“When she actually found out our ages and things like that, it broke her heart,” Jennifer Flewellen’s son Julian, now 17, tells PEOPLE
It’s a miracle — and it all started with a joke.
As Jennifer Flewellen, of Niles, Michigan, lay motionless in a hospital bed last year, stuck in a nearly five-year coma caused by a car crash, her mother Peggy Means told her a joke. Then the impossible happened: Flewellen, 41, laughed.
“When she woke up, it scared me at first because she was laughing and she had never done that,” Means tells PEOPLE. “Every dream came true. Today’s the day I said, ‘That door that was closed, that kept us apart, had just opened. We were back.'”
The August 2022 breakthrough was just the first step in a long battle for Flewellen, who is working hard to regain her speech and mobility after being in a cocoon state where time ceased as her brain slowly healed. A GoFundMe campaign has been started to help buy a handicap van and home remodels.
“She woke up, but she didn’t completely. She couldn’t speak, but she was nodding,” Means, 60, says. “She would still sleep a lot right at first, but then as the months would go by, she would get stronger and be more awake.”
“This is so rare,” Dr. Ralph Wang, her physician at Michigan’s Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital, tells PEOPLE. “Not just waking up, but making progress. Maybe 1-2% of patients wake up and make progress this far out.”
The feisty mom reached another big goal in October when she was able to participate in a senior night football celebration with youngest son Julian, 17, at a Niles High School football game.
“She was my biggest supporter,” says Julian, who was 11 when his mom fell into a coma. “So to have my biggest supporter back on the sidelines cheering me on, it was a surreal moment.”
After news hit about her attending her son’s football game, Flewellen was able to secure additional therapy through Mary Free Bed, a local rehabilitation hospital.
In a PEOPLE video interview with her mom from the rehabilitation hospital, an animated Flewellen, who can only string a few words together, nods yes and no to questions and sits up almost straight in a portable hospital bed.
Flewellen’s nightmare-turned-miracle began with a typical morning on Monday, Sept. 25, 2017. Then a 35-year-old wife and mother of three young boys in the small town of Niles, Flewellen had just dropped off her three sons at school and was heading to work at Bittersweet Pet Resorts.
It was the last typical morning she would have. At 8:23 a.m., she hit a utility pole, according to a news report from local radio station WSJM. (Neither speed nor alcohol appeared to be factors in the crash that left her unresponsive.)
