in,” Stephanie said.

Stephanie had not conquered steps until the end of May. She had to square herself to chairs and couches to sit down and stand up properly. She had trouble bending down. Her upper body strength was severely diminished. Her fingers were only at 30 percent strength.

Both of her daughters had to take on new responsibilities to help their mom recover, especially as she started walking without her walker.

Stephanie pushed herself, sometimes past her limits.

“It was good seeing her try a lot harder, but the scary thing was is that we didn’t want her to fall without anybody there,” Emma said.

Tough as rebuilding physical strength was and continues to be, reconstructing the years of life she cannot recall has been Stephanie’s biggest challenge since regaining consciousness.

On April 7, Stephanie looked at a scattered pile of stray puzzle pieces from different boxes. Her task became creating a picture of a monumental part of her life she does not remember living.

From that point on, Stephanie has been in a constant battle with her memory, questioning what is true and what is false.

She said it is difficult for people to recognize that struggle. It is as if someone took every old photo album she had, ripped the pictures to shreds and hid the scraps.

“I lost so much,” she said. She mapped out a timeline of her life with her hands, extending her arms out to the sides. “Birth to death, then missing in between.”

The hole in her memory spans a period of about 15 years. Age 17 and beyond is but a cloud in her mind with a few shreds of memories floating in the abyss.

She arrived home expecting her dog Fonzi to be at the door, but Fonzi died last year. One time she set a place at the table for her brother who moved out of the state nearly two decades ago.

It took reminders from friends and family to let her know what was true.

When she finds one of those tiny bits of information she thinks may be real, Stephanie has to latch onto it, pull it closer and examine it.

She begins searching for the full memory like an archaeologist picks and sweeps and piles of dust, dirt and rock in hopes of finding a piece of the past that doesn’t nearly paint the whole picture, but makes it a little bit more whole.

“I question myself a lot,” she said. “Like, I’ll see something and remember a memory, but then I really have to question myself. Is my mind putting this in? Is this false information? A false picture in my memory? Or is this something that really happened?”

The moment someone corroborates a memory for her is one of relief for Stephanie. It makes her focus less on what memories she lost and more on those she still has.

Breaking point

By July, Stephanie could operate fairly well on her own. She wobbled less while walking. She built up enough endurance to walk a 5K. Her memory and cognitive ability were much sharper as well.

While she was at Ohio State, though, doctors told Stephanie and her family it would be anywhere from a year to 18 months until they would know what kind of permanent brain damage she would have, so there is still much to be determined.

Nearly five months after the crash, things had grown much more complicated for the family.

Stephanie’s strong will showed itself in other iterations. Her stubbornness is one of the many reasons she recovered so well, so quickly. But it was also one of the reasons, midway through that journey, she hit a sizable bump.

As Stephanie learned more and more about her past, she and her parents began to stack up her current life against the life she had before the crash.

Stephanie said her parents “know I won’t be the same, but they expect me to be the same,” which led to tension.

On the night of July 12, after an explosive argument, Pam dropped Stephanie off at the Zanesville Police Department. A friend from Columbus came to pick her up, housing her for the night.

Stephanie decided not to return to her parents’ house, instead staying with family friends in Pataskala. Her daughters are staying with their father in Pickerington.

She saw a psychiatrist and took an IQ test. Her score is back to where it was before the crash. However, she still struggles emotionally processing particularly delicate events. Stephanie said she has issues with her temper as well.

Stephanie has not spoken to her parents since the night of the argument.

Communication with her parents was an issue from the start. When stormy weather blew through the Tilley household, Stephanie could no longer just leave like she did before the crash.

She couldn’t drive. Walking off the property was too dangerous, and she could not have gone very far anyway.

The family had to face any rough patches head on. The most they could do was go to separate rooms.

Every family member dealt with issues. Pam and Rick had been empty-nesters for more than a decade. Stephanie’s daughters, though matured by assisting their mother in recovery, still were young, impressionable and sensitive.

“(Stephanie’s) lifestyle is a lot different than my husband and I’s lifestyle,” Pam said. “We’ve got our habits, she’s got her habits, so it was a big adjustment at first.”

The family had to try to strike compromises.

Stephanie’s cell phone became a huge object of contention because of its role in her crash. Her parents thought it was unhealthy for their daughter to maintain such consistent use of it. For Stephanie, it was a link to the outside world, one she rarely saw after the crash.

“I try to limit myself on (my phone), but having a brain injury kind of cuts you off from society,” she said.

Her phone helped her learn about the life she had, but her parents thought it only distracted her from the life she was living. They did not know where that life was going, and neither did Stephanie.

Both parties had bent to the point of breaking.

Refusing to fail

A small outdoor shelter juts off the end of Genesis COOR. Underneath the structure is an old, free-standing basketball hoop lowered to 8 feet.

The May sun scorched the pavement surrounding the shelter while rows of cars baked in the parking lot.

Physical therapist Tara Kuzma stood behind Stephanie, holding her just above the hips. Stephanie spun an old basketball between her hands, feeling the gritty lines near the seams of the ball where the pavement had roughed up the tired leather.

Her eyes dialed in on the rim. Her tongue gripped her upper lip, tightening with focus. Stephanie raised the ball in front of her face and, as if she had cut the rope of a catapult, her arm sprung forward at the elbow, launching the ball toward the rim.

The basketball careened toward the plastic backboard, crashing off the blue square and through the rim, pulling the dirtied white nylon strings as it made its trip back toward Earth.

Stephanie threw her arms in the air and shouted exuberantly. Then she shot the ball again, made it again and shouted again.

“You’re unreal,” Kuzma said. “I don’t know how you didn’t play basketball.”

Shooting baskets is one of the moments Stephanie holds up as a victory in her recovery, as was swinging golf clubs the first day she attended therapy at Genesis.

“Ever since the accident, I failed eating. I failed drinking. I failed everything,” she said. “Not anymore.”

Stephanie next wants to kick a soccer ball with her daughters.

Stephanie was captain of the soccer team at John Glenn High School. She looks back on her athletic career with fondness, marking it as the point in her timeline where she was physically at her strongest.

Kicking a soccer ball is one of those moments when she said she will “feel alive again.”

“That’s my long-term goal,” she said. “I’d make it a short-term goal, but I want to be realistic.”

For the average 32-year-old, it is difficult to imagine a world in which kicking a soccer ball is a long-term goal.

It has become that way for Stephanie too as she begins to think more about her future.

After leaving her parents’ house, Stephanie canceled the rest of her therapy sessions at Genesis. She walks almost every day to stay in shape and recently was accepted to start additional outpatient therapy at Ohio State.

However, her primary focus now is figuring out a new life.

Stephanie said she hopes her stay in Pataskala is short-term. She wants to try to have her own place to live with her children and has even thought about learning to drive again. Her parents said they want her to achieve those things too, but it is uncertain when or if those things will come.

Stephanie has learned a lot about her old life in almost half a year of rehabilitation. Not long ago she began realizing she could not have that life back.

“She’s a little different,” her daughter Lily said, “but it’s not a bad different, just a different.”

No matter how much she recovered, Stephanie would always be different. She is starting to accept that she will never fully heal.

But by continuing to deny it, Stephanie is able to strive for a better life, one she is piecing together day by day.

“If I were to accept the fact I’d never be normal again, I’d never get out of bed,” she said.

So she tries her best to stay positive and optimistic when considering her future. She probably will not recover everything from her life before the crash. She may not even get most things, but that will not keep her from aiming for them.

“Even if I’m lying to myself that things are getting better, I have to maintain that (optimism),” she said.

Stephanie thinks her positive outlook on life is something she can control and control is the very thing she wants right now because she has not had it in so long.

For a brief point in her life, Stephanie lost control. Now, she could spend a lifetime trying to get it back.

bparks2@gannett.com

740-868-3732

Twitter: @Bradley_W_Parks

About the series

Stephanie Latier suffered a traumatic brain injury in a February car crash that she attributes to distracted driving. Her attempt to regain the life she nearly lost illustrates the delicate challenges of living with TBI, and the potential consequences of distracted driving.

Distracted driving data

•Ohio law banned texting while driving starting in August 2012.

•Nearly 18,000 distracted driving crashes occurred in Ohio last year, 141 in Muskingum County.

•The number of distracted driving crashes in Ohio increased by more than 300 from 2013 to 2014.

•In 2014, more than 3,000 distracted driving crashes resulted in injuries, 14 in fatalities.

Source: Ohio Department of Public Safety