Reboot and Rebirth

Have you ever experienced frustration when computer problems resulted in a deleted document, file, project, or entire database? Many a peaceful mindset has been lost along with all that valuable information.

Now imagine that computer is your brain.

Su Meck's astonishing story is not far from that. At 22, she was hit by a ceiling fan and a week later, woke up with total memory loss. Her husband Jim humorously commented, "She was Su 2.0. She had rebooted." But things were far from easy or amusing. The accident erased all of her memory and her brain was reverted back to that of a 4 year old. She could no longer read, eat, walk, dress or drive. She couldn't do anything by herself. Her vocabulary was reduced to a few phrases.

In addition to the incredible task of having to re-learn everything, Meck woke up a virtual foreigner to her life: a husband she didn't recognize and two kids that didn't feel like hers, though biologically they were.

"It was literally like she had died. Her personality was gone," said her husband, Jim, of after the accident. Indeed, the journey back was long and began with short letters to her extended family who lived far away, since telephone calls were too difficult for the first few years. Seeing the difficulty with grammar and spelling, as well as the limited vocabulary is heart-rending.

But now-- the woman whose brain doctors said was full of cracks "like shaken Jello"-- has graduated from Montgomery College as the chapter's Phi Theta Kappa president, with an associate degree in music and a 3.9 average. Perhaps even more beautiful is that her husband and three children were there sharing jubilant congratulations and love at the graduation.

This is the stuff of movies or Talking Heads songs, not of real life. But Su Meck did what we can only imagine: re-falling in love with a husband and children and courageously relearning her way through her entire life. These days, Su Meck is looking ahead at earning a bachelor's degree in music and joyfully drumming along to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Hats off and much admiration to this amazing woman!

Image by Patrick Hosely on Flickr via Creative Commons Licensing