6: Blink Twice

Blink is intended for mature audiences as it discusses topics that can be upsetting, such as drug use, sexual assault, and emotional and physical violence. Content warnings for each episode are included in the show notes.
Resources for drug addiction and domestic abuse can be found in the show notes and on our website, BlinkThePodcast.com. the testimonies and opinions expressed by guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily

reflect the views of myself or affiliates of this podcast. After timing out of hospice care, Jake's motionless body was physically removed from the bed.
The borrowed medical equipment stripped away, and then, just like that, he was left on the floor.

It's almost impossible to wrap my head around.

How could this happen?

How could someone so vulnerable be discarded like an afterthought?

Every new detail on Jake's story just leaves my jaw on the floor.

Just when I think I've heard it all, there's something else.

While Jake lay there, his family was left in the dark, desperate for answers.

For all they knew, he was dead.

Had he suffered in his final moments?

Had he been in pain?

And the most haunting question of all, was this the end of Jake's story?

Would they ever see him again?

Even if only at his funeral. The End Thank you.
It became a void, and we had no idea how Jake was. And, you know, given his prognosis and the course of the disease that we were aware of up to that point, and, I mean, you know, Varda would reach out, and Daron couldn't get in either.
He was getting all his reports from the hospice nurse, not from Elle,

and somehow miraculously, he didn't die. He was still alive.

I get a phone call from one of his caretakers, all freaked out about,

do you know where Jacob is?

I said, no, I have no idea where he is. Don't you know?

Last time he was home, she goes, no, we got fired. The company says we can't go to work.
We're worried about him. So, sheesh.
Okay, thanks. There wasn't much Daron could do with a restraining order, but a couple of months later, when his sister Varda traveled up to Massachusetts for Daron's trial, which was the trial involving Ellen and the stairs, Daron asked Varda if she wanted to go with him to see Jake.
Derone says, you know, I have no idea what's going on with Jake. I haven't heard anything in months.
I'm going to get the police to give me an escort. Do you want to come? I said, of course, I really want to see him.
So the police officer comes, we go, we ring the doorbell. Nothing.
We knock, knock, knock, nothing. The cop goes with us.
We're like, the drone said, can we look through the windows? I mean, I don't understand how no one could be home. He's supposed to be in there on hospice.
So the cop went with us and we looked all around and there was no sign of anybody living there. And we were like, where the heck is Jake? Did he die? What? It was the worst feeling, because you don't know if he's dead or what the hell's going on.
It was gut-wrenching. It was so bizarre.
Jake was now missing, the home seemingly abandoned and looked to be that way for some time. Where was Jake? With Ellen having power of attorney over Jake's care, there was no legal obligation for medical personnel to divulge any information that they may have on his whereabouts.
And so Daron began a months-long search for his son. He was calling hospitals.
He even went and

started walking around hospital floors and looking in rooms,

peeking in. He was going to nurses' stations and asking.

Nothing. Couldn't find anything.
Jake's story is unlike anything most of us could ever imagine.

The idea of being trapped, completely aware but unable to move, speak, or signal for help, And the other thing is,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think,

I think, I think, I aware but unable to move, speak, or signal for help, is the kind of nightmare that feels almost too horrifying to be real. When people hear about Jake's case, they think about the isolation, the months spent in silence, but what's even more unthinkable is the pain.
Jake wasn't drifting into some unconscious dream state. He was awake, and he was alert, and he felt every ounce of agony coursing through his body.
Fully aware of pain. I was in constant crisis, and I felt everything.
And not only did I feel everything, I was hypersensitive to everything. A nurse could walk by in a speeding manner and the breeze would burn my skin.
The mental endurance it took to survive that, and while his own family whispered their goodbyes and told him it was okay to let go, it's just beyond comprehension. But Jake refused to let go.
He fought. And I had to know.
Where did that strength come from? When surrendering seemed like the easiest escape, what made Jake keep fighting?

I went through a couple months of definitely freaking out and pain and talking to myself.

And that's how it really began, the talking to myself and that's how it really began the talking to myself out of boredom what do you do when you're locking your own body you're it's you got no one to talk to no one to calm you down you can only do so many math problems i remember really started when people come into my room, like nurses and medical professionals, and I would start talking to them as if they could hear me, and then I would say the sarcastic answer as if they were replying to me. And I would just have these, like, dumb conversations.
I know it sounds crazy. And then I was thinking about meaning of life and death, and I was having these deep philosophical thoughts and conversations with myself.
And it finally got to a point where, you know, I was convinced that I would die or be like this forever and had to come to terms with that and peace with that i started thinking thinking about why I had been so upset and depressed my entire life. Essentially, what started happening was there was this voice that was kind of like down in my chest, my heart, and I would be talking to myself in my original voice before I got sick from my heart, and my brain was a version of my original voice, but deeper and wiser and more calm would answer me,

and I started having these conversations, you know, two voices, same voice, one deeper, both mine. Jake describes to me how the voice from his heart was panicked, constantly asking questions about his life to the deeper, wiser voice that lived in his head.
The wiser voice would answer and prompt him to seek the answers from within, guiding him to where he needed to be mentally to break down these barriers and face his demons. And it reminded me a bit of EMDR therapy, or even hypnosis.
But Jake had never done either of those before. Yet, he was somehow acting as his own therapist and patient, and then there's this placement of the voices.
I couldn't help but make the connection between how Jake was describing these voices and where they existed in his body relating to the chakras. The wise one at the crown of his head, aligning with the crown chakra, which governs wisdom, awareness, and inner peace.
And then the wounded one in his heart, the heart chakra, which is associated with self-love and the ability to forgive and find acceptance. Jake's case is already challenging science's understanding of the brain and consciousness, but moments like this makes me wonder, what else could his experience unlock? Hi, it's Corinne, your host.

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Very spooky. For two months, Jake would engage in these really difficult conversations, the sort of self-help therapy retreat.
At one point, the wise voice told him that he had not yet grieved his mother's death properly. His heart disagreed, yet he was forced to face the pain of that experience again.
So I never had time to grieve. I was, like, getting real with my next steps in life, trying to figure out, like, where I live and money, you know, survival.
I just kind of went off the rails. I obviously knew what happened, but I more understood the full picture when I talked through this with two voices.
This self-help therapy retreat that happened in my own body, In silence. In medical arrest.

Probably took place for two months.

And when I came out the other side of it.

I was more at peace.

Don't get me wrong.

Still miserable.

Still in pain.

Still probably looking forward to death at that point.

But I was more okay with it after this self-talk.

My brain, he took his time with his words. They were not as rushed as my panicky searching for

answers. It was just very sure of himself and calm, collective, and seemed to have all the answers.
Something I don't think I ever really had, but I guess this was all me. I guess I did have the answers the entire time.
It came from my brain. Amazing what the brain can do in this situation.
You know, there's a lot of distractions in life when you're able to move around, talk to people. Most people don't have to sit with the thought by themselves for too long.
Even those that choose to, you know, it's an hour and then move on to something else. I had no choice.
I was like, all right, Jake, why were you so fucked up? Why was it always the next thing? Why were you such an addict? Why did I become such a mess? But it also was like other relationships, you know, romantic ones. It's so hard to explain.
I just, I grieved all of it, you know, in this time. And I thought about what I could have done differently and what I should have done.
You know, I had every thought pretty much imaginable during this time. There was never any like, oh, I wish I could go back and do it again.
It was more like it is what it is this happened. It was just trying to get some peace with it before death.
I also knew it was a very real possibility I'd be trapped like that for eternity. That's when I realized there was something scarier than death.
And it was being trapped in your own body, complete isolation for the remainder of your life. Which, at that juncture, I started realizing might be another 50 years.
And a day felt like a month, and a month felt like a year. It made me wonder how many other people there are that have to have those conversations with themselves.
How many people are trapped in their bodies, unable to communicate with the outside world, thought to be brain-dead, lacking awareness and any sort of comprehension? It's a really scary thought, and a topic that we will get into in future episodes. But luckily for Jake, he would not be stuck in this state for much longer.
After hospice timed out, Jake's wife did not call an ambulance. Rather, she contacted Dr.
Vena, the chief of neuroimmunology and neuroinfectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr.
Vena had been one of the only doctors to give Jake hope, telling Jake he thought he would survive. And I haven't been able to secure Dr.
Benna for an interview as he's incredibly busy working on the world's most complex cases, but I am so curious how he felt when Ellen had contacted him. Did he really believe that Jake would survive?

Dr. Venna, hearing that Jake was still alive and needing help, had Jake brought back to Massachusetts General Hospital to the same floor that he had been in months before.
But now he was under the care of Dr. Stephen Levison, who was the head of complex care at MGH.
July of 2018, over a year after Jake was first admitted to the hospital, something in Jake's body changed. There was a small movement in his wrist, and Dr.
Leveson took notice. And he goes, he's moving something, he's moving something.
Hey, I don't know if he can hear me, but if you can do that again. And I did.
I didn't know I did, but apparently I did. And they were like, wow, I want him under observation.
I want someone from nonverbal augmentative speech therapy to come in and teach him how to blink. And in a week or two weeks, I was communicating by eye blink.
This was a miraculous medical recovery. Jake had been in stage four of acute toxic progressive leucoencephalopathy.
No one had ever recovered from the stage before. And yet here was Jake communicating through eye blink.
My wife was around for this and there's something I couldn't. Again, I'm looking at the ceiling mostly.
That's when people lean over me. That's the only time I could see them.
But I could tell by something in her tone of her voice, she was frustrated with these healthcare professionals. And I couldn't understand why, because they're all doing their very best to help me.
So that's when I first noticed something odd going on. I would expect, oh my God, this is amazing.
Honey, honey, this is great. You know, there was no like real communication from her to me at that time.
It was just her giving the doctors what I interpreted as grief, her giving them grief. But on the other side of the coin, every now and again, she'd be like, honey, I'm, you know, like when doctors weren't in the room, I'm going to make it so you get into Spalding.
And like, so there was flashes and glimpses of positivity and supporting this from her, but it was strange. I was confused with what was happening.
So while Jake didn't quite understand the changes in behavior from his wife, he was determined as ever to communicate again. Working daily with a speech therapist at Spalding Rehabilitation Hospital, Jake worked on getting his voice back.
Here's Michelle Braley, the speech and language pathologist who was assigned to his case. 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. 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.
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. 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, 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.
It would take him about 45 seconds to blink in response, but he could do it. And gradually he moved up to using a letter board to communicate.
The board contained five rows of color coded letters, A, E, E, I, O, U, in the first column, and the person who wanted to communicate with Jake would go row by row, and he would stick out his tongue to signal yes. And they go, is it A, is it E, is it I, and you pick the row.
And then once you pick the row, and I would signal the row by, you know, saying my tongue. And so if I, you know, said A, they would go, is it A, is it B, is it C, is it D? And when I get to D, and then they sort of process over.
So it's really painful to do when you're trying to have a conversation. There's still someone can know exactly what they want to say 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 letter board. And that was challenging.
But I remember very distinctly doing after it was probably within the first week, 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? 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 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, 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 to his case. Like, from the minute I met him, I wanted to help as much as I could.
But when I realized how trapped he was in there is when I got, like, fully emotionally involved, too. From there, Jake graduated to the Megabee.
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 Megabee, 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. 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. Helen was still spending time in the hospital with Jake, and Michelle recalls her interactions with her.
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 did not interact with her often.
When I came in for therapy, she usually left. She was a little confusing to me at the beginning.
And I try not to judge, truly, because everyone handles grief and stress differently. 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 8 o'clock every morning at the hospital. And usually if there's a swallowing component, speech will go see in someone in the morning.

So I had a lot of 8 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,

those 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,

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. 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 like not to judge it, but it did strike me as odd.
I didn't meet any of Jake's family. Michelle remembers that Ellen had set up the letter boards throughout Jake's room so that he could study it and become faster at communicating.
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.
And 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 anytime I got the sense that anytime a therapist was helping or making progress with Jake, she was a little resentful of it because it wasn't her that was, and again, I could be projecting, but she wasn't, she, 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. 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 letter board.
I was trying to teach her, like, this is what we're doing, and she was not interested. And then after that, I think she disappeared.
Not disappeared. 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 his wife? You know, we kind of want to update her.
We need to know what the plan is. And so we're always we're always like where's this guy's wife like we need to talk to her about so many things all of us for different reasons and um she 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. We're here trying to, like, do the thing with you.
So it was just a strange, we never quite knew what was going on. I asked Jake if he had memory of this, and he did.
She wasn't a guest on the show, which is what I initially thought. Rather, she was front row, outside, with Jake on FaceTime, talking to one of the hosts as they walked onto stage, attempting to tell this host about her hospitalized husband in the few seconds they had before the show went live.
So it sounds like, while the hospital staff struggled to reach her, Jake still did have occasional contact. But I guess occasional is the key word here.
So I noticed Ellen, my wife, beginning to pull away. I didn't think of it as her pulling away, but I more noticed something strange or off.
She had definitely not been visiting as much, which, you know, I didn't blame her because, you know, she was my only caregiver during hospice. Her choice, by the way, being the only one.
She needs a break or I'm viewing it that way. And I'm making these kind of huge gains in therapy in the scheme of things, but to me, they're still small in the scheme of things.
But coming from where I came, everyone's like, it's pretty amazing what's happening here. I'm in PT, and they got me in this walking harness rolling cart machine, and they were trying to see if I like take a few steps with like tons of support on either side people moving my legs and my wife and my mother-in-law walk in and all the therapists people are like oh my god.
Look, look what your husband's doing. I saw her face.

I haven't been vertical in quite some time.

And she just looked not happy at all.

She looked a little disappointed.

She was mad. A few days after this, my wife and mother-in-law, I've had like, you know, I'm getting beat up in therapy.
I'm exhausted. They come in the room and I always say, Hi, honey, mom, and I'll give them a kiss, and she's like, all right, mom is going to, like, say a few things.
I'll leave you guys alone, leave the room. And my mother-in-law was like, oh, honey, I don't know how to say this.
I don't know why I'm saying this. Ellen kind of needs a divorce.
And I'm like, I mean, I just started like, I had this very weird scream-cry thing. That was the only thing verbally I could do.
I could cry, I could scream, I could yell, but it sounded very strange. I was told from people at Spalding that I sounded like a wounded animal.
For the next 48 hours, Jake cried on and off in the hospital, refusing all medications, food, and therapy. The last year and a half had been absolute hell.
But Jake had had Ellen. She somehow always knew what Jake needed in every moment.
She'd lay next to him and paint a picture of their future, what they'd do together when he recovered, and the home that they would have, the family they would create. And for Jake, this hope was his lifeline, and Ellen was the love of his life.
But then she was gone. They thought that was the end for me.
They thought I would never bounce back from that. I don't think they thought I would necessarily die, but they didn't think I'd continue recovering.
Jake did bounce back. On the third morning, when medical staff entered his room, he stuck out his tongue to accept his medication.
He may have lost his wife, but that didn't mean he couldn't get her back. He was now more motivated than ever to recover fully and to prove to Ellen that the magical recovery they dreamed of was just around the corner.
I feel like we got very close very quickly because there was something about him and about his story that spoke to me. And then 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.
And so I was super involved. I would, and, and was trying to think of any way to, 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. 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? And so he would ask me these questions, or we would have these conversations where he would talk to me about his addiction issues 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, let's just, why don't you just talk to me about like cooking? 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. 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.
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 I saw him at his worst moments, but he was still himself.
So and then I saw him at his best moments because there were times where this guy sitting here, he's sweating and uncomfortable and in pain and can't move anything in his body. But he's still cracking jokes to me right now, like through a Megabee.
Like, what? 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 chose to tell me, that says a lot about who you are. So I appreciated his sense of humor.
He's a little sarcastic. He has a little dark sense of humor sometimes.
But he's also optimistic and hopeful. And he perseveres.
And that all came out in these conversations. Jake has told me that he feels that he's a very powerful manifester, and I agree.
He's so driven and motivated, and he puts all of his effort into obtaining a goal that he visualizes for himself. In this moment, getting better for Ellen, despite their strained relationship, was all the motivation he needed.
And just two weeks after asking for divorce, that wish seemed a little closer to reality. Ellen came to visit again, and with her carried a life-sized teddy bear.
Like, nothing has happened. Like, nothing.
I'm very perplexed, and the spalding staff was too, because obviously there's very little secrets in hospital life.

And then she proceeds to tell me,

I bought us a house.

Not just any house, a big house

that's all decked out with ramps everywhere.

It's got a pool with a hoyer lift directly in the pool. And it's time for us to leave Spalding.
And I'm like, huh? You know, in my head. And hit my call bell or something.
And I tell, I'm like, well, it looks like I'm going home, you know, non-verbally. And they're all like, what?

Where? Huh? Who? How? When?

Hospital staff and a social worker inquired about this new home.

Did it have the proper equipment?

What preparations had been made?

Jake had been making incredible strides in the hospital.

Did he really want to leave now?

I blink my eyes now. I'm scared shitless to leave Spaulding.
Sometime later, Jake's social worker presented an alternative. He could be transferred to a different rehabilitation hospital in western Massachusetts, close to where Ellen had bought their new home.
Jake's speech therapist, Michelle, assured him that this was going to be a good option. I'm like, done deal, let's do it.
Unbeknownst to Jake, a family member had tracked him down at Spaulding. One of Jake's family members had wanted to come see him in Spaulding 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. So that was, and that was like the week of his discharge.
Jake's belongings were packed and he was transferred to Western State Hospital, which is a little over a two-hour drive from where he previously was being treated. Jake tells me that this was like moving from a five-star hotel to a Motel 6.
But Ellen had put in a lot of extra effort to make the room feel more homey. She had decorated the walls with photos of the two of them, and Jake was trying to be optimistic.
Everything seemed good, and she's like, okay, I'll be back tomorrow to visit you and see how things are going. And tomorrow came, and she didn't, and the next day came, and she didn't, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day.
Jake asked the hospital to help him make contact. Ellen wasn't answering calls, and she hadn't visited.
They helped Jake set up an email account for himself and his very first email was sent to Ellen. I email her with help, essentially saying like, hey, miss you.
Would love for you to visit sometime, but take your time. You know, I don't want to push her.
She wrote back, I am unable to visit the hospital. It gives me anxiety walking into a hospital.
Can't do it. Maybe could do it by phone call.
I just wrote back with help. Okay, I understand.
She sacrificed so much for me trying to be a thoughtful and an understanding husband make best of everything. The hospital wanted to set up a call with Jake's family to go over medical history and care routine, as they do with all new patients.
But at this point in time, Ellen was Jake's only family. Finding a time that worked for her took some time.
It was getting to be obvious that nothing worked for her. The call did eventually take place, and Jake remembers it going well.
He was in a wheelchair in the room and listened as the hospital staff went over everything in his care plan with Ellen, who had called in. After that, Jake said that Ellen never returned to the hospital.
he was now abandoned in this hospital, hours away from his now estranged family, with no way to get in contact with anyone. With no one left, he chose to focus his efforts on his recovery.
First, he needed to get his voice back. I've mentioned to him a few times how impressed I am with his attention to detail during his storytelling, and just how much effort he puts into providing facts.
And he reminded me that he was without his voice for so long, and he is so determined to never be misunderstood again. In the hospital, that was something that happened pretty frequently.
And Jake recalls one of these humorous moments. This nurse comes in to give me my morning meds.
And there's like a bunch of shit. And there's this one med called Lovenox, spelled L-O-V-E-N-O-X.
And that is for blood clot. It's like an ejection in the stomach, which I honestly hated.
It was

very painful. And, you know, if you're in bed for a long time, or like all the time, it's very important you get this every day so you don't have blood clots.
And she gives me all my meds but she forgot the lovinoox. And I'm like, where's my injection, you know? And I can't talk.
And I'm like, just like blinking my eyes a lot to signal like, and she's like, what's up? And I'm just like, I blinked by. She's like, letterboard? I'm like, circle my tongue for yes.
And I start spelling letters. I get to L-O-V-E.
V E and she's like Jake I don't have time for this like we can't talk about love right now like I got 18 other patients and I'm like a blink in my eyes like crazy and I'm just getting like all frustrated and she won't let me she's like let's do it again we get L O V E and she's like calls in some other people and She's like, let's do it again. We get L-O-V-E.
And she's like, calls in some other people.

And she's like, you just keep spelling love.

And like, there's like eight people in my room.

And like, after like 30 minutes, they let me keep going on.

And I spell N-O-X.

And they're like, who do you love?

Like, who is Knox?

And I'm just like, oh. And then someone's like, oh, Lova Knox.
He's so smart. And in my head, I'm like, I got fucking brain damage.
And I'm like, what's your excuse? Like, you know? Anyway, all this cool recovery stuff started happening in February 2019. I kind of made my first ah-ah sound, and that was a huge breakthrough.
Speech therapy was like, oh, my God, see, I told you you could do one day. I started learning vowels, and my therapist is like, those are good.
It's time for us to start working on words. And time for you to start thinking about the first things you want to say.
Easy. It was the same as the last thing I said.
I love you, you know, but I wanted to throw Ellen in there. I love you, Ellen.
I love you, Ellen. Practiced that for like three months.
Finally, his speech therapist thought he had the phrase down. Perhaps it was time to use it.
It was suggested that Ellen could be invited to a therapy session to see Jake's progress and to hear him speak. I'm like, hmm, I don't think that'd be a good idea, guys.
Despite the opportunity to be with Ellen again being the main motivator for Jake in his recovery, he was hesitant to reach out after everything that had happened. They had been exchanging texts and emails briefly during this time, mostly about his care, given that she was still his healthcare proxy and his power of attorney.
He thought about his speech therapist suggestion for a week, and then decided to FaceTime Ellen instead. I call in the nurse because at this point, I can't tap my own, I have the iPad and the holder, but I can't use it on my own.
They hold it in front of me, I'm in the bed. And she answers and looks puzzled.
Boom, the call ended. She hung up on me.
And it fucking broke my heart. And I knew it was over.
It was hard to motivate me. It was hard to get me out of bed.
It was hard to get me to stop crying. And shortly after that, I called in a social worker.
And non-verbverbally so I could be understood, I told him it was time for me to file for divorce and asked for help with that. Jake's face deflates as he revisits this time in his life.
I apologize to him that he has to relive all of these memories and he says it's okay, but that he still doesn't quite understand why everything happened the way that it did. I just, I didn't get it.
It was like, you, you wanted this. We want, I thought this was the plan, but you've abandoned that plan.
It seems that everyone who ever cared for Jake, despite him being under their care or not, still tried to follow his case and still tried to help. 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.

If Michelle had befriended Ellen on Facebook, perhaps she would have seen a post. A post

announcing a funeral service for her dearly departed. Jake is dead.
The End Thank you for listening to Blank. This podcast is hosted and produced by me, Corinne Vienne, alongside my co-creator and survivor, Jake Handel.
Our original music is composed by the brilliant

and talented Michael Marget. We're so grateful for your support.
If you enjoyed this episode,

please consider rating, reviewing, and sharing this story with others. For additional resources,

updates, and behind-the-scenes content, visit our website, BlinkThePodcast.com.

Blink will return with a new episode next Sunday.