Look at the View with Jamie MoCrazy
Show Notes:
“Jamie is never going to live independently, she’s never going to recover fully, she won’t ski again, she probably won’t even walk again.” This is what doctors told the family of skier Jamie MoCrazy who suffered a life-threatening brain injury while performing a double flat spin during the 2015 World Tour Finals. Jamie was in a coma for 10 days. When she woke up, she suffered from amnesia and the right side of her body was paralyzed. After her miraculous recovery, Jamie became a motivational speaker and made it her mission to help others recover from unexpected trauma, overcome adversity, and climb new peaks on the journey of life.
Today she joins us on The Post Concussion Podcast to talk about her miraculous recovery. She explains how her hiking metaphor came about, how she stops to “Look at the view” when she needs a break, and how this translates into other aspects of her life. As a motivational speaker, she talks about achieving your goals, ignoring the ceilings placed on you, and the importance of baby steps. To be encouraged and empowered to love and fully accept your daily personal best, tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
• An introduction to today’s guest Jamie MoCrazy.
• The story of how she suffered a brain injury skiing in the 2015 World Tour Finals.
• The details of the amnesia and partial paralysis she experienced.
• What Jamie has done to aid her recovery.
• How Jamie’s mom, a psychologist with knowledge of brain injuries, aided her recovery.
• How Jamie had to relearn how to read before finishing her college education.
• Bella’s trick to not reading too much so she doesn’t suffer the consequences.
• The mental health aspect of brain injuries and how Jamie’s mental health was affected.
• Jamie’s hiking metaphor and why she says, “Look at the view,” instead of, “I need a break.”
• The difference between dream goals and attainable goals and why you should have both.
• What Jamie’s dog Luna has taught her about goals and baby steps.
• Thoughts on how the limits that doctors put on you after a brain injury are often incorrect.
• Jamie’s advice to do your own personal best every day.
Connect with Jamie
Check out MoCrazy Strong: www.mocrazystrong.com
Follow Jamie on Instagram: @mocrazystrong
Like Jamie’s Facebook page: @mocrazystrong
Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.3] BP: Hi, I’m your host Bella Paige and welcome to The Post Concussion Podcast, all about life after experiencing a concussion. Help us make the invisible injury become visible.
The Post Concussion Podcast is strictly an information podcast about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. It does not provide nor substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The opinions expressed in this podcast are simply intended to spark discussion about concussion and post-concussion syndrome.
Welcome to today’s episode of The Post Concussion Podcast with myself Bella Paige and today’s guest Jamie MoCrazy. After suffering and miraculously recovering from a life-threatening brain injury, while performing a double flat spin during the 2015 World Tour Finals in Whistler Canada, Jami embarked on her motivational speaking career.
Jamie was in a coma for 10 days. Her recovery marshaled the expertise of Dr. Mypinder Sekhon of Vancouver General Hospital. Dr. Miracle Myp as Jamie says. Use a groundbreaking brain bolt that directly measured the brain tissues of brain oxygen levels, rather than a less accurate finger monitor. This reading saved her from permanent brain damage. Jamie was the first patient in North America to receive this technology.
After recovering from this devastating brain injury, Jamie made it her mission to help individuals recover from an unexpected trauma, overcome adversity and climb a new peak on the journey of life. s a result, she launched her motto, “live MoCrazy” to encourage and empower others to love and fully accept their daily personal best. Jamie frequently offers words of inspiration through speaking engagements, workshops, and events such as woman’s retreats around the country.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:02:19.0] BP: Welcome to the show, Jamie.
[0:02:20.9] JM: Thank you so much for having me, I’m happy to be here.
[0:02:24.9] BP: Do you want to tell everyone a little bit about your injury, what occurred and then kind of start from there?
[0:02:31.5] JM: Yeah, what happened was, I was competing at World Tour Finals in Whistler Canada in Slope Style skiing, which is multiple jumps and get judged on the overall impression and after my first run, I was actually in fourth place which for me, didn’t cut it, that’s not on the podium, you don’t remember the fourth place.
I had to upgrade; I changed my off-axis back flip which is called a flat three to an off-axis double backflip which is the double flat seven. Because of the 2013 X-Games, I had become the first woman in the world to compete any sort of double flip in a slope style competition run. I knew I had a really good chance of getting to the top of that podium, you know? That’s what I cared about.
I changed it and then on my second run, I gave my little sister Jeanee a hug actually, at the top of the mountain and I dropped in for my run and she was watching me and she could see me take-off on the jump I was double flipping and it kind of looked like maybe I landed but then, she couldn’t see me go off the next jump and she waited and then she heard the radio crackle to life. “We need all hands-on deck and a helicopter on standby,” and immediately skied down to me and saw me convulsing, my eyes were rolled back in my head, and I was spewing blood.
[0:03:57.1] BP: Wow, wow, that’s hard on your sister for sure to come up on that.
[0:04:01.7] JM: Yeah, it’s remarkable that she remembers the whole experience because I don’t remember six weeks at all. After that, my – I had amnesia, which is like, no memory. Like the star of Fifty First Dates, how she has no memory day to day. I had no memory at the beginning day to day. I don’t remember, people will ask me and be like, “But do you remember being in a coma?” I’m like, “Well, no” I don’t remember being in the coma but then after I woke up from the coma, I don’t remember being pushed around the hospital in a wheelchair during that time and then I only remembered the biggest things to me.
You know how, when you think back on your childhood and you’re like five years old, you don’t remember everything progressing but you just remember the big moments that mean a lot to you. I vaguely remember my first memory is stimulators put on the right side of my body because I had right brain stem damage so my right side was paralyzed.
Stimulators, put on my right side to get it to move again. I vaguely remember moments from that but I don’t remember anything else that day or the next day so then, for the next following couple months after the time when I remembered nothing, I just remember very, very vague things. For Jeanee, she’s actually writing a novel about that experience because she saw it firsthand and she was the one who – when she was being driven to the hospital, thought that she was never going to see me again and when they called, she was sure that they were calling to say that I had passed away on my flight to the hospital. That terror and those memories are things that will stick with her forever.
[0:05:51.0] BP: Yeah, it’s amazing how the brain, you don’t remember it, and it’s almost like a defense mechanism. I didn’t have any severe injuries like you but there’s a few years where my health was really bad and I’ve been working on my book and I actually had to request for all my medical records because I can’t remember what happened in those few years because like everything is just kind of – your brain just kind of mushes it all into – protects itself so you don’t remember and then also there was so much going on like you were doing like a therapy. What have you done to help in your recovery that you remember?
[0:06:26.0] JM: I did start remembering when I was in outpatient therapy. I don’t remember I was on three different floors in the hospital. First, I was in the hospital at Vancouver General Hospital and then I was airlifted in a Learjet which is the only time I’ve been in a Learjet so far, to the Salt Lake City Hospital and I was still in a coma for that and then I was in the Salt Lake City Hospital and I was on different floors.
I do remember the top four which is technically inpatient rehab. I remember coming back to that room and it was all decorated because Jeanee decorated it. I even had like a hammock, I had pink blankets because I love my magenta pink so it was all decorated. My mom was living there with me and that’s when my mind – I have some vague memories from there and then I remember pretty solid about my outpatient therapy.
For that, I was doing outpatient therapy in Salt Lake City five days a week for three hours and then my mom, she actually has a masters in psychology, she had a federal grant from the government to teach self-esteem to women and has done lots of workshops and programs and she actually – listen to this, she wrote an article about keeping your self-esteem and confidence while recreating your synaptic connections after a brain injury, one week prior to my brain injury.
When I arrived, in a way, I’m always like, I was your perfect case study because then she got to try out all the things that she had been practicing. I would say, realistically, with her on top of my outpatient therapy with the hospital, I would do seven hours of therapy with her, seven days a week and the rest of the time, I was sleeping because she was just retired and working as a ski instructor at that time and so her focus was me.
She’s actually gone back into it with MoCrazy Strong, the company we’ve built and so now she works on workshops and retreats and is working on her PHD. She got all refired up after my brain injury. The couple of years right after, her full-time job was my healing. With that, we did a lot of beyond what’s for a start— Relearning how – I had to relearn completely how to read. I saw that you said that you were a large reader before your accident. Same as me, I was a huge reader, I would always read the most books in our town in the summer, summer section and so I loved reading.
Afterwards, I had to relearn how to read, that’s like kindergarten, like those big letters and stuff like that. Then after I relearned how to read, it was still really difficult. I went back to college at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. During that time, I had to just read my text books and reading but I didn’t read for pleasure at all.
Then, after I graduated in 2019, I was like, kept trying to get myself to read for pleasure but I couldn’t really read beyond 20 minutes, that was one of my longest modes to recover. After I would read a little bit, I’d have to force myself to read and then this summer is the first summer, actually, with an introduction back to the Harry Potter books, I started reading them again and I’m actually enjoying reading and so now I’ve read some other books as well and just having fun and keeping to that light, airy books. Not educational books but just for fun.
It’s six years after injury and this year I can say that I’ve actually begun to like to read again but it took a long time.
[0:10:27.1] BP: Yeah, well, that’s great and I get the not reading thing. Now I do something where – because I can read now and I can read a whole book in a day but I shouldn’t because I’ll pay for it the next day. What I do is when I start, I’ve put the bookmark in a new place and then I force myself to stop when I hit the bookmark because you know how you get so into the book and you just keep reading and reading and reading. Now then I, I was sitting at my friend’s lake house. I was sitting there and I’m reading and she’s – I stop, she’s like, “Why are you stopping?” “That’s where my sticky is, my sticky says I have to stop here” Because otherwise, I’ll sit all day and read and then my headaches get really bad from it.
It is nice to read for pleasure because when I was in school, I also gave up reading for pleasure because I felt that I didn’t have extra brain room to read all the school stuff and read for pleasure because I was pushing myself so much to do just the school stuff. I love your family, it’s great, they just sound fantastic.
[0:11:27.0] JM: For me, I wasn’t having headaches, I would develop from it but I would reread the same word a few times. It was just boring, kind of. I had to do actually kind of the opposite last summer. I would make myself like, every few days, every other day, I’d put it in my calendar and I would make myself read for 20 minutes, regardless of what else was happening and I would just force myself to read. Now, it’s come back to the pleasures.
[0:11:55.1] BP: Yeah, when I first thought I had memory issues, you read the page and then I couldn’t remember what the page said so then I have to reread the whole page but it shows, every single brain injury is different. It all depends on what works for you.
Your family played a huge role in your recovery and I’m sure it helped a lot. How did you find your mental health, what’s affected with all of the changes in your life?
[0:12:20.3] JM: Well, my mental health was challenging. People will say, because I had such a severe injury that happened in the blink of an eye. The visible stuff, they were like, “Wow, what was it like relearning how to walk?” I’m like, “That was pretty easy actually for me.” Because I grew up as – I know, but seriously, I grew up as an athlete, I was used to pushing my body beyond what it could do and all this was coming back to me.
It just took a couple of weeks to relearn how to walk and then it did take some – about a year to relearn all of my motion stuff, however, it took years and years to deal with the emotional stuff. I’ll say, the physical stuff that you could see was way easier than the invisible injury portion of it and that’s something that affects a lot of people who have had a brain injury is all the invisible stuff and the emotions.
I remember when I was going to my first conference after my brain injury, they said that one in six people who have a brain injury commit suicide and one in two people get depressed and I was like, I still remember those numbers and it still kind of floors me because it’s incredible to think that it’s that common and then, when you think about it, it makes sense because your emotions are all in your head. Your emotions are affected by a brain injury. Also, everyone’s lives change because of brain injuries. There’s no one who can have the same exact life.
The thing that I look at, because my life definitely changed my competitive ski career was taken away. However, right now, I’m engaged to a wonderful man and I’m living in a wonderful house and doing – we reconstructed the whole house and doing all these exciting things outside of MoCrazy Strong. I’m very happy with my life. I don’t think that because your life changes, that means you’re going to have to have a worse life.
I always call it version of myself 2.0 I’m Jamie 2.0 instead of one. However, you can take steps and you can work and focus on the things that affect you. Like I mentioned, my emotions were huge, I went to mental therapy, I started going to therapy and that helped tremendously. I would cry so much; I went for a few years and so that was really big.
Then now, I still will have days when I feel kind of “Blah” and that’s something that every single person in the world has days when they feel kind of “blah” it’s just – as of now, we don’t have that hunter/gatherer, fight and flight world. We’re so fortunate that we can feel “blah”. Instead of feeling “blah” I’ll try to distract myself or if I’m feeling “blah” on the computer, I’ll get up and take my dog to the dog park or just what I think really helps is to remove yourself from what you're doing that makes you feel “blah” and do something else. Maybe sometimes it’s cooking, sometimes it’s dancing just get up and move when you're feeling “blah” and realize that you might feel “blah” but you still have another day.
One thing that really helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed out, because that happened a ton after my brain injury and still happens sometimes and I’m feeling overwhelmed, I use the metaphor to look at the view because when I was hiking after my injury, I was really weak. I would only be able to hike about five minutes before needing to take a break. As someone who had been an athlete their whole life, that was really humiliating and so, my mom came up with the idea, instead of me saying, “I need a break” just say, “Look at the view!” We were in park city and the mountains were gorgeous.
Every time I needed to rest, I’d say, “Wow, look at the view,” and we’d all stop and look at the view and I’d get my rest in and then we began to realize that there always was an amazing view. Now, I use that metaphor always in my life. If I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed and all caught up, I say, “Look at the view.” Look at the view; your current life, your current opportunities, your current moment, and find something you like about that.
[0:16:57.7] BP: Yeah, well, that’s great. I love the advice that you just gave, it’s true. Sometimes taking yourself out like as you said of what you're doing right now can make a huge difference. Sometimes even myself, I’ll be working for hours and then I’ll be like, “Uh, my brain’s just done” I just get up, go do something and then I’d feel way better and it makes a big difference.
You can connect with Jamie and learn more about MoCrazy Strong at mocrazystrong.com which will also be found in our shownotes. With that, we’re going to take a break.
[BREAK]
[0:17:35.0] BP: Want to create awareness for concussions? Want to support our podcast and website? Buy awareness clothing today on postconcussioninc.com and get 10 percent off using “listenin.” That’s “listenin” and be sure to tag Post Concussion Inc. in your photos. We do love to see them.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:18:00.8] BP: Welcome back to the Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Jamie MoCrazy. Something I wanted to talk about was advice on creating goals in recovery because I know you’re all about creating goals so do you have any advice for that?
[0:18:15.2] JM: Yes, one of the big things I realized in creating goals for recovery is it’s so easy when you say the word “goals”, to think of these big – your dream goals that are huge in the future. “I want to go back to skiing,” was one of my dream goals, at the time when I couldn’t even walk up the stairs. That seems so far away, it can seem so overwhelming and hard to get there. However, if you break it down. It’s okay to have some dream goals but think about setting attainable goals and what those goals are, is goals that you can accomplish every day. Look at your current life, assess your current self, and asses where you want to be going which is towards your dream goals and then each step you can take to get there.
At the time when I – my dream goal was to return to skiing, who I currently was, was someone who is working on walking up the stairs. I had support walking on the stairs, I couldn’t even do it by myself. My attainable goals every day was to keep practicing going up the stairs a little bit further, a little bit faster, a little bit more independently. Then I started going by myself and then I started running. By the time I left the hospital, I could run up 13 flights of stairs in three minutes and 23 seconds because I also started timing myself.
I was hitting all these attainable goals, or goals you actually can accomplish. Because, at that time, it was unrealistic for me to go— I couldn’t go skiing. To set the little goals that get you up there and that’s something that I really think about, beyond just setting for my brain injury but just in life in general. It’s so easy for me to start thinking about all these dream goals I have for MoCrazy Strong, for my speaking business and I have so many dream goals.
[0:20:14.6] BP: I get that.
[0:20:15.4] JM: It’s okay to have those dream goals but really focus on your attainable goals. Okay, today, what can I do today to better it? Just keep taking those steps because it doesn’t all happen at once.
That’s actually something that I have learned with my lovely Luna who is my doggy and we’ve actually started fostering this girl at the beginning of COVID, when COVID was hitting. Our friend works at the dog kennel at the park city and she was like, “We need more volunteers, we need fosters” because we can’t have as many volunteers. Then we fostered her and then we were going to do one week and because our kitchen was demolished and we had sub flooring and so we had this dog for a week and then they were like, actually, we’re on strict quarantine now because this is March of 2020. We’re on strict quarantine and we can’t have any volunteers. Can you hold Luna for a month? Then we were like, “Okay.” As we were constructing the house, we had this dog who was terrified of the world and her steps have – she’s taken little baby steps every day and I love her so much and now she plays with her cousins and she goes on these long hikes and she plays with her friends on the hikes and is so happy and has this big smile on her face.
My point is, it takes her so long and such tiny steps every day, she’s making miniscule steps, which is what happens a lot after a brain injury, is the steps you’ll be taking, your attainable goals will be so small, it’s like you’ll get one percent better. However, if you get one percent better every day, all of a sudden, you’re 365 percent better at the end of a year.
Taking those baby steps really make a huge difference and it’s so easy for us to think about the growth and getting ourselves overwhelmed and stressed out. Just really focus on those baby steps of goals.
[0:22:14.8] BP: Yeah, I love that, yeah, I get the MoCrazy Strong where you’re just like, there’s all these giant goals that are like, huge, right? In brain injury, it’s really hard to see yourself where you feel like you’re not getting any better because you’re looking at months or years, right? Where the long-term progress, you need to look at like, what couldn’t you do yesterday that you can do today? Every day can be an improvement and it’s really important to look at that as well.
Something we talked about a little bit before was how your ceiling of success can kind of change. Do you want to explain that a little bit for survivors?
[0:22:49.6] JM: Yeah, for me, when I was in the hospital, I don’t remember this because I didn’t have any memory. Yet, starting out when I was in a coma when my family arrived, some of the doctors would tell my mom, “You know, Jamie is never going to live independently, she’s never going to recover fully, she won’t ski again, she probably won’t even walk again, you have to be prepared for these statistics.”
Like you might – beginning to realize with Mama MoCrazy, she don’t listen to things she doesn’t want to and she actually has the training behind it to say, “You know what? I know that you don’t know what’s going to happen to my daughter because nobody can actually tell at this stage of her brain injury, where it’s going to go, it’s impossible!” and that’s true. It is impossible in many stages for the doctors to know.
However, they went through medical school and they went through their residency and I actually have an older sister who is a doctor. I think very highly of doctors, yet my sister will say the same thing. She says, the biggest flaw for doctors is that they are supposed to know everything so if they don’t know, they’ll make it up with statistics, it’s not completely made up but they’ll say, this is what’s going to happen statistically. That’s not always true.
In many cases, your brain is so unique and individual, it’s not going to follow the set statistics. What happens in a lot of cases is they say what’s going to happen and then the family prepares for that, the survivor comes back to knowledge, knowing that that’s going to be their ceiling and they’ve just put a brick on to you and so you don’t go past that ceiling.
Because at the stage when my right side was paralyzed, I couldn’t hold a glass of water without spilling it. There’s two options. One, my family could feel so bad for my brain injury and tell me to hold the glass in my left hand or saying that they would help me with it when I couldn’t make breakfast with my right hand. They would make breakfast for me all the time. Or, the second option is they could do what my mom did, which was tie down my strong hand and forced me to make breakfast with my weak hand which took an hour and I was so mad, I was just pouring milk and cereal into a bowl and it was so frustrating.
However, if I had not used the right side of my body, the synaptic connections around that portion of my brain that utilizes that would not have begun to work again, we all have billions of these synaptic connections, they’re like stoplights. They say, “You go right or you go left” and they get damaged after a brain injury and concussions and any sort of brain injury, they get damaged. We can rebuild new synaptic connections; we don’t use anywhere close to all of ours and we have millions that are unused completely. However, if we don’t force ourselves to use that, they never will begin to rebuild again.
[0:25:57.3] BP: Yeah, it’s true. When someone tells you, you can’t do something, either you're going to go, “Yes, I can” or you're going to go, “Okay, then I guess I can’t” Those two different paths like you said that you can choose.
[0:26:07.6] JM: Right. Especially if it’s a doctor, they’re really smart and they’ve gone through so much training and if they say, “Here are the statistics of your recovery possibility” They say, “The statistics of Jamie ever using the right side of her body again are like under three percent” You’ll say, “Oh my god, she’s definitely not going to do it” It seems so irrational.
Yet, the important thing to think about for brain injury is that 20 years ago, the doc, everybody was trained that every deficit developed from a brain injury was permanent. They didn’t know what neuroplasticity was, they didn’t know the concept that you can heal and rebuild yourself, they honestly had no idea. If they were trained in that venue, then maybe they stayed up to date a little bit but it’s still hard to eradicate all that training and believe that you really can create a different outcome.
Now, miracle Myp who you mentioned has told us, one, that they’ve changed their protocol of Vancouver General Hospital for family involvement because of my family’s involvement. They understand that the family is not going to understand the medical jargon, however the family is going to understand if the survivor likes to be Bob, Robert or Bobby.
That makes a difference how you react to the survivor because they’re not just a number, they’re a person and so that’s the whole concept of person-centered practices, is really focusing that each survivor is a person, not just a number.
There’s that, then he also has said that he doesn’t put that brick ceiling on survivors. The caregivers or the survivors always want to know, they say, “what are the chances, what are they going to go, what’s going to happen?” in the hospital. “What’s the outcome?”, they want to know what to expect. He says, "here’s some different variations that could happen,” and he will actually say, “honestly, at this stage right now, we don’t know the final outcome. Here are some steps you can do right now to help better the outcome opportunities and here’s the different variations of outcome you could receive.”
Which I give him a lot of credit for because that’s hard as a doctor. The doctors are supposed to give you an answer and the people want an answer from the doctors, however, the answer that the doctors give, if they say, “This is what’s going to happen, is just putting a brick ceiling on survivors. What the medical staff says your outcomes are, are not necessarily the outcomes that you experience.
[0:28:48.3] BP: That’s some great advice and you're not the only survivor we’ve had on the show that’s proven that you can do a lot more than what they expect when you have that original diagnosis or ‘ceiling’ as you call it. Is there anything else you would like to add before ending today’s episode?
[0:29:05.7] JM: I would just say during the recovery process, one thing that’s really important to keep with you during the whole thing in your – everything you do, is to be your own personal best every day. Before my accident, I kind of understood this mantra that Mama MoCrazy raised us with, to mean, be the best, be the best, be the best.
I’d always try to be the best. However, I really understood after my accident what “be your own personal best” meant. It meant that one day, my own personal best was becoming the first woman in the world to do a double flip, the next day, my own personal best was struggling up three flights of stairs by myself or my own personal best was taking a swallow of water because once my food tube was removed, I couldn’t swallow anything and then it took weeks for me to be able to swallow water unassisted. That was my own personal best.
Do everything at your own personal best. Each little attainable goal that you're setting, perform it at your own personal best and you’ll climb a much bigger alternative peak than you ever thought you would.
[0:30:14.6] BP: Well, that’s great, and thank you so much for joining and sharing your story.
[0:30:19.7] JM: Thank you so much for having me.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:30:23.5] BP: Has your life been affected by concussions? Join our podcast by getting in touch. Thank you so much for listening to The Post Concussion Podcast and be sure to help us educate the world about the reality of concussion by giving us a share and to learn more, don’t forget to subscribe.
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