Traumatic Brain Injury | Memoir | Poetry

In Humble Tribute to Mary Jane

A girl I will never forget

I still remember her despite the years, A teenage girl with close-cropped, dark brown hair that barely covered scars above her ears from urgent surgery for brain repair She looked so vulnerable lying there in isolation coz of golden staph She couldn’t speak or move her limbs herself Her eyes were open but ‘no one was home’; or so I was told by the nursing staff who, like me, gowned up to enter her room

It was my first day as ‘speech therapist’, the neurosurgery ward, my domain Six names of patients written on my list the first was David, next came Mary Jane She’d suffered severe trauma to her brain the sole survivor of a horror crash her life upended in a speeding rush that killed her friends one Sunday afternoon Now she lay covered in a blotchy rash as I tried feeding her with a teaspoon

A naso-gastric tube was still in place The tracheostomy had been removed She had a good swallow and cough reflex I carefully introduced oral food and spoke to her to stimulate her mind I visited her once or twice a day until the contagion had gone away An orderly wheeled her to my office she knew who I was but she couldn’t say so nodded her head and smiled with her eyes

When later she was transferred to rehab I thought I would never see her again I’d played my part; someone else had the job of helping her with communication Two years went past and many patients seen when I observed a young woman walking towards me down the corridor, smiling I knew it was her; she knew it was me ‘Thank you,’ she said awkwardly, ‘for helping.’ I am still humbled by that memory.

© Carolyn Hastings 2023

Dedicated to Mary Jane who, at the age of 18 years, sustained a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) in a horrific car crash that changed the course of her life.

Mary Jane was only a few years younger than me when I met her on my first day in my first job as a recently qualified speech pathologist (we called ourselves ‘speech therapists’ back then). Me, a new grad, thrown straight in the deep end — acute, adult neurology-neurosurgery. I loved it!!

Some patients leave a lasting impression. Mary Jane was one of those people. So was David, the first name on my list. Forty plus years later, I can still remember the ward, their rooms, the beds they were in, and me standing by their beds trying to be the best speech pathologist I could be — for them.

I don’t know what brought Mary Jane to the hospital that day I met her in the corridor. Or what made her retrace the path to the allied health services wing. It seemed, however, that she was a woman on a mission. Maybe her mission was to connect the dots; to somehow piece together what had happened to her since that fateful day of the accident two years earlier.

Her hair was longer, and best of all, she was walking and talking! Not in the way we would call normal but she was unaided. No wheelchair. No walking stick. No communication devices. She’d achieved a level of independence that I thought would have been impossible given the severity of her brain injury.

Mary Jane was on that day — and I hope she still is — a living testament to the human spirit that never gives up, and the capacity and resilience of the human body to recover.

To have played a part in her recovery, to have been witness to what she had achieved in such a relatively short period of time, and to have been the recipient of her gratitude was — and still is — one of the most humbling experiences of my career. 🙏

Many thanks to Marilyn J Wolf for providing the impetus for this story with her poem, Being Humble —

A Note about the Poetry

I’ve written the poem in 10-line stanzas called dizains. Each line is written in iambic pentameter (five sets of alternating, unstressed-stressed syllables). Dizains have a strict ababbccdcd end-rhyme scheme.

If you liked my Mary Jane memoir story, you might also like this one about Prill — another woman with a TBI who inspired me in my early days of speech therapy—

Thank you so much for reading. 🙏 💕

I am an Australian speech pathologist, educator, author, poet and editor for an online poetry publication. Feel free to connect with me here on Medium or via Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

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