Sister Rachel

I didn’t have a close connection to brain injury when I accepted a job with the Brain Injury Association of America (BIAA) in March 2014. My grandfather had suffered a stroke in the early 90’s, and I had a friend in high school who sustained a traumatic brain injury in a car accident, but I did not come into this community with a solid knowledge of what so many go through on a daily basis. My parents divorced before I could crawl; I’m not complaining. My mother’s marriage to my stepdad predates my earliest memories, and my father remarried before I was in first grade. His was a package deal, complete with two new sisters, the subsequent loss of two-thirds of my toys, and a haunting memory of my Batman-themed playroom being painted a soft pink. Rachel is a year older than me; Juliana a year younger. What began as disdain for one another moved to tolerance, then acceptance, and eventually grew into love. We have the unique and occasionally tumultuous bond only found in a blended family. On the evening of December 7, 2015, I checked my phone and discovered several missed calls from my dad. That should have left me with some looming intuition, but it didn’t. Dad is impatient and has yet to understand voicemail. In the course of seven consecutive messages, I learned Rachel had a “cardiac event” while sitting up in her bed watching television. Her heart had stopped – twice – and she had been revived both at home and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I made the eight-hour-drive from Austin to Oklahoma City in five hours. When I arrived at the hospital at 2:30 a.m., Rachel was in the intensive care unit (ICU) and had been placed in therapeutic hypothermia because her heart had stopped – cause unknown – and there had been a subsequent lack of oxygen to her brain. Read the rest of this story in THE Challenge! (Volume 10, Issue 2).