Michelle Braley
Appearances
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
At that point, he was blinking his eyes and sticking out his tongue. He will answer yes or no questions. So I knew that there was that kind of baseline. But a lot of times when someone's completely nonverbal, it's a language impairment. And so I'll know that there's like a yes, no reliability. But after that, there's no way to communicate with them in any more complicated way.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
So I never treated someone with that diagnosis who was presenting like that before. And I was kind of trying to come up with a game plan for how to assess what's going on with this guy. Is his language intact? Can I communicate with him in any way? And then a lot of times there's communication boards if someone has use of their hands or use of their head or use of their feet.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
There's a way that you can communicate non-verbally. But I knew that he didn't have use of most of any of his limbs and he just had very limited use of his eyes and his tongue. So it was trying to figure out how am I going to communicate with him to figure out what's going on, to figure out if he has language, to figure out if his cognition is impaired or it's intact.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
So that was kind of my my first thought going into it was, how am I going to figure out what's going on with this guy? So that's when I was I kind of was thinking, all right, we have a reliable way. I know he's giving me yes or no. Like he knows exactly what he wants to say.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
There's still someone can know exactly what they want to stay and still have a cognitive impairment and be a little confused, a little disoriented, have memory issues. So I had to figure out how to do an assessment of his cognition with just that letterboard. And that was challenging. But I remember very distinctly doing after, it was probably within the first week or
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
I want to say like three or four days into having seen Jake, I did an informal assessment because you couldn't do any of the formal cognitive assessments with the way he was able to communicate. And I was checking, do you know where you are? Do you know the date and time? Do you know why you're here? If I give you three words right now, can you remember those three words in 10 minutes?
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
Can you explain to me how do you start a car or how do you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? Kind of those kind of simple sequencing things. And so I started doing those and and he was just nailing it every time. And the more he did it, the more that I started to kind of be like, oh, my God, like this guy is in here. And that's where it got. It had always been real for me.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
But that's when it kind of hit me that he's fully he's fully cognitively intact. His language is there. He just can't speak. His cognition is totally intact. He's literally trapped in his body. And that's, I think, when I'd always been sympathetic to his case. Like, from the minute I met him, I wanted to help as much as I could.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
But when I realized how trapped he was in there is when I got, like, fully emotionally involved, too.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
It's basically this big board where it has letters and colors and numbers all throughout the board. And basically Jake's able to more quickly scan and select letters so he can communicate faster. To use the Megabi, your cognition and language has to be totally intact. You have to be sharp as a tack, and you have to have very good attention. Your cognition has to be really good.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
Really good attention, really good working memory, very good visual scanning and tracking, very good language. Do you know the language that's involved in spelling every single word you want to say before you say it while you're saying it? Like, it's insane.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
She was there every day at the beginning. I want to say the first week or two she was there every day, I'll say. I didn't interact with her often. When I came in for therapy, she usually left. She was a little confusing to me at the beginning because and I try not to judge truly because everyone handles grief and stress differently.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
But I did find her challenging sometimes because she would be kind of reticent to participate in therapy or to have him participate in therapy. I know because I was speech, therapy starts at eight o'clock every morning at the hospital. And usually if there's a swallowing component, speech will go see in someone in the morning.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
So I had a lot of eight o'clock sessions with Jake because I wanted to do his oral care. I wanted to get him up and maybe we could try some trials of solids or liquids. And I don't know, it was morning sessions were pretty common for us. And I remember I would always knock on the door, the door would be closed, and she would be in there sleeping.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
And I would kind of go in to start therapy, and she would be annoyed that I was there. And I'm kind of like, that's why he's here. He's here for therapy. And she gave me a lot of attitude. And I know that she gave other therapists attitude And a huge part of therapy is family education. Let me educate you. Let me tell you exactly what we're working on and why. Here's where he's at.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
Here's his strengths. Here's his weaknesses. And I would try to engage her in that education piece, and she wasn't really interested. So I thought, to me, that was odd. And again, everyone's relationships and family dynamics are different, and I try not to judge it, but it did strike me as odd. I didn't meet any of Jake's family.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
I thought, wow, what a supportive wife or family member. Like, she's so involved, and I never would have thought to do that, and it's so great. So she was super involved then, but she didn't want to be involved with me, the therapist. She wanted to do it herself. And I got the sense that any time a therapist was helping or making progress with Jake,
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
She was a little resentful of it because it wasn't her that was. And again, I could be projecting, but she wasn't. I do feel like she was super involved in his therapy at the beginning. But when the therapists were involved, she didn't want to be involved with the therapist. She wanted to be the one doing it. I do remember I was trying out a new tool, a new eye gaze tool.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
I had brought the other ATEC SLP to come help me with some of the assistive technology for Jake. So the two of us were in there trying to set up a new eye gaze system for him. We were trying to see if he had a reliable eye gaze to select targets instead of the letterboard. I was trying to teach her, like, this is what we're doing. And she was not interested.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
And then after that, I think she just not disappeared. She did. She was not around. She was there every day for the first couple of weeks. And then she was kind of gone, not there. And I know we were the therapy team was trying to figure out where's where's his wife. You know, we kind of want to update her. We need to know what the plan is. And so we're always like, where's this guy's wife?
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
Like, we need to talk to her about so many things. All of us for different reasons. And she had just kind of disappeared. And then I think I remember one day, and I can't remember exactly, we found out that she had been on the Today Show or Good Morning America. It was either Today Show or Good Morning America talking about Jake. And we thought, wow, that's interesting.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
We're here trying to like do the thing with you. So it was just a strange, we never really, we never quite knew what was going on.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
I feel like we got very close very quickly because there was something about him and about his story that spoke to me. And that I thought, you know, this we've got we've got to do something like he's got to get better. He can't live his life like this. Like, I can't sleep at night if he's living his life like this.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
And so I was super involved and was trying to think of any way to make things better. And then he was also really vulnerable and transparent in, I think, a very productive way. You know, he was struggling. I can't even—he was struggling with the fact that he had guilt that it was his addiction that brought him here.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
He had an incredible amount of guilt about what he had done to Elle, his wife, and their relationship. He had an incredible amount of fear. You know, am I going to have to live my whole life like this, like stuck in my body in this intense pain? Part of the therapy was communicating and I'm not going to dictate what you want to communicate. You tell me what do you want to communicate about?
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
And so he would ask me these questions or he would we would have these conversations where he would talk to me about his addiction issues and and the guilt that he had about that. And so I would say every conversation was kind of a deep conversation. I remember trying to like try to lighten it up because Jake was a chef. And so I would say, why don't you just talk to me about like cooking?
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
I'm trying to become a better. What should I what should I make for dinner tonight? And how would you do it? Like where chicken parm? How do I make chicken parm? Just things like that where it would be that you teach me something. We would talk about that. We would talk a little bit about his life. I knew that he had lost his mom, but I didn't know the details.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
So we would talk about his history, that. But a lot of times it was like the present. You know, I'm in pain. I feel horrible. I've destroyed my marriage. I've destroyed my life. And so we would kind of have those conversations. And I would also defer to our neuropsychologist as well, who could have like more kind of detailed counseling conversations as well.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
From the minute I met Jake in the hospital to our relationship today, nothing has changed. He's exactly who he was. And I feel like he was able to do that because he was so authentically himself, even in like the worst moments of his life when he's in terrible pain, physical and mental, and scared and frustrated and, you know, like... Like what? What?
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
communication is so vital and it's so it's like with in his case in that situation was a limited resource and so like what he chose to tell me I was that says a lot about who you are you know so I appreciated his sense of humor like he's a little sarcastic there's a little he's a little dark sense of humor sometimes but he's also like optimistic and hopeful and and and he perseveres and that all came out in these conversations
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
One of Jake's family members had wanted to come see him in Spalding right before he was discharged and he wasn't allowed. And that, to me, was very upsetting because I knew Jake was desperate for that. I thought, this guy just needs all of the people in his life that he can get. And, you know, someone showed up to help him and they were turned away.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
So that was, and that was like the week of his discharge.
Blink | Jake Haendel's Story
6: Blink Twice
It's like a very hard position to be in. Now, granted, Jake's not my patient anymore. I can't, like, befriend her on Facebook and kind of be like, what's going on? You're just kind of like, that's fairly bizarre. But we all knew something was very strange.