Amazing Progress
Bobbi Mlynar - Special to the Gazette
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Mariah Serrano’s family predicted two years ago that the teen’s lifelong pattern of grit and determination would pull her through life-threatening and life-changing injuries.
Mariah has spent those past two years proving them right.
“Where there’s Mariah, there’s a will and there’s a way,” her father, Ed Serrano, said during a recent interview.
Mariah surprised her neurosurgeon this spring by walking — haltingly — into his office.
“His words were, ‘Amazing. This is remarkable progress,’” her mother, Angie Serrano, said. “Surgeons sometimes don’t see. They’re in the operating room and they don’t see what comes out of that. Last time he’d seen her, she was laying in a bed, barely moving. …”
Now, Mariah has returned emotionally and intellectually. She continues to work on the physical hurdles thrust on her by the accident.
The collision
Mariah sustained critical head and chest injuries on the late afternoon of May 29, 2009, when the car in which she was a passenger collided with a semitrailer at the intersection of Roads 220 and M. She had turned 15 only two weeks before.
The car damage was so extreme that for a time emergency medical technicians could not even see Mariah trapped inside.
A LifeTeam helicopter crew flew her from the accident scene to Stormont-Vail HealthCare in Topeka, where doctors cautioned family and friends that she might not survive.
The accident had happened on a Friday; during the weekend, she suffered several strokes. By Monday, Angie said that doctors told them Mariah was in worse condition than when she had been brought into the hospital.
She fought a potentially deadly blood infection during those first days in Topeka, and underwent multiple surgeries. For a time, she wore a helmet to protect her vulnerable skull area.
New struggle
Months later, after winning the fight to live, Mariah began the battle to recovery.
She was transferred to Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln, Neb., for acute-level rehab care and in January 2010 she began a four-month stay at the Quality of Living Inc. center in Omaha.
Family, friends, and strangers held fundraisers, or donated vacation days, or took work assignments to help clear the way for Ed, Carrie and Angie take shifts at the hospitals as Mariah slowly gained ground on her problems.
When she returned to Emporia in mid-May 2010, it was to homes that had been modified to accommodate her wheelchair and her needs. The cooperative effort continued to give Mariah the best opportunities to achieve as much rehabilitation as possible.
Both households developed routines and coping skills as they worked with Mariah to define an ever-changing “normal.”
There were some difficult months initially as they learned more about Traumatic Brain Injury and its diverse consequences.
“We didn’t have a lot of resources,” Ed explained. “So there was a lot of growing pains and learning on our own.”
Back at EHS
After a summer of adjustments, healing and settling in, Mariah began to learn again, too. She returned to classes at Emporia High School, taking along her wheelchair, her Dynavox communication machine, and a paraprofessional for assistance.
Additionally, she is attending classes this summer to catch up on what she missed during the year lost.
“She’s taking all normal classes,” Carrie said, mentioning sophomore English, history, and pre-Algebra as examples. “She has a para with her.”
Assistants from Community Works have been lifesavers, she said, as they help with schoolwork and care for Mariah while she, Ed and Angie work at their jobs and remain involved in the activities of Mariah’s younger brothers — Derrick, Kellen, and Taylor.
The teen again has taken on one of her favorite pre-accident roles, that of Big Sister to the boys. They have helped restore a sense of normalcy and joy in Mariah’s life, Carrie said.
Knowledge that she will have another sibling, from Ed and Carrie, by the end of the year brought a broad smile and a thumbs-up sign from Mariah.
She is ready to have a baby added to the family, and is anticipating receiving a service dog later from an organization in Cincinnati that she and Carrie visited after Mariah was chosen from a field of other applicants. Each change will add another layer of pleasure to her life beyond school, therapy sessions and participating in some activities she enjoyed in the past.
Extracurricular enthusiast
Ed Serrano once described his daughter as a “social butterfly.” That has not changed.
Mariah attended the Homecoming and Winter Sports dances during the past school year, and has her dress picked out for the Junior-Senior Prom; this year, she was not old enough to attend.
She took an art class and exhibited a ceramic piece, titled “Unstoppable,” in the school art show. The piece, which she termed a representation of her mind, was paired with a poignant message in Mariah’s own words and typed up by her paraprofessional. (See accompanying photo for the full text.)
“She did the talent show at the high school and she won,” Ed said, adding another activity to the growing list.
Mariah’s entry was a video presentation that chronicled her life from the accident through ongoing therapy.
Emporia Physical Therapy owner Greg Bachman and long-time friend Logan Ranger were key to her talent show entry and are key to her ongoing recovery, the family said.
Ranger has been a constant visitor and friend throughout.
“They’ve been friends since elementary school,” Carrie said. “He’s the one that has been above and beyond.”
Ranger helped create the talent-show video, and Bachman helped Mariah walk across the stage to perform her own illustrative movements.
“She had to throw in her own little twist,” Ed said.
Therapies
Mariah continues in rehab at Emporia Physical Therapy, where she has shown marked improvement from the previous year.
She can rise from a chair on her own and walks by herself, with the security of a belt that can be grasped to give her stability.
“We have to say Greg Bachman is the best,” Carrie said. “He gets her ice cream on Friday. He started that when she came home and he kept it up.”
But Bachman expects Mariah to work for it.
“He’s one of the few people on earth who can tell her what to do,” Ed added.
Bachman’s goal is to send Mariah back to EHS in August without the wheelchair.
Mariah, in the meantime, has taken herself to new levels in other directions, using her own initiative and perseverance.
“We haven’t had to push her to do a lot of things,” Ed said.
Can-do attitude
Mariah already has tallied 50 sit-ups in one session at therapy — perhaps because movement was built into her pre-accident schedule, through cheerleading, sports and a regimen of exercise.
“She used to do 350 (sit-ups) every single night, her entire freshman year, no matter what time it was,” Angie said.
And, while people are amazed by what Mariah has managed to do so far, no one can predict how much further she can take herself.
The accident, combined with the strokes, left her with hampered vision and diminished ability to use her right side, though she has regained considerable use of her facial muscles.
The trademark smile, which she flashes frequently, is almost full across her mouth now.
To cope with the snail’s pace communication the Dynavox typed-response machine provided, she resorted to hand signals to express basic communications. Fingertips closed together, pressed to her lips and then extended outward means “thank you,” for example.
When she found hand signals inadequate, Mariah began teaching herself to write again, this time using her left hand.
She’d had a tendency to be ambidextrous — particularly noticable when she played softball, her family said — and perhaps had a head start in learning to print clearly.
During the interview, she wrote that she wanted to go to college and become a nurse – like her mother and her Aunt Becky, Carrie Serrano’s twin sister.
Occasionally, the vision problems cause her to overlap letters and lines as she writes, but her sentences are full and expressive.
“It’s something that nobody did for her,” Ed said. “She did it herself.”
Hand-to-lips
Regaining speech appears to be Mariah’s next self-appointed task.
For reasons none of the family fully understands, Mariah’s speech therapy sessions were eliminated earlier, because of a decision handed down from an unspecified source in charge of making such decisions.
After a crisis brought on by her difficulty swallowing — she choked on food and could not breathe — the speech therapist was briefly reinstated for re-training on how to use tongue and throat muscles to eat.
Then the speech therapist again was eliminated from the rehab effort.
Unwilling to give up on communicating, Mariah began using her left hand to make her lips form the first words she wanted to say. The sounds came slowly as she demonstrated the three-word sentence: “I love you.”
The speech was not crystal clear; the intent, however, was.
chalkrocks (anonymous) says...
Great article!!!
June 8, 2011 at 4:28 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
rmbcollege (anonymous) says...
Agreed! Very good article!
June 8, 2011 at 7:36 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )