Patient Stories
Hit by a Drunk Driver, Now Relearning to Walk
Jonathan Blankenship was twelve years old when his life split into before and after: a football player, a straight-A student, a leader at his school in Mingo County — the kind of kid whose school never had to call home. He was riding in the front seat of his family’s truck, headed toward a vacation in Tennessee, when a driver came around a blind curve, crossed the center line, and hit them head-on.
The impact was violent enough to bow the truck’s frame and snap Jonathan’s seatbelt latch. The same seatbelt he never rode without, not even on a four-wheeler. He was thrown from the truck.
Jonathan doesn’t remember the crash. His father, John, does. “When I got my senses about me, he was lying on the ground,” John said. He pulled off his shirt, laid across his son to hold him still, and pressed down on his head to stop the bleeding while he waited for help. Jonathan was airlifted out. He would spend nearly two months at Cabell Huntington Hospital, part of his skull removed to relieve the swelling on his brain, five weeks in a medically induced coma. Then he was transferred to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.
“All that time I was left in limbo,” John said. Doctors couldn’t say much. It was too early, the swelling too severe. John read more than 1,800 studies on traumatic brain injury trying to understand what came next. “It was really scary,” he said. “I’ve always been the type of person — it’s black or it’s white. I’ve had to learn, even today, to leave a little bit of gray.”
Finding RNI
Jonathan came home, but recovery didn’t. For nine months, the family managed on their own, not knowing that comprehensive neurorehabilitation existed less than a few hours from home. A caseworker finally asked John if he’d heard of the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute. He hadn’t. Through the West Virginia Center of Excellence and Disability’s TBI waiver program, the Blankenships made their way to RNI.
John walked in guarded. “I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder with everything that’s been said and was done,” he said. His first words to Dr. Javier Cárdenas were blunt: Don’t play games with me. I’m not in the mood, and I’m too old.
Dr. Cárdenas ran a full evaluation. Then he told John something no one else had offered in nine months: I believe I can help.
Rebuilding, One Skill at a Time
More than a year later, Jonathan continues to be a patient at RNI, working with a care team that includes physical therapist Caleb, speech-language pathologist Amanda, and occupational therapist Melissa.
When Jonathan first arrived, he could barely walk a straight line. He was weak, inflexible, and prone to fixating on a single thought for hours. The family dog’s name repeated over and over because he couldn’t get past it. Amanda was the one who discovered that Jonathan’s eyes weren’t tracking correctly, a hidden piece of the puzzle that had been shaping his behavior all along. She taught him to read and write letters again. Caleb built physical therapy around a buddy system that motivated Jonathan to push harder than he would on his own, then sent the family home with exercises to reinforce it. Melissa brought a lighter touch, but no less structure.
“She didn’t let him get away with anything,” John said. “With Jonathan, if you don’t force him to do stuff, he’ll stay where he’s at.”
John estimates his son is now at about 60 percent of who he was before the crash — up from roughly 5 percent when he first came through RNI’s doors.
For Jonathan, the change shows up in what he can do. “It has made it so I can physically move my body better. I’m also better at solving problems thanks to this place,” he said. “I can also speak better now that I’m here, and I can understand better now that I’m here.”
He remembers physical therapy most from those early days. Tossing balls back and forth with Caleb, small exercises that felt more like playing than treatment. What he remembers most now is how it feels to walk through RNI’s doors. “They’re close to me like family,” Jonathan said. “They talk to me and treat me like I am family. They’re starting to become family to me.”
John has watched his son go from a boy who could get violent and withdrawn to someone joking and affectionate again — closer, he says, to the kid who never gave him a reason to worry. “It hasn’t always been rainbows and unicorns,” John said. “But it’s always been in the best interest of Jonathan.”
A Team Worth Trusting
John had taken his son to specialists in cities across the country before landing at RNI. “You wouldn’t think a place like this existed here,” he said. “You would think Atlanta, Houston, Sacramento, New York, Chicago. But when everybody said no, this place said yes.”
What keeps the Blankenships coming back isn’t just the clinical expertise, though John says he’d put RNI’s team up against anyone. It’s the way the team shows up for Jonathan and for him, session after session, tracking every detail John brings them and building the plan around what they see, together.
“I have some of my old son back,” John said. “And I don’t think without them, I’d have him.”