Jeremy Shares His Story

I want to tell you my story, so you never have your own story to tell.

My name is Jeremy Buschmohle.  On July 29, 1997, I was a happy 20 year old college student attending Central Michigan University and was home for the summer.  My life was great.  I had a summer job working at Print Max, a printing company.  I was even making money.  There was nothing I could complain about on July 29, 1997.

I could never have imagined what would happen on July 30.  I was supposed to go out with my really good friend, Matt, but the plans fell through.  So another friend, Prince, came over with his car and he asked me to hang out with him.  I was the type of person who would rather hang out then stay home and do nothing.  And so I made a fateful decision.  I knew he had a suspended license but that didn’t matter to me.  I was twenty and invincible.  Since he had a really fast Mustang 5.0 that he had souped up to be able to drive to a drag strip to race other cars, I let him drive his car when we decided to go out.  I liked the speed as much as he did.  And I never thought anything could happen to me or hurt me.  Remember, I was 20 years old and invincible.

But I was very wrong…almost dead wrong.  What happened next, changed… my… life forever.

Our destination was a parking lot on Maple and Lahser where everyone hung out.  That parking lot is only two miles from my home.  We never made it.  Less than half a mile from that parking lot we crashed.  My then buddy got behind a few slow moving cars and got impatient.  He decided to pass them all illegally. He drove into the opposite direction lane.  As we were passing he saw a car coming directly at us. There was no way to get back into our lane. The line of cars he had been trying to pass was way too long.

So he thought the next best move was to turn the wheel and take the car off the road.  But that didn’t work.  The driver of the oncoming car had the same idea.  Our car was skidding off the road.  His car hit the front passenger door causing our car to flip over horizontally a couple of times.  I hit my head on the windshield, then the dashboard and then the side window.  The car was a 1986.  It had no passenger air bags.  What stopped my head was the dashboard.  The dashboard was my airbag.  When his car came to a stop it was on its side with the passenger side on the bottom.

In case you’re wondering, I was wearing my seatbelt. And this was no ordinary seatbelt.  It was a racing harness designed to protect my lap and shoulders.  But the only working part protected my lap.  The rest of me was left free to fly around inside the car.

After the impact and the car came to a dead stop.  Prince was able to climb out of his window.  He thought he smelled a gas leak and was scared the car would explode.  Lucky for me there was a sun roof in his car.  And he pulled me out through it.

Now, what I just told you is what other people told me.  I was unconscious.  I have no memory of what happened on my own.  I believe God sent an angel disguised as a doctor because he told my friend how to care for me until the ambulance arrived.

From what I was told I was in bad shape.  The EMT’s, or emergency medical technicians, had to perform an onsite tracheotomy.  They had to make sure I could breathe.  Once they did that the ambulance took me to the ER at Royal Oak Beaumont Hospital.  Fortunately, I was taken to one of the top trauma centers in the U.S.A.

But sometimes even being in a top rated hospital doesn’t solve the problem just because you are there.  A priest was called in that first night to give me last rites.  As you can tell by my being here, I didn’t need them.  I hope there isn’t an expiration date on being given last rites.  I’m putting them in lay away for, hopefully, much later in life.

And so I lived.  But that didn’t mean I just walked out of the hospital.  Now the work began.  More hard work than I had ever imagined I would have to do in my whole life.  I was in a coma for two and a half weeks.  Now this is important to know.  The longer the coma the harder and longer the rehab.  My rehab in the hospital lasted from the day of the accident until December.  Five months.  And this was only the beginning of my rehab.

From the moment I was in the coma my life as I had known it was on pause.  Then when I woke up from the coma it was on rewind, while everybody else’s was on play.

I basically had to relearn how to do to everything to take care of myself.  I had to learn to walk, talk, eat, go to the bathroom, shower, dress, shave, brush my teeth, and comb my hair among everything else we all take for granted.

So I had my first rehab schedule while I stayed in the hospital.  But it wasn’t over just because I was finally discharged.  The first place I went after leaving the hospital was home to my parents.  While I lived there I went to outpatient rehab to continue what began while I was in the hospital.  

I lived at my parents’ for five years.  But I was a grown man now who had never had the opportunity to live on my own.  I had never paid my own bills, did my own laundry, or  cooked my own meals.  I didn’t know how to do these things.  So it was important for me to live more independently.  But I couldn’t do it alone.

You might be wondering why, after five years of working in rehab, I still needed more rehab. and assistance from other people.  Well, I still had major memory problems.  I still did things that were unsafe because if I was doing one thing and got distracted I wouldn’t remember to go back to what I was doing.  I still had trouble remembering and following directions.  My life was similar to the the movie Fifty First Dates.  Each morning when I woke up I didn’t remember what happened yesterday or how to make it through the new day.  New things and unexpected things threw me.  Somebody had to help me get through the day.  

My first move out of my parents’ house took me to a semi-independent apartment where I got help learning the skills for daily living.  I got help cooking, cleaning, scheduling my day, learning how to take medication on my own, and everything else people do automatically in the day.  

I lived there for a while but it was too far away from my family and friends.  Still not ready to be able to live without assistance I moved to another semi-independent apartment closer to the people I care about and who care about me.

In order for me to relearn what I could do before the accident and learn what I had never known how to do I met therapists.  I met physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech/language pathologists.  I met psychologists. I met doctors and more doctors.  My life revolved around either having a therapy appointment or going to a doctor’s office.  

For the therapists to help me some of them had to hurt me.  P.T., or Physical therapy is really physical torture or pain and torture.  Occupational therapy, or OT, became known as Over Time.  I was tired and ready to quit for the day.  They weren’t and pushed me.  Speech/Language Pathologists didn’t wear me out physically so my energy for OT and PT therapy might return. But after Speech/Language sessions I was sometimes so mentally exhausted that just thinking hurt.

And the hurt was much deeper than just on the surface.  I hurt inside.  My heart and my brain hurt.  I needed an outlet to express the pain I was feeling about what happened to me.  And who better to talk to than someone professionally trained to help me through it.  So I started seeing a psychologist.  Someone I could talk to who could help me deal with all the feelings I had.  Feelings about myself, the guy who was driving the car, and how I would live the rest of my life.

Therapy was my new full time job.  A job I never applied for and didn’t get paid in money  to do.  My paycheck was recovery.  Most jobs are 40 hours a week.  The job of recovery never ends.  It is a job I never wanted but a job I have to keep doing because I still struggle with daily living.

Everyday is hard.  I wasn’t able to drive for the first eight years after my accident.  That’s how badly I was injured.  Then, I rejoiced when I did get my driving privileges back.

But, who would have expected that out of the blue, I would begin to have seizures after all those years.  And my one independent activity was taken from me until medication was found to control the seizures.

Thankfully, they are now controlled with the medication and that allows me to drive again.  And I can do this without assistance from anyone else.  But I can only drive to familiar places.  If I go someplace unfamiliar my dad has to plot the route in my GPS or I don’t know where I might end up.

I work hard.  For instance,  I work hard to remember what I need to remember and still get assistance from others to do that.  I work hard  to cook myself a meal and even then I need somebody near me just to make sure I make safe choices and do not burn down the neighborhood.  I work hard to make sure my apartment stays clean and I need somebody to help make sure it is clean.

I work hard at my job.  Even my job is about rehab and recovery.  I work at a sheltered workshop where I am known as the activity facilitator.  My rehab program calls for me to plan activities and interact with other traumatically brain injured people.  I am both a client and a mentor.

Life can be so challenging that I live in an apartment and get help from the staff who understands traumatic brain injury and how it affects me.  But I am not always there.

On weekends I go home to my family.  I can’t say enough about how wonderful my family is for me and to me.  I am so lucky that they have stuck by me since day one. This road that I am traveling would be much bumpier without them.

I wanted to be a regular person with a 9-5 job earning a living but I had to learn that those dreams are probably never going to happen.  All because of my limitations from the accident  I can probably never work a 40 hour work week because I don’t have enough energy to do this.  My body and my brain get tired.  It’s been a hard adjustment.  

I am so fortunate to be surrounded by my caring and loving family and friends along with my supportive and encouraging rehab team.  How do I handle it?  As Joseph Campbell said “we must be ready to get rid of the life we planned so we can live the life that’s waiting for us.”  I am doing my best to do this.

There’s a post script to the story.  You are probably wondering what happened to Prince.   Accidents, crashes, and injuries don’t only break up bodies, they break up friendships too.  Prince and I, as you might have guessed, are no longer friends.
 
I told you that the dashboard served as my airbag.  Prince was luckier.  He had the real one to protect him.  He walked away without any injuries.

But he went to jail because of what happened.  He didn’t have a license because he had already had too many points and had lost it.  He was driving on a suspended license when the crash happened.  He was out in six months for good behavior.  

We don’t keep in touch but every so often I run into him.  It’s not easy when this happens.  I will always be reminded of that day.  I carry the scars.  But, I’m friendly when we bump into each other because my faith in God tells me to forgive him.