Well that was a dumb idea...

So for the past week we've been in Vermont on vacation during my favorite time of the year in vermont, summer! We've spent lots of time on the lake and we've done a lot of fun things plus a lot of nothing. All good things. On Sunday we had a family bbq at my mom's house, a perfect way to see everyone at one time.















On Monday we went to the Colchester Causeway. The causeway goes several miles out into Lake Champlain. It was originally built as train tracks that went all the way to Montreal. Now it is just a biking/walking dirt path. It ends now just before South Hero, Vermont and there is a break for the boats to get thru. So you can only go just so far but at the end there are docks and after a good bike ride we were hot and jumped in. We were trying to jump and get a good picture. Here they are. I think I'm a better photographer than jake...or he's a better jumper one or the other.













Later on that night we went with our good friends Tyler and Nicole to the lake house. My mom and dad were there too and we were going to jet ski and have a bbq. Jake and Tyler decided to go jump off of Barn Rock. A well known place to cliff jump on the NY side of Lake Champlain. I've seen people jump but have never jumped myself. So off they went on the jet ski just the two of them. They came back an hour later and Tyler said Jake wasn't feeling so good and that he didn't remember jumping. Tyler said they had jumped from the top which is about 80 feet! Here is a picture of the famous rock.





























Jake got off the jet ski with the blankest look on his face. He stood on the stairs and asked my dad and Nicole, " This might be a really dumb question considering I'm standing here with you, but am I in Vermont?" This made us all panic a little bit but he had this smirck on his face like he was joking around. Then he asked again...and then he asked again...

He kept saying, "Tyler, did we just do something we shouldn't have done?" and he had this smirck that I wish I had captured on camera because his question combined with the smirck was hilarious. But then we kept asking him questions and he kept answering wrong. What year is it? 2009 What did we do this morning (the causeway was the right answer)? He didn't remember. Didn't know when we got to Vermont or who the president was. SCARY. I called my nurse friend, Maura, told her his symptoms and what she had done and she said take him to the ER. So off we went. Tyler and Nicole came with me, which I am so thankful for because Jake got sick on the way to the Hospital and we had to stop on the side of the road. Not to mention the moral support.

We got to the hospital and the nurse started asking him questions to which he answered with a blank look. I started answering for him and she picked up on the amnesia side of things. I swear she thought he was just being rude though because he looked fine. Wasn't bleeding or having problems doing anything. He was walking and could talk fine, he just had no idea what had happened.

They did a cat scan pretty soon after we got there and then when that came back clean they sent us home. The doctor said the amnesia could last 10 minutes or hours but to wake him up once or twice in the night to make sure he was rousable. This was the fastests ER trip ever. Thank goodness we were in Middlebury Vermont on a Monday night. It was pretty quiet. We were there for an hour and half.

So anyway the ride home was so funny. I'll try and insert a video of Jake being sarcastic. We knew he was going to be okay when his sarcasm came back! He kept saying to me "Long day, huh?" and I would say Yep babe you were a handful. Minutes later he would ask again and kept saying the same exact answer. After 3 or 4 times i could hardly get the phrase out correctly because Tyler and Nicole were busting out laughing in the back seat. This cycle of asking and forgetting and asking again and forgetting and asking again when on the whole ride home and then for a full 2 hours in the middle of the night.

The middle of the night was a little scary because I woke him up at 2:30am and he had NO CLUE what had happened to him. I had to tell him the whole story...cliff, 80 ft, concussion, hospital, etc. So for the next 2 hours he would ask me the same 15 questions and then he would forget which was followed by panicking which was followed by asking the same 15 questions again. I was definitely praying through all of this because I was starting to get scared that this might be long term. That every time he slept I would have to tell him what had happened the next day. Just like 50 first dates?!?! ahhh. Funny part of all that though...He would say, "I jumped off a cliff?" Yeah babe you jumped off of an 80 foot cliff...then he would say, "Well that was a dumb idea"...Yeah babe it was a dumb idea. too funny. At least he realized in his amnesia that jumping off a cliff was a really bad idea.

Finally he fell asleep and when we woke up at 8am the next morning he remembered that he had jumped off of a cliff and had a concussion. THANK YOU JESUS.

He is feeling a lot better now but still has about a 48hr time period missing from his life which is very surreal for him. He didn't recall seeing tyler and nicole at all. So when we saw them a few days later for him it was like seeing them for the first time in a year and a half. We had lots of good laughs about that.

Moral of this Story....listen to your wife! ;




Even with a brain injury he beat us at quiddler...he gets no sympathy from us anymore!