July 2025 Melody Bonnema

In 2008, I was in Pennsylvania visiting my family. I was in a car accident that changed my life forever. Three of us were riding back from the Poconos. My father was driving. I was in the passenger seat and Aunt Gracie was in the back. It was a T-bone accident, and I was at the point of the impact. All three of us went to St Mary’s critical care unit.

 My daughter Leah lived in N.Y.C. She came first with her partner Dustin to wait. My husband Garret was in Bethel, ME. The doctor who admitted me told my husband, Garret, that if he wanted to see me alive, he should get down from Maine ASAP, so Garret and a friend drove all night and got to the hospital at about 6 am.

I was in a coma that lasted almost a month. I don’t remember anything. While I was in a coma, they removed my spleen and put my small intestines in a bag so they could put a sponge on my liver that drained out the blood from my liver.

There were people along the way that were lynch-pins, who helped me along in my rehabilitation.

The first were my husband and daughter. We are a small creative family, and they watched over me while I was in a month-long coma. Garret came to the hospital early in the morning when the day shift was going on, and Leah came late afternoon and stayed until late at night. Leah decorated my room in the trauma ward with pictures and paintings. They played my favorite videos. Leah’s friend brought bags of different scents.

 While Garret and Leah were watching over me, Garret wrote emails to a person in my church about how I was doing, and she sent them out to a mailing list that grew to over 200 names. It was big news in Bethel when I woke up

I was very thirsty and confused. I was sucking on ice chips when the person in charge of food saw me and said I had to be limited to having my lips wet with a sponge on a stick. Our relationship grew, and at one point she called me an artist. Until then I had felt like only a patient and having a more personal label helped me. She was another lynch-pin.

I had a PA who was originally from Russia who said when he came into my area, he felt like he was coming home. On my last day in Pennsylvania, he was off work and he called me to say goodbye.

I had a lot of visitors. As an extrovert, I loved hearing about peoples’ lives. I had grown up in that area, and I had a lot of relatives and friends that visited. All this interaction helped my brain damage. Sometimes I waited to see if people would realize how I knew them; other times I just asked. I had almost no short-term memory. One day I asked to brush my teeth seven times.

While I was in a coma, I was exercised passively. When I woke up, I was encouraged to stand up by this short woman. She reassured me that she could catch me if I needed help. I thought of her as Dr. Ruth. When I left critical care, I was able to use a walker pretty well.

For my last week I got moved to telemetry, and instead of a nurse watching me, I was hooked up to machines. My first night in telemetry, a patient was running around naked and they had to call security. A nurse from critical care came to protect and explain what was happening.

Garret and Leah visited rehab hospitals in the area. There were several nice possibilities. But the idea of being closer to home was pressing. New England Rehab seemed like a good place for me to be closer to home and get the kind of care and instruction I needed. Moving from Newtown, PA to Portland, ME, I didn’t have a lot of options. I wound up in a 9-hr. ambulance ride with less than the best padding and having a urinary catheter not put in right. Happily, I had a friend with me to talk to, but it was long. I was leaving a place and people who had helped me breathe on my own, swallow and talk some, and use a walker with help. Many of the people there felt like almost friends.

 In New England Rehab, I had to get stronger and more flexible. I had to get more organized and clear thinking. I had a person who came to my room and exercised me while I was in bed. A couple of times a week I went to a class with different machines to help people get stronger. N.E. Rehab served clients with all kinds of needs. Some had strokes, some had amputations, some had brain accidents like me. A fun class was playing cards standing up. Unfortunately, I was a poor card player. The physical therapist wanted to know what challenges I would have at our home. Our bedrooms were on the second floor. We had an older home with steps in the front of the house with 8 ½ inch risers. The back stairs begin in a 3 step turn and one uneven step toward the top. Both stairways have handrails on both of the sides. At N.E. Rehab. I had a mock stairway with 3 steps up and on the other side, 3 steps down with handrails on both sides. I practiced on these until I got good enough to practice on the regular building stairway.

I loved learning about my therapists lives outside of the job. One day my physical therapist got married over lunch. Another thing she did with her husband was collect oil from restaurants to use to power an adapted car. A guy put up flag poles for his family’s business, another husband wrote commercials for a salve we all used and she brought in a few samples. Being an extrovert, I had a longing to interact with my worlds. Just like I felt better when I was recognized as an artist as well as a patient. I think that helped my caregivers too.

My small intestines were handled a lot when they were bagged up and that made them likely to stick together over time. The first time it happened when I was in N.E. Reb. I went to Maine Med’s Emergency Department. It was a busy Friday night and I was lying in a gurney, Leah was with me and explained what she could see. At 3 o’clock they took me in after some testing, they realized my small intestines were blocked. They put a tube through my nose and down my throat into my stomach and changed the pressure and unblocked my small intestine.

I went back to rehab. Being able to fall asleep was hard for me. I couldn’t wind down. We tried nature sounds like rain but it wasn’t enough. Sometimes a friend of mine would come and read a mystery to me. That really helped. Later when Garret was there, he would get a fudgesicle from the kitchen on my floor. I would slowly eat it and then I was able to fall asleep. I still use that same idea here in Bethel. I come down to the kitchen and eat something and go back to sleep in my bed.

I was in Rehab four weeks. I had a nice homecoming; people were waiting in the driveway and there was a sign on the wall welcoming me home. It took a while for me to settle in. I used the walker a lot. I didn’t like the noise it made so sometimes I lifted it up. Once I fell into the closet. Being home was good. I was aware of how the studio and showroom were moving along. I could sit in my favorite chair and look out the dining room door and see people coming and going into the showroom.

 My first lynch-pin in Bethel was Vicki Theabould, a person from the state whose job it was to get people back to work. I was eager to be back in the studio making pots. Vicki connected me to the Iris Network because my vision was distorted. My left eye didn’t match my right eye. The difference was so extreme that it couldn’t be corrected with prisms. My ophthalmologist didn’t believe it would get better, but he encouraged me to see other eye doctors. I saw two but neither thought they could do anything partly because of my age. A child can adjust to the operation but not at my age.

The Iris Network had a mobility therapist who got me walking outside on the Davis Park walkway and showed me the safest way to go to church. Another woman counselor helped me to adjust to using one eye; and the last person helped me to do things I used to be able to do around the house. These three people came to our house so Garret didn’t have to lose work time.

I still go to a support group. Until recently I went to one in Lewiston, and since I didn’t drive Garret had to take me. Now I am going to one in Rumford. It is much closer and it is co-led by a woman who originally led the Lewiston group. In the support group in Lewiston, I regularly asked if anyone had a cycle of mania and depression. No one had. We had a person who was connected to our group and worked days at West Side. I privately asked him and he said he was seeing someone right now who was experiencing it. That information really helped me because that period of mania was really hard on my husband.

The next person Vicki connected me to was Christine Barth Ramsey, a clinical neuropsychologist. She was the first and only person who described to me what happened to my brain. She tested me in several areas. I came out slow and average. When I took the test, I was depressed. She felt before the TBI I was high average or even superior. Christine Barth Ramsy made some recommendations. She wanted me to go back to Westside Rehab in Lewiston and see Dr. Perna and try to find a support group and continue with yoga. I was able to do all of her ideas; I saw Dr Perna, I go to a support group, and I do yoga.

At this point I would like to write about my losses. I lost the person I was before the accident. It has taken a long time to accept who I am now. Grieving is a part of coming to this new person.

One of my major losses is not being in an equal partnership with my husband. I went to Art school and Garret quit being a math school teacher and joined me, forming Bonnema Potters. We worked dividing jobs by who was good at what. Together we were able grow our business. First going to fairs and selling at wholesale, stores, and galleries. We moved from Pennsylvania to Maine in 1974 and made a studio and showroom to sell retail while we wholesaled our pottery. For fourteen years we were part of a Craft Co-op store in Freeport. After the accident with my body and brain damage, I lost the ability to be a real partner like I was for all those years.

 I have a bad short-term memory. Sometimes I have trouble finding the right word to keep my conversations going along. I have trouble following reasoning or directions. I have found ways that I can gloss over some of my failings. Humor is a real help. I use questions like “where do I know you?” Since my two eyes don’t match, I use only my right eye. The left lens on my glasses is lightly frosted. Using one eye affects my drawing, painting, and sculpture. I was working on a self-portrait head, and I couldn’t make my eyes match. When I am painting a landscape, I have trouble establishing a horizon line. It is very important that I move my head a lot so I can be using my right eye to see what is coming upon my left.

I don’t drive. I gave up my license when I realized how much trouble I had judging distances. I also had one accident; neither of us got very hurt but both cars were totaled. I don’t read aloud, and sometimes I recognize a word but I can’t say it. So, I don’t volunteer to read in church. I have to go with someone when I snowshoe or when I’m in an airport. It is very bewildering to not recognize where I have just been.

My balance is ok mostly because of yoga. I have been doing yoga off and on for 45 years. After the accident, returning to yoga I had a lot of trouble. I kept with it because I felt I was born with a flexible body and I needed to get back to it. Yoga helped me understand where my body is in space.

Sometimes when I think about what pulled me through this terrible accident, I say to myself I had a body that was kept in working order because of being a potter and my mind was a mind of an extrovert. I had a longing to be in my world so I was motivated to keep trying.

Beginning in January 2025 Traumatic Brain injury is recognized by Medicare and Medicaid as a chronic condition. Soon it will be 17 years since I got my TBI. I am still able to learn some new strategies and I love my family, my friends, my home, my church and my art.