I need to back pedal for a minute because the story of Jasmine and Shandrea are a big part of the whole picture. When Jill was rehabilitating at Children's Specialized Hospital there was a CNA there that took a special interest in her. Her name is Karen and the night of Jill's accident her son had been at the corner right after it happened. He came home and told her all about it and then a couple of weeks later she was taking care of one of the girls who had been hurt. Karen is one of the funniest, nicest, compassionate people that I have ever met. She has a way of making every person she comes in contact with feel very special. Karen took extra special care of Jill. She went to great lengths to make sure that when Jill took a bath that it was as painless as possible, and that was not an easy task. We would talk often and even after Jill was released we saw alot of her when we volunteered. A couple of months after Jasmine was at Children's, they moved her into a bigger room with a few more children. This was better for her because there was more activity to keep her stimulated. There was one little girl named Shandrea who shared the room with her. Shandrea was only six weeks older than Jasmine, and like Jasmine had a life altering event.She was a shaken baby.When Shandrea was around ten months old, she was shaken to the point of severe brain damage and blindness. Her skin was as black as night and as shiny as all the stars in the sky. I have never seen such beautiful skin in my life. Shandrea had a laugh that if it could be captured in a bottle it would make millions. Jill and I spent alot of time with Jasmine and Shandrea, but so did someone else. Karen took to her like we took to Jasmine, and before long thoughts of fostering her were becoming a real possibility. She already had a son who was heading towards his teenage years, and a seven year old autistic son. She struggled with the idea, but like me really felt like this was meant to be. Shandrea went home with Karen only a week before Jasmine came home with us. So it was to be that Shandrea and Jasmine would become best friends forever. We live right down the street from each other. They take the same bus to school everyday and have been going since preschool and are in the same class. They have occasional play dates where they swim together while their mom's catch up on their progress. We even took a trip to DisneyWorld together! So it is only natural that Karen was the first person I called when we brought Jasmine home. I was in a panic. Spread out on my dining room table was a mixture of medications, lists of when and how much to take, feeding tubes, and a list of how much to feed Jasmine every four hours around the clock. Since I had never even fed her before by myself, I was petrified. Karen came to my rescue, bringing a nurse from Children's with her. The nurse sat down, figured out all the meds, wrote out a schedule which I could actually follow, organized everything for me, and showed me how to feed her. I felt so much better, but it was still so much harder than I had ever imagined it was going to be. The next few months I was extremely exhausted, waking up in the middle of the night for her feeds, and waiting while it slowly dripped through her tube.( Her crib was right in our room, so at least I didn't have far to go to check on her.)
