For nearly five years, Peggy Means went to sit with a daughter the doctors had all but given up on. Jennifer Flewellen had been in a coma since September 2017, when she felt lightheaded while driving her three sons to school near Niles, Michigan, and crashed into a utility pole. Her heart stopped at the scene. Paramedics revived her on the fourth attempt, but the brain injury was severe, and the prognosis, delivered and re-delivered over the years, was blunt: she would not wake up, and if she somehow did, there would be nothing left of the person they knew.
Peggy did not accept it, and she paid a price for that. As she told CBS News, she was repeatedly advised to let Jennifer pass peacefully, but she refused every time. “I just couldn’t let her go,” she said.
One by one, the people around her fell away. Friends stopped visiting. Her husband moved on with his life. Peggy kept coming, nearly every day, to care for her daughter and talk to her, telling her stories and jokes the way she always had, into what everyone else treated as silence.
Then, in August 2022, after four years and eleven months, it happened. Peggy was walking Jennifer along a path at the hospital, telling her a joke. This time, Jennifer laughed.
“When she woke up, it scared me at first because she was laughing, and she had never done that,” Peggy told People. “That door that was closed, that kept us apart, had just opened.”
The laugh wasn’t a cure. It was the first proof, after nearly half a decade, that Jennifer was still in there. It also proved the doctors wrong twice: first about whether she’d ever respond, and then about what would be left of her if she did. Dr. Ralph Wang, who treated her at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital, has called her recovery genuinely rare, the kind only a small fraction of long-coma patients ever achieve.
What followed the laugh was not a miracle so much as a grind. Peggy had to push hospital staff who thought she was unreasonable for even requesting speech therapy. Jennifer, unable at first to make any sound, learned to push air through a little whistle, then to shape vowels. One Christmas, Peggy gave her a kitten named Huey, she says with a grin, “because it was vowels.”
The hardest part of coming back was the time. Jennifer went under when her boys were children and surfaced to find them nearly grown. Julian, the youngest, was 11 when she crashed. His older brothers, Skylar and Daeton, finished high school while she slept.
“I told her I was Juju, and her eyes lit up like, ‘Wow, it’s my Juju bean,’” Julian said, using his childhood nickname.
The reunion carried grief, too.
“We’ve talked about the time that she’s missed, and we try not to, because it makes her upset,” he said. “But my grandma always tells her, ‘You can’t sit here and be sad because being sad is not going to get you moving forward.’”
The moving is slow. But Jennifer is home now, in the house she grew up in, though she still can’t walk and needs help with nearly everything. In October, she made it to Julian’s senior-night football game at Niles High School. “She was my biggest supporter,” he said. “To have my biggest supporter back on the sidelines cheering me on was a surreal moment.”
Peggy, brushing the hair from her daughter’s face, put the whole five years into six words. As she told WZZM-TV: “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
Jennifer’s family has set up a GoFundMe to help cover the cost of an adaptive van and make her home wheelchair accessible. You can find it here.
