NEWS

A costly distraction: Rebuilding a life

Story by Bradley W. Parks, photos and video by Shane Flanigan
Tara Kuzma, a physical therapist with Genesis COOR, helps keep Stephanie Latier balanced during a physical therapy session. Stephanie was unable to walk without assistance after leaving inpatient rehabilitation at Ohio State University’s Dodd Hall in Columbus. To view more photos, visit www.zanesvilletimesrecorder.com.

This is part two of the Costly Distraction series. Read part one: close to death and part three: taking control.

The silver Chrysler minivan sat in Pam and Rick Tilley’s driveway covered in tarps and duct tape to hide the passenger side from view for months.

Stephanie Latier had not filed for a lost title while in recovery, so there it sat, casting shadows on the driveway in the evening sun. Seeing it gave Stephanie chills the first few times.

“I came from that,” she said. “It looks worse every time I see it.”

The Chrysler minivan Stephanie Latier was pulled from sat on her parents’ property for several months before being towed away. It was a constant reminder of the crash during that time. “My car looking the way it looks, I don’t need to remember that,” she said. “I just need to remember what I need to learn from it.”

For Emma and Lily, Stephanie’s daughters, first sight of the van was a far different experience because they remembered how the vehicle used to be. Stephanie didn’t remember it at all.

“It wasn’t like a race car on fire or something,” Emma said. “When I saw the car, I would ask, ‘Why is the door torn off?’ Nobody told me at the beginning that my mom was hanging out the window.”

Though the sight of the van frightened Stephanie at first, her inability to remember the crash helped her overcome that fear quicker. Her daughters knew she was safe, so eventually they too became desensitized to seeing the van.

Soon it just became a bother for her family to keep around.

“I’ll kinda miss it,” Stephanie said. “because I drove around with it for like a year or two. I hope that I can retain the memory because every time I see it, it’s a reminder that I’m a miracle. My life is a miracle.”

The family had the van removed June 13.

Shifting expectations

As days passed, the question began to shift from if Stephanie could reclaim life to what kind of life she would reclaim when she fully regained consciousness.

Her parents, family and friends wanted her to be so far ahead of where she was each time they visited the hospital.

“It’s hard to just sit there and look at somebody when there’s nothing you can do,” Rick said. “I mean nothing. Everything’s out of your hands.”

Pam and Rick began to realize their measures of progress did not match up with those of the medical team, so they had to adjust their expectations.

They started to see accomplishment the way Stephanie’s doctors did. Progress was difficult for them to visually measure at first, so with the Tilleys’ shifted mindset came a change in their emotions as well.

“If you seen her leg move, you’d tell the nurse, ‘Hey, her leg moved a little bit!’” Rick said.

That was how the first few weeks progressed. A leg moved here, an arm there. Those small advances triggered such excitement with Stephanie’s parents and children, who desperately needed something about which to be excited.

Stephanie had run into complication after complication. According to Facebook posts from visiting friends, Stephanie would slip in and out of consciousness confused and agitated, trying to remove her tubes. The medical staff continued to sedate her in efforts to immobilize her.

She suffered a lung infection. She went into emergency surgery after a feeding tube was accidentally removed. She developed a fever.

And Stephanie remembered none of it. Friends and relatives would visit. Stephanie would hold their hands and raise her fingers in acknowledgment, still unable to speak, but the memories never stuck.

Stephanie Latier actively used her cell phone, which survived the crash unscathed, throughout her stages of rehabilitation. It was a lifeline to the world around her she couldn’t reach at the time. Stephanie also uses apps like Lumosity, a brain training game, to strengthen her cognitive abilities.

For all of the physical hurdles she faced, the mental block was the biggest one in the way. Her first creation of a memory was the most notable sign of progress, but her friends and family continued to wait and wait for that moment to come.

That was especially difficult for her daughters, who were still in school for months after the crash. For some time, they relied almost exclusively on what people told them, spending a lot of time wondering if their mother would ever wake up.

“Even if it was just a picture or something, we would have asked for that,” Emma said, “but we didn’t because we knew maybe it’s something we shouldn’t have seen at the time. I was right.”

Pam would send text messages to Emma to keep the girls in the loop, but would only highlight progress. She tried to shield her granddaughters from the more gruesome details.

At age 12, Emma was old enough to know her mother’s ordeal was more complicated. She worried, but kept optimistic for she and her younger sister Lily’s well-being. Emma did not want Lily to see their mother in such poor shape.

“She’s 8,” Emma said. “Most of the things she wouldn’t even understand what happened.”

A lifeline at Dodd Hall

Stephanie spent three and a half weeks in intensive care before being transported to Ohio State University’s Dodd Hall for inpatient rehabilitation. However, she almost didn’t make the cut. Dodd Hall has a limited capacity with 60 beds. Pam said doctors wondered how much the treatment could help Stephanie.

Her physical progress still was minimal. She also had yet to form a memory.

“When they told us that she could go to Dodd Hall, she was still strapped to a bed,” Rick said. “We just couldn’t believe it that she got accepted because they told us she had to be able to help herself.”

After being transported from Fairfield Medical Center in Lancaster, Stephanie Latier spent nearly a month in OSU Wexner Medical Center’s intensive care unit. She was sedated to keep her from moving so some of her injuries could heal naturally. She was transferred to Dodd Hall for inpatient rehabilitation March 13.

And they didn’t know if she could, which was a big barrier to entry. A variety of factors allowed the doctors to give Stephanie the green light. She was young. Before the crash, she was in very good shape and maintained proper nutrition.

Had that not been the case, Stephanie could have been denied entrance to Dodd Hall. She most likely would have ended up in a nursing home, possibly for the rest of her life.

That was a reality her parents did not want her to have to face. Stephanie had built a good life for herself. She was an athlete all throughout her childhood and worked with a personal trainer a few times a week in the years leading up to the crash. She had a full-time job and shared a home with her two children.

To recoup any significant portion of that existence would have been near impossible for Stephanie without Dodd Hall’s care or something similar.

“It was a like a celebration time when you found out that she got accepted into Dodd Hall,” Pam said.

Rehab begins

A team of physical therapists and medical professionals descended upon Stephanie’s room March 14. Her first day in Dodd Hall was her first day of work.

“And they said, ‘We’re going to take her down to the gym,’” Rick said.

Pam and Rick had, for the past three and a half weeks, watched their daughter lay in a bed unconscious. The idea of Stephanie in a gym seemed ludicrous.

But the therapists lifted her out of bed, put her in a wheelchair, took her to the gym. She practiced sitting – and eventually standing – up.

It was the first step in rebuilding Stephanie, brick by brick, while her family watched and encouraged her. They were learning just how long it would take to rediscover the daughter, mother and friend they remembered.

Pam said the first few weeks of being in ICU taught crucial lessons in self-care.

“When you’re sitting there all day looking at a hospital bed with your daughter in it, that’s a hard thing,” Pam said. “Both of us had never played solitaire before. ... While she laid there asleep, we kind of got to be masters at solitaire.”

Stephanie and her family were surrounded by other patients in need of critical inpatient rehabilitation at Dodd Hall, some of them in worse condition than Stephanie.

That environment grew heavy.

“Dodd Hall told us it was really (important) just to get your mind away from everything that’s in that room,” Pam said. “You’d go crazy.”

So she carried iPads to Dodd every day. Whenever the weight of their surroundings became too much, they would pull out an iPad and drag the digital cards across the screen to focus on something other than the physical world around them, which seemed to be filled with tragedies.

‘I want to go home’

April 7 started out like most days for Stephanie. Each day she learned the same lesson: She couldn’t get out of bed and walk away.

But something was different about that day for Stephanie and she noticed it as soon as she looked out the window. It wasn’t snowing, nor was there any snow on the ground, which seemed odd to her. She asked the nurse for an explanation.

“She said, ‘It’s April,’” Stephanie said. “And I was like, ‘No it’s not. It’s February.’”

Stephanie remembered what month it was – or at least what month she remembered it being the last time she could remember. In that moment, her memory had revealed itself for the first time since the crash.

Stephanie then began a long search for answers, trying to comprehend the foreign injuries on her body and why exactly she was in the hospital.

For some time, no one could tell Stephanie how bad her injuries were or how far she had to go in recovery. Filling Stephanie in on what transpired in her recent past was a gradual process. People told her more information tiny piece by tiny piece.

After the crash, Stephanie’s memory of the past 15 years of her life had become just as blurred as the road in her frosted back windows on Feb. 18.

Though Stephanie was physically in the ICU toying with her tubes, issuing non-verbal responses and acknowledging her visitors, she was mentally distant for nearly two months.

One of the only things Stephanie remembers from her slips into consciousness is being transported through an underground tunnel from the intensive care unit to Dodd Hall.

Stephanie already was severely shaken. Piling on bad memories could have made her situation even more stressful. Delivering the story piecemeal helped Stephanie understand things better.

She learned about the crash, how her head smashed through the passenger window of her van, and how her brain would never be the same.

Despite this, she did not fully grasp the situation because she didn’t remember the experiences people told her she had, almost like being convicted of a crime she never committed.

It eventually became important for people to issue subtle reminders of her condition.

April McCurdy, assistant physical therapist, works with Stephanie Latier on her balance using yoga therapy at Genesis COOR. Stephanie spent nearly five weeks in Dodd Hall before moving out April 17 and beginning her outpatient rehabilitation sessions at Genesis.

“She would see people in the hallway and she’d look at me and say, ‘I don’t belong here. They’re in really bad shape,’” Pam said. “She couldn’t believe that was her a week before.”

At one point early in her recovery, Stephanie looked to her mother and, with the trach tube in, mouthed the words, “I want to go home.”

“I walked over to her and I said, ‘You have to be able to walk first,’” Pam said.

Stephanie gripped a plexiglass tray attached to her wheelchair with her hands. She leaned forward and turned her feet inward ever slightly.

“That’s the first time I seen her feet move and I just cried and cried and cried,” Pam said.

To Pam, it was a tangible sign of progress – one of the first she could latch onto.

To that point it had been impossible to know what Stephanie was thinking throughout the course of her recovery. Did she really get why she was here? Did she know just how difficult it would be to leave? The moment Stephanie moved her feet was the first time Pam was able to answer those questions with yes.

Stephanie showed an understanding of her own situation and the motivation to emerge from it. She found a goal and demonstrated her will to achieve it.

“I said, ‘You’re on your way, but you just got to go a little bit farther,’” Pam said. “I’ll never forget that.”

New challenges

Stephanie spent a total of four and a half weeks in Dodd Hall, building up the physical and mental capacity to operate not necessarily on her own, but without the critical care of the facility’s experts. She moved out April 17.

Dodd Hall is very much a controlled environment where medical professionals could prepare her for daily life after a traumatic brain injury, but living outside of that setting presented a new array of challenges for Stephanie and everyone around her.

Stephanie Latier and her daughter Emma rummage through boxes upon boxes of what used to be their old life. The basement floor and a section of the garage at Stephanie’s parents’ home are filled to the brim with their daughter’s belongings. Stephanie lost her home after the crash. “It's a lot of memories,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.”

While she was in the hospital, Stephanie’s parents had to manage the minute details of her life.

“It’s a 24-hour thing,” Rick said. “It’s not something that you just leave the hospital and go do what you want to do.”

Stephanie had moved away from Zanesville several years ago. She kept in good touch with her parents and would bring her girls to visit on occasion.

But her parents were not with her enough to possibly know what sort of daily structure Stephanie had created. They had to figure that out to keep her life running while Stephanie was unable to do so herself.

“We had to stop and check on her place and figure out what was going to happen there – bills and things like that that she had. Get her mail,” Rick said. “Did you file your taxes? Did you do this? Did you do that? We didn’t know. She’s on her own.”

When they knew Stephanie and the girls would be moving in with them, the Tilleys packed up Stephanie’s things from her apartment. They piled their basement high with boxes and containers full of things Stephanie didn’t remember buying.

Pam and Rick readied themselves to begin raising their 32-year-old daughter.

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.

The three-part series concludes Monday.

Distracted driving data

•Ohio law banned texting while driving 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