Episode #90: Many of us say we would be there for our friends in an emergency, but that's often theory until it's tested. Not everyone can rise to the occasion. And crisis is a time when the friends you want around you and the ones you may need to leave behind (even for just a while) becomes very clear.
Kelly Lang, co-author with her husband, Mike, of The Miracle Child: Traumatic Brain Injury and Me is a brain injury survivor and caregiver to her daughter who sustained a traumatic brain injury in 2001, in her early 30s, after the family's minivan was hit and pushed through an intersection by a reckless driver. Kelly takes us through the days after the accident and the way friends and family supported her family then and throughout the years.
Meet Kelly Lang:
Kelly Lang co-leads the Brain Injury Association of America’s Advisory Council and serves on the Virginia Brain Injury Advisory Council. Her advocacy experience includes working with the National Center on Advancing Person-Centered Practices and Systems’ Brain Injury Learning Collaborative and serving as a member of the Traumatic Brain Injury Leadership Group and the Person-Centered Advisory Group. She has been the Keynote speaker at a number of state brain injury conferences and conducted workshops and webinars about brain injury and advocacy. Kelly is also a communications trainer with INOVA Health Systems. Kelly and her husband, Mike, created a website https://www.themiraclechild.org/ educating others about brain injury.
Find Kelly: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Threads
* All transcripts are available on the main Buzzsprout "Dear Nina" site. Click on any episode and find the transcript tab.
Let's connect over all things friendship!
Episode #90: Many of us say we would be there for our friends in an emergency, but that's often theory until it's tested. Not everyone can rise to the occasion. And crisis is a time when the friends you want around you and the ones you may need to leave behind (even for just a while) becomes very clear.
Kelly Lang, co-author with her husband, Mike, of The Miracle Child: Traumatic Brain Injury and Me is a brain injury survivor and caregiver to her daughter who sustained a traumatic brain injury in 2001, in her early 30s, after the family's minivan was hit and pushed through an intersection by a reckless driver. Kelly takes us through the days after the accident and the way friends and family supported her family then and throughout the years.
Meet Kelly Lang:
Kelly Lang co-leads the Brain Injury Association of America’s Advisory Council and serves on the Virginia Brain Injury Advisory Council. Her advocacy experience includes working with the National Center on Advancing Person-Centered Practices and Systems’ Brain Injury Learning Collaborative and serving as a member of the Traumatic Brain Injury Leadership Group and the Person-Centered Advisory Group. She has been the Keynote speaker at a number of state brain injury conferences and conducted workshops and webinars about brain injury and advocacy. Kelly is also a communications trainer with INOVA Health Systems. Kelly and her husband, Mike, created a website https://www.themiraclechild.org/ educating others about brain injury.
Find Kelly: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Threads
* All transcripts are available on the main Buzzsprout "Dear Nina" site. Click on any episode and find the transcript tab.
Let's connect over all things friendship!
[00:00:00] Nina: Welcome to Dear Nina, Conversations About Friendship. I'm your host, Nina Badzin. I've been writing about friendship since 2014, and each week on the episode, I cover a different aspect of friendship.
Taken as a whole, we get to all of the highs and lows of adult and sometimes teen friendships. Today is a heavier and important topic inspired by my friend Kelly Lang, whose daughter suffered a traumatic brain injury at the age of three in a horrific car accident. Kelly and her husband, Mike, co wrote a book many years later called The Miracle Child, chronicling the days and years after the accident and the way care for brain injury patients has changed in the past two decades.
And as March is Brain Injury Awareness Month, I'm really grateful to have Kelly here to tell us her story and the ways friends rose the occasion, one friend in particular, and navigating what to do about the friends that couldn't quite fit into the picture anymore. We really just get a taste of it here on the show today.
It would be hard and probably too personal to have Kelly go through all of her friendships and all that happened, and we're mostly focusing on the positive, but I do think it is helpful for anyone who finds themselves on the other side of a friend's crisis. Thank you
So, thank you again, Kelly, and welcome.
[00:01:24] Kelly: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:01:25] Nina: You've been such a wonderful part of our Dear Nina Facebook community for a long time, and I've known about your story. We were in a writing group together. I've read your fantastic memoir this story will be new for a lot of the listeners.
I'm hoping you're comfortable. rewinding to the very beginning. You're not going to tell your whole story. People can get really the whole story told by, you and Mike, which is really cool to have both perspectives. But just from your point of view, happened?
[00:01:55] Kelly: it was 2001, about two months after 9 11. Mike had been laid off from his job due to the he traveled a lot. And due to travel being cut off, he was laid off. I was driving, he was out of town for a short term consulting job. My oldest daughter, five at the time, had her first Nutcracker stage rehearsal, which is a huge deal if you're a dancer. I was taking her and my other daughter, Olivia, who was three, to the rehearsal.
And the last thing I remember is pulling out of my driveway and listening to a Blues Clues CD in the car and the girls were singing along. the next thing I remember is only an auditory memory of a paramedic. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a paramedic talking to me and asking me if anyone else was in my car.
I was in a minivan. He wanted to know if anyone was in my third row. And I knew at that point there was something wrong. I just started screaming that he had to save her. I knew it was Olivia because Hannah had been screaming, Mommy, Mommy, wake up. all three of us were taken to the nearest emergency room and Olivia was transferred almost immediately to a trauma one pediatric emergency room, which is about 40 minutes away from where we were. And my best friend rode in the ambulance with her because I couldn't be released and no one could get in touch with Mike.
[00:03:06] Nina: and I know from reading the book, her name is Kristen, how did Kristen end up at the scene? I don't remember that
[00:03:11] Kelly: I don't didn't remember talking to the nurse or giving her any information while I was unconscious, but she showed me on the sheet, she'd written down names and numbers. I'd given her Kristen's phone number. I somehow remembered that. When I woke up and I was in a daze, but I kind of knew what happened.
She said Kristen's on her way, and I was all confused 'cause I didn't remember. Kristen walks into the room, she sees Hannah and she's like, Oh my gosh, thank God you're okay. Because they had told her Hannah was injured. She thought Olivia wasn't in the car.
And then they said, No, it's Olivia that needs to be transferred. it was requested that you go in the ambulance with her. Kristen had just had a baby, probably about three weeks prior.
[00:03:50] Nina: Wow.
[00:03:51] Kelly: but she's the friend that is always going to be there. And I, I would have to say I learned a lot from our friendship and from just the way she stepped in.
[00:03:59] Nina: How old were you and Kristen at
[00:04:00] Kelly: We were in our 30s in our early 30s. we had met a few years prior when our oldest children were one. We lived in the same neighborhood I was walking. With Hannah in this little, push car and we clicked instantly our kids became best friends and then she moved to a bigger house and then we moved to a bigger house.
So we were living in different areas but still maintain that closeness.
[00:04:22] Nina: we all sometimes have in mind this person we would call or we say the words like, I would absolutely show up for anybody who really needed me. Like sometimes we talk about being really busy day to day, but if someone really needed me, I would be there. And this is an example of real life. This is not a theory. you really needed someone to be there because your husband was out of town.
[00:04:40] Kelly: so Mike was on his way home, but no one knew because he had left a message for me after I left the house on our home answering machine. I had a cell phone, but it was only, you know, you only carried it around if it was an absolute emergency. We didn't communicate the way, we communicate now Yeah. and I had no family in the area, so Kristen, I guess, was my go to. she stepped up. I mean, she'd had a newborn. She had four kids. This was her fourth. her grandfather was visiting from North Carolina. I mean, she has a huge family on her husband's side. When she got that phone call from the hospital, she dropped everything and came. And not only did she do that, but she also arranged for her sister in law to come to the hospital for me. Because she realized, oh, she's not going to have a car. How is she going to get from one hospital to the other?
To have that foresight was so critical in that moment. I still wonder, like, how did she figure that out?
[00:05:29] Nina: I'm surprised you could even be released quickly enough
[00:05:32] Kelly: I was released. Olivia was released. They had a cardiac care ambulance out waiting for her. I didn't realize how serious it was. I didn't realize that she, they didn't expect her to survive. They took me immediately to get a CT scan and some x rays I think my leg hurt, my jaw hurt.
I did the x rays, they said everything was clear, I might be sore. They said there's nothing we can do, you're free to go. all of a sudden Susan, Kristen's sister in law showed up and she's in the lobby waiting for me. the most calm person you would ever want driving you in that situation.
[00:06:03] Nina: you're there with no family, this is your, Close friend sister in law. I mean, it's really incredible. Now they're part of this story forever. That has really shaped your family's life let's hear a little more of the story because it's not like there was an accident and then oh it turns out Thank God by a miracle Olivia survived.
Well, that part's true. it was a whole shift for your family. So what happens next
[00:06:24] Kelly: was a whole shift. ironically, Mike and I arrived at the hospital the exact same time, Kristen had left him a message on the answering machine saying, Mike, the girls are in an accident. And he waited for her to say, but everyone's okay. And that didn't come.
And she just said, pack a bag, one for you, one for Kelly, and get to the hospital. he jumped in the car and he went, and I don't even remember if he packed me a bag, actually.
[00:06:46] Nina: and where was Hannah?
[00:06:47] Kelly: I had asked her, You're gonna have to spend the night with someone, who would you like to go to? And I gave her some options, and so she named this friend she had, and I had someone call the mom.
she came and picked her up. Hannah was very happy. It was a sleepover on a school night. She was in kindergarten. and I knew she was going to be well taken care of.
[00:07:05] Nina: okay. So you're at the hospital Mike's at the hospital. Olivia's in
[00:07:08] Kelly: in the pediatric intensive care and Kristen is there with her husband actually came with the infant. there was, her sister and another sister in law who was a nurse at the hospital. So there's all these connections that came in, that was a great resource to have because she could get information, we said hello and Mike and I were immediately scooted away to go meet with the doctors and to see Olivia.
[00:07:31] Nina: And at that time, what did they think were the chances of Olivia surviving?
[00:07:35] Kelly: They never said there was a chance she wouldn't survive, They basically said, we don't know.
[00:07:40] Nina: And she was in a
[00:07:41] Kelly: She was in a coma, she was on a ventilator, you know, she looked very peaceful, but here's this little three year old girl, who actually was a big three year old, they said that's what saved her, partially, she was not petite, laying there in a diaper, that's all that was on her, you know, with these tubes but she still looked peaceful, because There were no bruises on her.
There were no marks, which was fascinating. every question was, we don't know. you can talk to her softly. You can touch her. we suggest you read books to her that she remembers. but that's all you can do. And we couldn't lay down in the bed with her. We couldn't hold her.
We couldn't do any of that. And I bring up the no bruises because it was after that I went to the restroom. the nurses had given me scrubs to wear because they had cut my pants, to get me out of the car. And I walked into the restroom and I looked in the mirror and I had two black eyes and blood all over my face.
And I thought, no one told me. I cleaned myself up as best I could. I never really asked why no one told me until more recently and Mike said, I thought you knew
[00:08:37] Nina: That is interesting about Olivia having no visible bruises because Internally, there was a lot of damage going on, you would soon learn.
[00:08:45] Kelly: Yes. they did some scans on her the following day and we found out that she fractured her skull in the back and then also she had at least three brain bleeds. The theory at that time was, you wait and see. You put in an, um, intracranial pressure monitor that gets put into the skull to monitor the pressure in the brain.
If it got too high, then they would have to do surgery to relieve that pressure. If they could maintain it without surgery, that was the better option, and that's what they were going to try to do. And that was a success because she didn't have to have surgery. it was wait and see.
That's the hardest part I think is you just don't know I kept saying are there people I can talk to have been through this are there books I can read is there anything because I was just Grasping for information and they just kept saying no. we don't know. We don't know we don't know and that was the hardest part. There was one nurse who really looked at me and said, you know, I am NOT a doctor But I have a feeling that she's going to wake up and she's going to recover to some extent. And that gave me a little bit of hope.
[00:09:46] Nina: part of what interests me so much in your story is there's so many parts along the way where you would need help. I mean, there's like this piece where you're physically in the hospital, I mean, you need help with Hannah. you. are trying to find out if anybody knows any specialists. Is there a better hospital for her to recover at?
I remember that part of the book. And it's like all these times we need help, but it doesn't end in just this crisis part. We'll wait till we get further into Olivia's life. But just right now, pausing for a second to think about all the needs, even just getting the word out. people had email for sure.
And people, like you said, had cell phones that you used from time to time. I think it's hard for people, even those of us, you and I are on the same age who lived through a time before smartphones, it's still almost hard to picture, even the story of Mike catching the earlier plane, like right now that just be nothing he would have texted.
As he was getting the standby seat or something. Oh, hey, I was able to get on. Okay. Then you would know. we didn't know stuff. A message on the answering machine. It sounds so archaic, And it was 25, 30 years ago. less than that. how did you get the word out?
How did you decide? Was it all Kristen?
[00:10:50] Kelly: it was partially Kristen. that night in the hospital when Mike went to pick up the phone, the hospital phone, to call his parents because we knew we were going to need help watching Hannah. And he called his parents because they lived about a four hour drive from us. he broke down.
He couldn't talk. And so she immediately walked over, grabbed the phone from him, spoke to my mother in law, who she knew. She'd met multiple times, so it wasn't like she was talking to a complete stranger. Even if she was, Kristen would have done it. and my in laws were planning to come. They came the next day.
Between that, my mother in law notified certain family members. we had to call my parents, and that was rough. because there was, some difficult relationships there then just somehow a phone tree was established and I, wasn't part of that whole thing because I couldn't talk to anyone.
So I kind of shifted it off to Mike and to Kristen and said, look, can you call the schools? I had plans that week with friends, playdates and stuff,. And then my mother in law sort of became the contact person.
We had it clear that if you had questions, . My mother in law was pretty much there all the time and she would relay the information to us. And so she would pick and choose, obviously if people were just calling just to say we wish them well, she would tell us, but it wouldn't be at the high priority.
But if someone called and said, look, I know a neurologist that would get to us immediately.
[00:12:04] Nina: This idea of a gatekeeper is very brilliant I think technology has made it harder for people in a crisis in some ways. we're so accessible. it's very easy to wish somebody well to say, I'm thinking of you.
And I think any reasonable person does not expect a message back, but still it's a lot of messages . And yet you wouldn't want to not hear from anybody. So that gatekeeper concept is the perfect way to let someone in a crisis know you're thinking of them, but then that person just isn't inundated and I don't think people use that so much anymore.
[00:12:35] Kelly: No, they don't. but it was a nice way for us to manage. you know, we had small groups who would come to the hospital. Our neighbors all got together. They got, snacks. like, whole gift basket. They dropped it off for us, which was greatly appreciated.
you don't think to bring people food in a hospital, but it is greatly needed because I wouldn't leave the room. I was so afraid that if I left the room, something was going to happen and I wasn't going to be there. So we weren't eating. You just don't even want, I mean, even to go to the bathroom, I would have to go running. Kristen brought me homemade meals, and she would bring it on a plate, an actual China plate, And she would actually make me go sit down somewhere and eat it like a real person. And she said, I will stay in the room with her. And if something happens, I will make sure to get you.
It sounds so trivial. It was huge.
[00:13:20] Nina: I don't know Kristen. I love Kristen. I want to be Kristen. Like we all want to be that friend. We do. We want to know that we rose to the occasion that we didn't just say we would rise to the occasion But that we actually did.
So as Olivia eventually gets out of the hospital. I mean, it's not as simple as that. I mean, people need to read the book. It's a whole journey just to get out of the hospital. Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges at that point
[00:13:43] Kelly: she was only in the hospital for a month total when you put in her inpatient rehab, which was the shocking because that was not the expectation. She was supposed to be there much longer. it was a lot of, Trying to put the pieces back together, here, our family was finally under one roof. How do you put that back together and how do you figure out what therapy she was going to need, what Hannah needed?
I had no idea what Hannah had witnessed. I had no idea what was going on in her mind. I had my own things going on in my mind that I didn't even realize. then the guilt Mike had, because he wasn't there. he was unemployed still, and he got a job quickly after, which was great. That was a huge relief.
The life we had before was so different. to the life we now had, and how do we make it work?
[00:14:27] Nina: and how long did it take to realize Olivia was going to struggle in School and in milestones
[00:14:35] Kelly: It came pretty quickly, she went to a special needs preschool at first, about two months after we came home, watching her, was hard, because I saw the difference, I saw how she reacted differently with her peers, she also went back to her original preschool twice a week only for like an hour and a half each day because that's all she could handle. but it was something I guess I needed to see. I needed to see that she was going to need a lot more help. and then also doing the therapies that we felt were going to be the best for her.
Some were provided by the school. But we also supplemented with a lot of private therapies and trying to get those in place was a huge job.
[00:15:10] Nina: Were you using the term traumatic brain injury at the time was that language the doctors had given you from the
[00:15:17] Kelly: Yeah, the traumatic brain injury was definitely from the get go, but I always have to remember it was 2001. No one really knew traumatic brain injury. we started to hear more about it after 2001, but still people didn't understand it. there's still misconceptions.
[00:15:31] Nina: Well, you should take a moment to talk about that, what it means to have a traumatic brain injury and what other people, athletes, different, yeah, just give us a sense.
[00:15:38] Kelly: Usually a child who's under the age of 11 who has a traumatic brain injury, the recovery is much different. so if you have a brain injury and you have learned how to read, those pathways will re, ignite each other slowly the information will come back, but if you've never had the information to begin with, it's harder to learn it.
learning to read was so difficult for her. Learning math anything that was, not rational was really difficult. her processing skills were all, much slower than they were and she'd be very quick to get frustrated. You know, obviously young children do get frustrated easily.
add that on top of it, it's like she would go from 0 to 60. she'd be in a complete temper tantrum. There was no stopping. You just had to let it go. And that was hard. my other daughter she'd gotten past that stage of temper tantrum per se, but watching her sister and seeing how difficult it was, I think, that was hard.
[00:16:28] Nina: I have to imagine maybe Hannah was like, why is she not getting in trouble? Why is she allowed to do that? I'm sure it took Hannah a long time to come around to understanding that the situation was going to need to be handled differently.
[00:16:39] Kelly: Hannah tried to fix her. At one point, and had to realize that I had to, explain it's not your job. your job is to be her sister, and to be supportive, and to be her playmate, and to include her as much as you can, but your job is not to fix her.
[00:16:50] Nina: In the book, it is really evident how much you had to advocate all the time, every year of school, a certain point, you would just know. You could tell by the look a teacher gave or a way a principal might have sighed or something, and you're like, oh no, okay, it's going to be one of those situations.
Like, you knew it was a good situation when it was a situation that was going to require you to step in
[00:17:11] Kelly: I learned early on that it was really important for me to communicate what They should expect from her I knew they didn't have time to read all the IEPs, I knew teachers were overwhelmed, and I would meet with the whole team of teachers and give them a scenario and say, this is what you can expect from her. And this is what she needs. I want to work as a team reach out to me if there's a problem and we will back you up. And I knew who my adversaries were and I know who I had, was going to have a battle with immediately.
[00:17:39] Nina: Did this connect you with a community of other parents of children with special needs? I imagine that you ended up in a network you never would have had otherwise.
[00:17:48] Kelly: It did. I mean, when she was in the special needs preschool
[00:17:52] Kelly: It was very different disabilities, anything from Down syndrome, Selma palsy, autism. And so there was some commonality and there was some differences.Some children were born with a disability or their parents knew ahead of time like that there was something that was likely going to happen., it's very different when I look back. I think wow, I Fought for her harder than anything because I wanted I guess I wanted to fix it
[00:18:16] Nina: this idea that We can go back to what we had and not need all these layers of doctors and testing. I mean, I just know there was years and years and years of
[00:18:25] Kelly: Yeah, it didn't end. it wasn't always the same therapies or the same doctors, but sometimes it would change depending on what was going on with her. And part of it's my never ending search to make sure that I've not missed anything.
[00:18:37] Nina: as Olivia got older and she wasn't in a special school necessarily, were you able to find other parents to connect with?
[00:18:45] Kelly: It would depend. she was always mainstream. She was always in a regular class with students and she would get pull out services, which she wasn't always happy with.
So there were some parents that I met. I mean, there's one that I met through their special needs preschool that actually lived in the neighborhood right next to me. Our daughters had different disabilities, but, they got along very well, so they would play a lot together, and her older daughter and my older daughter were a year apart, and they were close for a while, and we've maintained a friendship, even though our kids have gone in different directions.
But it was hard to find that support of parents who understood. I would get comments like, I'm so glad everything worked out for you. I would stand there not knowing really how to respond. I didn't want to be rude, but I also wanted to say, what do you mean you're so glad it worked out because it didn't work out?
Yes, she's standing here. She's alive. I'm very, very grateful for that. But there's a lot under there that you don't actually see. knowing when was the time to tell that and when was the time to just keep my mouth shut, as Livia got older, as I got older and realized, I actually owned my own injury too, I realized that it wasn't, something to be shamed of.
That it was a part of us, but it didn't define us. Getting her to that place was huge also, accepting what happened and moving forward.
[00:19:58] Nina: One part of your book I found so interesting was you and Mike not knowing exactly when was the right time to let Olivia know that she'd been in this accident.
[00:20:07] Kelly: we went back and forth on that for a long time of when we tell her and it came to a head because she was really fighting getting pulled out, why am I different, why can't I have this, why can't I have that, and we finally made the decision, you know, it's hard because some doctors said don't tell her. They didn'twant.
[00:20:25] Nina: I was curious about
[00:20:27] Kelly: They thought she'd use it as a crutch, Oh, I can't do this because I have a brain injury. I can't do this. And I felt that the more information she had, the better she might be able, because now, then there would be a reason.
[00:20:38] Nina: Right. She could, like, give herself a
[00:20:40] Kelly: Yeah. I mean, just like, you know, a kid who is having trouble to read and it gets pulled out has a reason that, Oh, it's more difficult for me to read. So we told her, and that was a really hard conversation. And we also knew not to tell her too much. we kind of judged, how much information to give her until she had enough and I could watch her face and I could see when, okay, we're done. We didn't have to give her the nitty gritty details, but she understood.
[00:21:05] Nina: So hard to navigate something like this, like, like you said at the very beginning, you were like, is there a book? Is there, I mean, now you've written the book, but it's like, is there something that can help me? Some resource? And each kid is different.
Each person with a, any kind of injury, brain injury especially, I mean it manifests differently and it's, oh my,
[00:21:22] Kelly: through the years I learned, who would be my allies, who I would trust and who I would just give very peripheral information. I learned which circles those. People would be in and there's nothing wrong because I'm sure there's people that I interact with that they don't tell me their whole life story, nor do I want to hear it.
I navigate it that way. And sometimes people from the outer ring might move forward, might move closer in. And then at other times, you know, it's kind of ebbs and flows. I think of it as a wave they come into your life. First. Not a particular reason, but they just flow in and you might have share some things and then they flow back out. And that's okay. and not everyone's going to understand it. That's for sure.
[00:21:59] Nina: I want to ask this because it comes up through my inbox sometimes in different forms, you know, not literally from a car accident, but your story is one that can help other people who are going through some sort of crisis and unsure about who to lean on and who to let go.
I have to imagine there were certain friendships that just didn't work out anymore, merely because you only had so much time, how, Did that play out for you?
[00:22:22] Kelly: you know, I was always a very private person and, I had a small circle, you know, of friends that I would share things with. And, I think I broadened it somewhat, but I, Um, I would just know who I could trust and who just wasn't going to get it. And even today I know who's going to get it and who's not and I'll share more intimate details with the ones who I think are going to be more supportive and who can understand. The others I'll give, it'll be more peripheral.
I didn't have a role model. About, how to have friendships. My mother was very closed off and I actually think that Kristen was my role model, because she showed me how you step up, how you be there without being intrusive.
you don't go storming into someone's house and such, you know, you try to give them privacy as well, but how to be there with the little things, dropping off a meal. I'm always like one of the first people, if a meal train goes around, I'm always signing up. I just feel like it's a little piece that I can contribute to make this family feel better, whether, someone's had an operation, had a baby, unfortunately a death in the family.
I am there. I think I learned a lot from Kristen watching her and how she approached me and my family and how she continues. even our relationship ebbed and flowed. she had four kids, I ended up having three. We lived far apart, kids had different interests. It was harder to see each other over the years and there was a point that our relationship wasn't as strong and I'll never forget, I was in the car and I was driving to something I was talking to her and she was on the speakerphone and she said something to the effect, and I can't remember it exactly, she has a niece who was born with a lot of, congenital issues.
she was graduating from high school and her sister in law said to her, I knew what Katie was going to be before she was born. But Kelly didn't know. it's a much harder road. And I don't know what that comment did to Kristen, but she called me and she says, I am so sorry. And that's all I needed.
It's just to know that, and you know what, she's, that I'll call and I'll tell her a story, you know, some like, you won't believe that, you know, this happened. She has taught me to laugh at things you have to find some humor in it and you have to not always be, down and about
[00:24:31] Nina: there's another friendship you write about in the book we don't have to go there if you don't want to, when Olivia was in a car accident later in her life. I can't even imagine the trauma that brought up for everybody in the family, I believe it was a friend of yours driving the car or was it just, was it, and I don't mean just, but was it, or was it the mom of a friend of
[00:24:49] Kelly: It was both. She was a friend of mine, and she was the mom of a friend of Olivia's, who was driving the car.
[00:24:55] Nina: So was that friendship able to survive that?
[00:24:59] Kelly: No. The friendship wasn't that strong at that point. I mean, it had gone more to the outer circle, if I use that analogy. But, that did a lot of damage and not physically, just emotionally, I think to both Olivia and myself. it brought back a lot of subconscious things for Olivia and seven years later and she's still suffering, but it makes sense when you look at it from a trauma perspective, that never actually leaves you.
[00:25:23] Nina: I feel for both you and the other mom in that situation because it's almost like a fear I have, not just having to do with a car, but to ever be the cause of somebody else's physical and emotional, but I mean, starting with physical pain, where it's your fault.
[00:25:40] Kelly: No, and it was hard because I was kind of like in the middle, was calling, texting me constantly and Libby wanted nothing to do with her, didn't want to see her. I don't even remember if Libby ever got back in the car with her. But, We were carpooled to school and so I would, said to Olivia, I will drive you all the time.
I'll pick you up. I'll drive you. I mean, that would have been the arrangement before anyway. just watching it through Olivia's eyes though was hard. the first time she didn't know what was going on and didn't have any memory of it. But this time she did.
[00:26:09] Nina: Kelly, we're going to wrap up. Is there anything else that you want to say about friendship related to your story
[00:26:16] Kelly: try to be there for your friends. Every friend is different and they're going to want your support in a different way, but just try to be there. I mean, I remember Nini, you had written, one of your questions, it's like, don't just say, how can I help? Because people aren't going to be able to say, well, can you bring me a dinner on such and such?
Just do something, even writing a card, you know, a handwritten note means the world. just try to show up for them in some. Some area.
[00:26:41] Nina: I agree. There isn't one perfect thing. And I mean, you really can tell because like, are you, your point of view really is so valuable because it wasn't just the one accident. I mean, there was multiple years and years of sort of needing support and different kinds of support. Well, one of these days I hope to meet Kristen.
I do. Kristen, our role model of, and I like that you said your friendship ebbed and flowed too. I mean, different things going on in her life and it's not like she could just be pigeonholed as like perfect friend. I mean, it's
[00:27:08] Kelly: Oh, and, you know, I had lunch with her yesterday, and we had a great time. We just had a great time together. even now our lives are different, but we still come together, and there's so much similarity. we joke that neither one of us had a sister, so We're sisters. she's just lovely. And I, I tried to take my lessons from her.
[00:27:24] Nina: Kelly, thank you so much for sharing your story with us and it's really just a slice of what's in the book, but I think it gives people some flavor of this trauma and showing up for a friend and then relying on friends in different ways.
[00:27:39] Kelly: Thanks, Nina. I really appreciated having this chat with you.
[00:27:41] Nina: all right, listeners, if you're interested in joining the Dear Nina Facebook community where Kelly has been a great participator since the beginning of it in the summer of 2021, you can find that in the search bar of Facebook, just type in Dear Nina, the group, that's what I called it, Dear Nina, the group, and it will show up.
We talk about books, shows, and friendship issues. Of course, you are more than welcome to be part of it. It is a really nice group of people. And then come back in a week or so for your next episode. When our friendships are going well, we are happier all around. Bye.