The following is a personal essay about the brain injury I sustained in November 2017.

My hospital room was small but welcome after a long day of therapies. Mom came into the room with me. She would stay for a while, then leave and go back to the Ronald McDonald house, where she slept overnight.

"I brought your book with us," she said, "in case you want to read."

I'd love to read. I nodded, and she brought out the book: Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret by Obert Skye. Oh yeah. That's what I'd been reading before my coma.

I don't think I knew about the coma at that point. I was kind of just . . . there, at the hospital, trying to handle my therapies without falling asleep. But I learned the story later: I'd been on the way to high school one November day when I drove into an intersection too early and was hit by another car. The first responders rushed me to the Portneuf Medical Center in Pocatello, where I spent a miraculous week progressing from complete unconsciousness to movement and some talking. I have no memory of the time at Portneuf, though. I still don't (although I've heard enough stories about it that it feels like I do). Two weeks and one hospital transfer later, when I finally started laying down memory again and got off the coma scale, I found myself at Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City.

I didn't really question it at first. I didn't question why I, a sixteen-year-old high school senior, was at a children's hospital. And that night, when my mom gave me my book, I didn't wonder how long it had been since I'd last read it. I just climbed into my bed and opened the book.

Leven Thumps was one of the series I'd been repeatedly reading since I started reading middle grade books. Who knows how many times I'd read it throughout my life? I knew the story like the back of my hand. This was the second book, and I'd left off during the part where Leven is lost in a big forest.

I opened the book. I was happy to read—to do something that felt so normal.

Yet it was exhausting.

It's not like I didn't know how to read anymore—I could still understand the words on the page. But even though this was a book so loved and so familiar, my energy was so low that my reading speed slowed and I could hardly focus on the scene. It almost wasn't worth the effort.

Oh no. I was too tired to read.

After a few paragraphs of trying to follow Leven through the forest, I put the book down.

Too tired. Must sleep.

***

"In hyperbaric oxygen therapy, we put you in a tank and give you pure oxygen to breathe," the technician explained. "We increase the air pressure—it's like being in a submarine—and your cells open up and take in more oxygen, which helps the body heal faster."

Hyperbaric oxygen was one of the therapies I was trying now that I was back home from the hospital. The therapy was often used as a treatment for physical injuries, but my doctors had recommended it to me as a treatment for my traumatic brain injury. So here I was, one month after my car accident, in a big room with a smaller room (a "tank") inside it, watching fellow patients in scrubs stand around while we waited for our "dive."

We entered the tank, which was painted inside like an underwater ocean landscape. Colored fish swam over my head. I sat in one of the chairs and yawned to pop my ears as the air pressure increased. Then the technician inside the tank directed us to put see-through plastic helmets over our heads, and the helmets pumped oxygen into our own personal air bubbles.

I leaned my head back against the chair. These days I was always exhausted. Thankfully, I didn't need to do anything in the hyperbarics tank, besides breathe. So maybe I could take a little nap.

***

Many teenagers would be mortified at the idea of their parents' personally chaperoning them to high school, but I was glad to have my mom with me when I returned to my school in January. She drove me everywhere—I certainly couldn't drive at the time—and made sure that I was okay, that I wasn't pushing myself too hard, that I could handle everything.

She walked with me to my dual enrollment biology class. I had five classes a day, but I started by only going to three: a college biology class, a college government class, and a science fiction–themed English class. I didn't have any makeup work in the latter two (the teachers simply exempted me from everything I'd missed), but I did in bio. Bio was the hardest class I was in. Before the brain injury, though, I'd found it fairly easy. I'd kept an A. Now, after the brain injury, I was terrified.

What if I was dumb now?

My mom left me at my class and told me she'd come pick me up after English. She gave me a hug goodbye and left. I went into bio and did my best to follow the lecture and take notes.

Some time later (maybe a week?), I started the makeup quizzes and tests. I'd studied. I'd worried. I thought I'd be lucky to get a C.

I took the first quiz. My teacher graded it.

86 percent.

My mom was absolutely ecstatic when she heard. I was relieved. My first bio quiz after the hospital, and I got 86 percent?

Maybe I wasn't doomed to be dumb.

***

I didn't like my speech therapist during my in-patient treatment at Primary Children's. I have no idea why. I just didn't.

One day, though, she taught me a new game. Five Crowns. It was a rummy-based game I'd never heard of before, but I took to it immediately. It was fun, even for my tired brain.

Afterward, when I was off to my next therapy, the speech therapist went to my mom. "She's going to be okay," the therapist said. "She just beat me in Five Crowns."

Hearing this was a relief after weeks of watching me fail at simple memory games and struggle to have energy at my therapies. My mom cried.

***

I lugged my heavy bio textbook into the hyperbarics tank with me. The patients in the tank with me were impressed. I was still tired much of the time, but I had to study bio, and hyperbarics was an hour of quiet in which I could.

Sometimes I rested. Sometimes I talked with the other patients. Sometimes I read books. I could read again without losing energy after a few paragraphs, which was a relief. I read Brandon Mull's Five Kingdoms series during my sessions in the hyperbarics tank. It was a middle grade series, way below my reading level, but that was normal for me. I loved (and still love) middle grade fiction.

But sometimes I needed to study bio. So I brought the big textbook—definitely not below my reading level—and read through the assigned chapters. It was tiring, but it was doable.

I breathed in the sweet oxygen and opened the book.

***

I still had a speech therapist, but this time an outpatient therapist at Idaho State University. In February, I took my bio textbook to one of my sessions with her. "I'll study with you, then," she said. So I opened the textbook, and we sat quietly as I read.

I was successfully keeping an A in biology. I was back to the point where I had been before: where I could read once and take notes and remember. So I read and took notes in the room with the speech therapist.

"You were doing it all by yourself," she said after the session was over. "I can't do anything more for you. I say you're done with speech therapy."

I agreed with her. I felt done. And it was one less therapy to worry about as I worked to regain my skills. My reading, my writing, my piano playing, my studying—I could work on them all on my own; I just needed the time to sit down and do so.

My parents and doctors had encouraged me to delay high school and redo senior year—after all, I'd skipped a grade years before, so delaying would put me back with my peers of the same age. But no. I didn't want to wait. I wanted to graduate on time, to recover now. I believed it could happen. And so, I think, did my therapists.

***

"She's going to be okay," the speech therapist told my mom at Primary Children's.

"I'm okay," I told my mom at Portneuf, the first time I woke up and started talking after the car accident.

I remember being tired and disoriented. I remember taking walks with my mom through the halls of Primary Children's, just us, walking slowly together. I remember feeling like Primary Children's was where I was meant to be. I didn't really understand that I'd been in a car accident, that I'd almost died—just that I was here at Primary Children's now, recovering, with my mom by my side.

Back then, I didn't yet feel the fear of not being able to read. Or the fear of being dumb. Or the fear of being too tired to ever accomplish something hard again. Those fears came later. But through those fears, my broken brain healed itself, with the help of hospitals and therapies and high school teachers and doctors and parents and divine providence.

I wasn't dumb. I hadn't lost the ability to read or think. I caught up in all my classes. And in the springtime after my accident, I graduated high school.