NovaeDeArx

Critical care RN here: what almost certainly happened was that the "bruised brain" swelled up; very common in your more severe head injuries. Basically, the brain is knocked around inside the skull.

Unfortunately, brain tissue tends to swell a lot when injured. After a while, it runs out of space in the skull, causing it to basically crush itself.

We manage this by chemically inducing a coma and giving medications to alleviate the swelling. In more severe cases, we may actually remove a portion of the skull to give the brain some space (a craniotomy).

However, we can only do so much. Cerebral edema (brain swelling) usually has a pretty poor prognosis if it gets past a certain point (the point where your brain runs out of room) and at that point pretty severe brain damage is very likely. If it gets too bad, the brain stem is crushed, and that's game over. The rest just depends on luck, doctors and time.

If it makes you feel any better, there was nothing you could have done after the accident to improve the outcome of that kind of injury. Seriously. For what it's worth, she wouldn't have suffered.

Also, the pneumonia was almost certainly caused by the ventilator she would have been on while chemically paralyzed and sedated. Extremely common in ICUs (We call it VAP, short for ventilator-associated pneumonia).

So, there you go.

...God, I hope you don't have any Y chromosomes in there.

What the flying hell is "Love Sponge"?

Yup. Our now ex-neighbors (we're moving) send their kids to a similar curriculum.

My older daughter (9) is friends with one of their daughters (13), and although she's a sweetheart and very creative, her lack of general knowledge terrifies me.

Last year I found out that she literally has never heard of the word "pollution", and has a grip of history and general science that's shakier than a Parkinson's patient.

And they look down on public education, where my daughter gets a great education and could run circles around their kids intellectually. All because their church pushes this school like crack (and apparently church members that don't put their kids in it are looked down on, so there's a social element as well.)

Sweet release...