A year later, accident victim still struggles

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BY HILARY KINDSCHUH / Lincoln Journal Star

I hear them talking about me, but I can’t say anything.

“It’s kind of amazing how fast your life can change in one second, huh, Jena?” my mom says. “One second, your life is changed.”

Several moments pass, and my mom, my grandma and my Aunt Dana are silent.

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Wearing a shirt with Jena's picture on it, Debbie moisturizes her daughter's lips. (Robert Becker)

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“Oh, I shouldn’t have said that,” Mom says, breaking the pause. “Makes you want to cry.”

 I feel her pat my knee.

“It’s kind of funny, because people say, ‘It’s just not fair,’ and I’m like, ‘Well you know, it isn’t … but who said life was ever fair?’” she says. “Life isn’t fair, is it, Jena?”

In three days it will be the one-year anniversary of the day that changed our lives.

Since that day, I’ve been in a coma, unable to speak to anyone.

“We’ll get through it, won’t we, Jenny?” Mom says, sitting on my bed to face me. “One more day that we have you, I guess, we could look at it that way.

“(Because) one point in time we were making funeral arrangements.”

No one knows if Jena Van Groningen can hear her mother’s words, feel her mother pat her knee. No one knows if, or to what degree, she is aware of her surroundings.

Last year at this time, the 2006 graduate of Lincoln Northeast High School had just begun classes at Southeast Community College and was considering a career in medicine.

Then 18, she was hit by a police cruiser at 12:28 a.m. on Nov. 5, 2006, as she and some friends crossed South 48th Street between Bryson and C streets.

Lincoln Police Officer Amanda May, then 26, was answering a call for backup at a home near Sheridan Boulevard and Van Dorn Street when Jena stepped in front of the cruiser.

In addition to a massive traumatic brain injury, Jena suffered a broken pelvis and other broken bones, as well as injuries to her spine and spleen.

She was in the intensive care unit at BryanLGH Medical Center West until Nov. 22, when she was transferred to Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital.

On Jan. 19, Jena was moved to Quality Living Inc. in Omaha, where she remained until May 25.

Since then, Jena and her mom, Debbie Chinnow, have been living with Chinnow’s parents in Plattsmouth. Chinnow’s sister, Dana Torres, also has a hospital bed for Jena at her home in Plattsmouth.

Jena’s grandfather, Norman Sunderman, is building a handicap-accessible house nearby, and her mom recently became a certified nursing assistant.

“We haven’t left the child’s side for 24/7, between me and my mom and my sister,” Chinnow said. “I would not be able to do this without the help of my family.”

Jena’s father, Kim Van Groningen, lives nearby in Lincoln.

The family always knew they would take Jena home, but it took a long time — especially considering the beginning.

Seven days after she was hurt, Jena’s family had just begun to think she was out of the woods when “everything just started going from bad to worse,” her mother said.

A doctor told them they needed to decide between two operations, a craniotomy or a stent, to reduce the swelling in Jena’s brain.

In a craniotomy, a piece of the skull is removed to allow the brain to expand. With a stent, doctors insert a tube into the ventricles of the brain to drain fluid.

“He said we needed to do (something) immediately, if not sooner,” Chinnow recalled. “We’re just stunned, you know? We’re not the doctors, we didn’t know.

“So I just said to this doctor, ‘If it was your daughter, what would you do?’

“And he said, ‘remove the bone flap.’ He did not even hesitate.”

Doctors did the craniotomy and later told Jena’s family that when they removed the bone flap, her brain popped out like a balloon.

And she still wasn’t out of the woods.

One of the emergency room workers told her family she probably wouldn’t make it through the night.

Jena’s mother, grandmother and aunt are gathered around Jena’s hospital bed in the living room, quiet as they remember that night. Tears come to their eyes.

“It was amazing, that night when they said that, we had people lined up for miles at the hospital to see her,” Chinnow says, her voice breaking. “And she was a tough little fart.”

She looks away, making a sound somewhere between a sob and a laugh.

“I shouldn’t have said that — who brought that up?”

She gets off her daughter’s bed to grab a tissue.

“We definitely don’t talk about losing her,” says Jena’s aunt, Dana Torres.

Jena’s family is glad they never had to make a decision about whether to keep her alive or let her go.

Doctors almost had to resuscitate her once. Should it happen again, they asked later, did the family want them to resuscitate?

Her mom didn’t have to think twice.

“That’s such a young life — I just feel like they’re a lot stronger,” Chinnow says. “It would be different if she was 60 or 70 years old.

“But being 18 at the time — absolutely, resuscitate that child.”

Jena flew about 35 feet when she was hit by that car. When the doctor was going through Jena’s CAT scan, Chinnow said, “she had so many bruises throughout her brain that he couldn’t count them all.”

Right now, Jena is at a Cognitive Level III on the Rancho Levels of Cognitive Functioning scale.

That means she may be awake on and off and react more specifically to what she sees, hears or feels, according to the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center.

For example, a person at Level III might turn toward a sound, withdraw from pain and try to watch a person move around the room.

A Level III may begin to recognize family and friends, start to follow such simple directions as “look at me” or “squeeze my hand” and begin to respond to simple questions by nodding the head.

Reaction, however, can be slow and inconsistent.

Because of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Chinnow against the city of Lincoln and Officer May, who resigned earlier this year, the family’s attorney, David A. Domina of Omaha, recommended that Jena’s family not allow her doctors to discuss her condition and outlook.

Dr. Peter Lennarson, a neurosurgeon at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said different factors often combine to create a condition like Jena’s.

“A craniotomy lowers (brain pressure) instantly, but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem that was causing the swelling and high pressure,” he said. “A defect created by surgery can further injure brain cells.

“It’s not as simple as it might sound — it’s a last-resort treatment.”

Lennarson, who has performed craniotomies on injured soldiers in Iraq, couldn’t speak more specifically about Jena’s condition and outlook because he is not one of her doctors. But he said he would have hoped to see more progress at this point.

“Most of the dramatic improvements we see are within the first year, year and a half,” he said. “I think the chances honestly of her having a significant improvement at this point (are) small, but not impossible.”

Doctors have told Jena’s family she probably will never wake up. “But they told us (she wouldn’t do) so many things, and she’s doing it. … You’ve just got to think, it’s in (God’s) hands, and he’s got a big plan,” Chinnow says.

Doctors also said Jena probably wouldn’t be able to breathe on her own; she is.

She also can move her arms and legs and head.

“When he’s ready to wake her up, she’s going to wake up,” Chinnow says. “We kind of ask him every day, ‘What are you waiting for?’

“But you know, his timing is a little different than ours.”

Chinnow looks at her daughter.

“Regretfully, huh?”

Jena’s family took her camping in Missouri over Memorial Day weekend.

“(People think) sometimes that we’re crazy because we take her everywhere,” her mother says.

She sits at the end of her daughter’s bed, holding Jena’s left foot.

“I just feel like, you know, she’s still got to have something in life, so we just take her everywhere.”

Later, Jena opens her eyes and watches her grandmother, Hazel Sunderman, who has begun to hook up her feeding tube.

“We’re going to have her walking and talking someday,” Chinnow says. “I’m never going to give up on that.”

Since the accident, Jena’s family has been in contact with the families of other brain injury patients.

“Some of the people who’ve written to us, when (doctors) told us that Jena is probably never going to wake up, they said, ‘Ugh, do not believe that.’ And I wouldn’t anyways,” Chinnow says.

Jena opens her eyes again as Sunderman strokes her hair and takes her hand.

Those other families said doctors told them their child would never walk or talk again. Happily, those doctors were proven wrong.

“It sounded like what Jena went through was exactly what their child had gone through,” Chinnow says. “And some of them worse.”

Jena is more minimally conscious than she is in a coma because she hears and understands things, says her grandmother.

“If you make a noise, she hears you,” Sunderman says.

Chinnow claps, and Jena briefly opens her eyes.

“She knows what we’re saying,” Sunderman continues. “I talk to her, like I tell her, ‘Your dad’s coming.’”

Chinnow steps closer to her daughter and taps her on the shoulder.

Jena’s eyes pop open and look in her mom’s direction, and she moves her head slightly.

“See how she knows when you’re touching her?” Sunderman asks.

Chinnow, still at her daughter’s side, says Jena’s name.

“If there’s a loud noise … if someone coughs, she turns to look, like, ‘What’s going on?’” Sunderman says.

Chinnow leans in and kisses her daughter’s cheek.

The corners of Jena’s mouth turn up ever so slightly.

Reach Hilary Kindschuh at 473-7120 or hkindschuh@journalstar.com.