Dexter High School
THESQUALL
December 19, 2008 Volume XIV Issue 4
2
The Squall wins Pacemaker
2200 N. Parker Road Dexter MI, 48130
8 NEW
Students named All-State Althletes
Web blogging online at thesquall.com
Keen fights Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Lindsay Fischer staff writer
Senior Jordan Keen has barely slept or eaten for five years. She has not been able to go to school. She has watched while her sister got her driver’s license, and she has spent months at a time in the hospital. “Even if I’m smiling, it’s just a cover-up,” Keen said. “My life is completely upside-down, flipped around.” The 17-year-old fell while skiing in January 2004 and wrenched her knee. The knee healed normally, but the pain stayed, plaguing Keen constantly. “She was on crutches for a year while doctors tried to diagnose her,” Jordan’s mother, Sue, said. “They would take an X-ray and see nothing wrong.” Finally, in 2005, a referral from the University of Michigan Hospital sent Jordan to a clinic where the
tion of a wire lead into the spine, would relieve Jordan’s pain. But the Keen’s insurance company has refused to fund the surgery three times. After the final refusal, the Keens were told that the surgery was not necessary, even though a trial stimulation in April cured Jordan for five weeks. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” was Sue’s response. “We’ve tried everything. What else can we do?” On Nov. 14, the Keens held a spaghetti dinner to fundraise for Jordan’s surgery.
cause of her constant pain was discovered. The diagnosis was Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD).
“It was crazy busy,” Sue said. “600 people in two hours! If there was a world record for spaghetti din-
“Her nervous system is messed up,” Sue said. “Her brain keeps sending pain signals even if there’s no injury. Her nervous system needs to be rebooted, like a computer.” The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke describes RSD as a chronic pain condition characterized by “continuous, intense pain out of proportion to the severity of the injury, which gets worse rather than better over time.”
ners, we would have it.” The dinner raised enough for the Keens to set a date for Jordan’s surgery: Dec. 11. “I’m a little nervous, because I’ll have to be awake for part of the surgery,” Jordan said. “But there will always be a nurse holding my hand. I’m just really excited to start my life again.”
A minor injury like jamming her finger could send Jordan into therapy for weeks. Once, a case of
In many ways, Jordan is just a normal girl. Her favorite color is red, she loves to make jewelry and
food poisoning from a meal at a bowling alley caused intense pain around her stomach, and Sue said
watch movies with her friends, and she’s a faithful fan of “Grey’s Anatomy.” But having RSD has changed
the nerves there have not been the same since.
her life forever, and there are some parts of her life she will never be able to recover.
Since January 2004, Jordan has hardly been able to sleep at night because of the constant pain--she says she gets three hours at the most. She drinks protein shakes instead of eating. “They taste horrible, but you gotta do what you gotta do,” she said. Last year, she was in the hospital from December to April, and when she was in school, she only attended three classes because she grew exhausted so quickly. “It’s the little things,” Keen said. “Like carrots. Eating carrots may not seem like a big thing, but I crave them.” Despite all this, Sue said Jordan has remained hopeful and positive. “She finds the strength to keep going,” Sue said. There is no cure for RSD, although there is hope for treatment. Spinal cord stimulation, the inser-
“Athletics are something I’ve learned I have to give up,” she said. “If I got hit in the face playing a sport, the pain would move to my face.” Still, Jordan said she is excited for her future to begin. She wants to go to school, study Kinesiology for her undergrad, and hopes to become a doctor for rehabilitation programs to help kids like herself. “I don’t want doctors to think kids with RSD are crazy--people need to know about this so kids don’t end up like me,” she said. She submits articles to magazines and newspapers like The Detroit News, hoping to share her story with as many people as possible. She said, “I want to reach out to people like me and say, ‘You’re not alone.’ Having RSD has really put my life into perspective--there has to be a bigger reason why I’m going through all this, and I’ll become a stronger person because of it.”