Bartram senior prevailed over injuries

St. Augustine Record intern
Published Sunday, June 01, 2008

Jessica Wills was saved and accepted Jesus into her life on April 11, 2004.

Four days later, she almost died.

An SUV hit her as she was walking to the bus stop in World Golf Village with her friend, Samantha. Jessica, then 14, flew onto the hood.

Then another car struck the SUV.

The impact catapulted her 25 feet through the air. She landed on a metal gutter drain.

"I was saved on Easter Sunday," she said. "I got hit on tax day."

At the hospital, doctors operated for four and a half hours on her fractured skull to relieve the internal bleeding. Then she slipped into a coma.

Jessica graduates from Bartram Trail High School on Friday, one year later than she planned when she began her freshman year. But other than problems with her short-term memory and a question mark-shaped scar around her right ear where the seven titanium plates and 14 screws are, she has recovered.

When Jessica was still in the coma, she could hear her family. She remembers the movie, "Shrek," was on the hospital room TV, and she dreamt she was inside a helium balloon and could see Shrek's head through it. In one dream she was in a dumpster and her step-brother was getting beaten up. In another, her mom looked like a paper cut-out.

Then 12 days after she went into the coma, Jessica woke up.

The doctors first told her mother that Jessica had less than a 15 percent chance of living.

Then she lived.

Then the doctors told her mother that Jessica would be paralyzed on her left side and would never walk again.

Then she walked.

"The more I thought about the situation -- I'm really pig headed -- the rebellion in me helped," she said. "Don't give in to what [the doctors] say."

She had to relearn how to walk and gain her memory and cognitive skills back.

"In my mind I felt the same, but [my parents] say I acted like a little kid," she said.

Jessica went home with a different perspective on life and a different sense of humor.

She no longer took things for granted, such as walking, and found comedy in the metal plates in her head.

She tried to stick magnets to her head, but they didn't stay. And when the first lightning storm came along, she asked her dad if she would get struck by lightning.

Jessica retook her freshman year of high school because she didn't remember it. Years later, she still has problems with government, history and math classes because dates and facts are hard to remember with her short-term memory loss.

As she prepares to graduate, a friend she met because of the accident has helped her define her future plans.

Kinsey Leonard, another Bartram Trail student who Jessica met at Brooks Rehabilitation, had a similar accident and suffered from a different form of brain damage that affected her speech. So Jessica learned sign language to communicate with her.

She will attend Florida Community College at Jacksonville to study sign language and hopes to transfer to the University of North Florida and major in sign language and education.

Her family, friends and faith helped her through her hardships.

"I find it easier when I have quiet times," she said. "I just open my Bible wherever it falls and the verse it lands on will take me in the direction I'm headed. I basically just live by church."

* Favorite YouTube video: "Dark Fish"

* Most used web site:

* Gadget you couldn't live without: Cell phone

* Ring tone: "Family Tradition" by Hank Williams Jr.

* Future plans: Study sign language and education and work for a government office as a sign language interpreter.