They had a ritual for the departed. When a relative died, she and her brother and cousins would all drive to Koksilah River, an hour north of their homes in Victoria. They would spend the day swimming in the jade water and looking at the native arbutus trees, which had red bark. A sweet, reserved 19-year-old with gray-blue eyes and freckles joined her younger brother, her cousin, and a close friend for a drive up-island after her grandmother died. It was the first day of September.
The group stopped at a Tim Hortons on their way to work. It was the last memory that he had of that day. After the stop, Emily spilled her iced coffee. She lost control of her car while she was distracted.
There were four people in the crash and three of them were badly injured. She was given a score of six on the Glasgow Coma Scale by the EMTs at the crash site. Doctors and nurses worked to save her life after she was rushed to the hospital. She came out of the coma a week later.
She was in the hospital for two weeks and her convalescence started to assume strange qualities. She was talking to everyone around her after regaining her communication skills. Her mother said that she was talking about everything after one day. Staff were asked how old they were, if they had children, and what their most interesting cases were. She was easy to talk to with the nurses' aides.
She had an appointment with a radiologist the next day to discuss the scans she had taken a few days before. With her mother by her side, she asked a lot of questions. She wanted to know if there were any of the cerebellum's problems. Do you know if an fMRI has been done? The thalamus, fornix, and pons are related. Has they been affected? The radiologist looked over to Jane, who was briefly over to him. He asked how she knew these things. In the days before the appointment, she convinced her father to borrow books from the library. She "read away into the night" after he dropped off the texts.
Jane said that she had been a cautious girl all her life. The young woman faded more and more as her time at the hospital went on. When a nurse went through the neurology wing and marked each room with colored tape, he snuck around and removed all the tape. She moved the dates on the whiteboards to December 24 after most of the patients went to sleep. She told him that it wasn't a helicopter and that he should fuck himself. She asked the neurosurgeon out on the spot after finding him attractive. She wanted to know where the source of consciousness was in the brain. Jane said that she wasn't the same person as before.
Doctors believed that her brain injury affected her executive functioning. A person who acted freely, spoke effusively, and approached others with a directness verging on audacity was a more disinhibited person. The transformation wasn't limited to how she spoke to others. She grew more emotional during her stay at VGH. She rose to a boil quickly that September, tumbling into the undertow of powerful mood swings, and breaking into convulsive crying jags.
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