Editorial: Wheaton woman shifts life path to help others

Like many of us, Jen Kray was planning her life.

At 23 years old, Kray was a Type-A personality in the middle of clinicals and months away from earning a master's degree in occupational therapy at St. Ambrose University in Iowa. The Wheaton woman was ready to start a dream career and looking ahead to relationships and adventures.

Life suddenly and tragically changed one day when a bad headache and sudden sensitivity to light led to a collapse as she walked across a room. She was felled by a ruptured cavernous angioma — a tangle of blood vessels the size of a raspberry that burst and caused a hemorrhage in the pons region at the base of her brain.

Four years later, Kray is working on her recovery as she continues to relearn how to walk. But she's also pursuing a new and different path for her life, one that uses what she's learned from her medical ordeal to create a valuable new purpose.

Kray says she is taking her real-life experiences and coupling them with her training and background in occupational therapy to form insights that will help others facing similar challenges.

She's writing a book about the first year after her surgery, including the moments of helplessness and the feeling of losing her identity, a 3½-year relationship and the end of her Occupational Therapy studies. Kray also is working with former instructors to talk with classes, and she hopes to be able to help more patients than she ever could as a therapist.

“I really do have insight that is valuable to future clinicians and clinicians now,” Kray told our Katlyn Smith. “So I started doing presentations with them, and then I've done a couple others at hospitals, so I guess that was sort of how the idea of a book came about. I realized my story is worth sharing.”

She organized a 5K in Wheaton last weekend that attracted about 90 runners and walkers to raise money for her doctor's lab — Mustafa K. Baskaya Lab, which conducts neurosurgery research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her GoFundMe page has raised nearly $7,500, in addition to checks and cask donations she's received separately.

And, she's logged the most steps of all the patients who have used a battery-powered robotic exoskeleton to focus on issues of balance and posture introduced four years ago at Marianjoy Rehabilitation Hospital in Wheaton.

Kray continues to battle through her recovery. She hasn't regained use of her left arm yet, and she struggles to stay positive as the pace of progress inevitably slows. She says she is sustained by family, friends and faith.

That experience builds personal lessons and forms a perspective she plans to share with other brain-bleed patients, to help them through the struggles they will surely face.

Jen Kray is taking control of her medical condition and using it to pursue a new path in her life that will make a difference in the lives of others.