Mackenzie Dejong: Learning to Meet the New Me

Can you share about the brain injury event itself?
My brain injury was caused in August 2024. A motorcycle at a stop vs an 82 year old lady in an SUV going at least 40 mph. I was the solo driver of that motorcycle. My bike ended up embedded in the front of the car, me unconscious on the ground behind her car. I truly do not understand how I survived that alone. I had multiple fractures in my spine, lost an entire inch of height! How rude! I had what is called a hangman's fracture in my C2 vertebra. I now have a fusion of three vertebra and some rods and screw that will forever stay in my neck and limit the movement too. I forgot to mention I was a 22 year old female...I nor my fiancé who proposed the month prior to the accident knew anything about brain injuries. My doctors told him I may have memory issues along with mood changes, but it will get better...until a year after to assume all ongoing symptoms are permanent.

How did you feel during the first days, weeks, or months after the injury?
I have only 2 memories of the first 2 or 3 months. Nothing even to do with the accident itself. What I have been told is that I was extremely irritable, I would get fuming mad at the smallest of things... like my now husband has said...I have accused him of petting our cat wrong. For vacuuming in a different pattern than I do. O my goodness..the microwave beep of ours specifically is worse than nails on a chalk board. It is now a muted microwave.

What kind of rehabilitation therapies or treatment have been most helpful through the process of recovery?
Recovery overall? Physical therapy for 2 months in the beginning. Then I went back to work as a tattoo apprentice. I have had nothing else but one more month of PT more than a year later. Free advice... don’t wait to get married and then have health insurance... do it before, because when the system is against you it is not fun.

What have been some of the biggest challenges you or your loved one has faced during recovery?
Why me? Why wasn't what I had already had to go through be enough? How is any of this fair? I feel like life has been trying to outweigh the good of me living, with one after one, each doorway out, is shut.

If there have been setbacks or repeated injuries, describe that journey.
My husband is in the military so he is gone and back randomly and in bursts without warning. I am just beginning to understand my behavior in the beginning and when he leaves is the injured brain. Not me as a person. Not my own fault.

How has your life changed since the brain injury?
I have had to stop working because I forced myself to my physical breaking point. From that, almost 2 years later, I am learning what a brain injury really is because I did not have the capacity to do anything in life but go to work, dream about being home, and then to be entirely couch ridden and grumpy the rest of the nights.

What role has support from family, friends, or community played in your journey?
I really haven’t had any support other than my husband when he is home, or my therapist. I moved hundreds of miles away from any family member.

Have there been any moments of breakthrough or unexpected positives along the way?
I stopped working finally and everything just kind of clicked. I was immediately happier, I felt more stable. I, in fact, was not crazy like my ex told me I was, I was not making things up in my head. Well, I might have been re-imagining a story based on a feeling, an emotion I for some reason have immediately tied to this situation.

What do you know now that you wish you knew at the beginning of this journey?
I am injured, it is not my fault, i need to speak up, don't mask my personality now with how I remember the past me.