GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – Whitney Cerak is laughing, talking in complete sentences and apparently beginning to understand that her loved ones, in a tragic case of mistaken identity, believed for more than a month that she had been killed in a horrific crash, according to a family Web log.
“It is such a blessing for me to see how resilient she has been to having the news of the accident and mix-up largely revealed to her these past few days,” older sister Carly Cerak wrote Monday in a blog entry. “She has had many questions and many tears, but then God has given her this amazing gift to smile and laugh.”
Whitney Cerak, 19, of Gaylord, is recuperating at Spectrum Health Continuing Care Center, a rehabilitation facility near Grand Rapids.
“She continues to recover from a traumatic brain injury,” said Spectrum Health spokeswoman Anne Veltema, who declined to release additional details about her condition.
Cerak, whose maternal grandparents live in Portland, Maine, was among 10 people from Indiana’s Taylor University, about 60 miles northeast of Indianapolis, who were riding in a school van that collided with a truck on April 26.
The crash killed a university employee and four students, including one identified as Cerak, a freshman. Another student, identified as Laura VanRyn, a 22-year-old senior from Caledonia, was taken to a hospital with a brain injury that left her in a coma-like state.
The injured woman, whose face was bruised and swollen, later was transferred to Spectrum Health Continuing Care Center.
On April 30, an overflow crowd of more than 1,400 people were at Gaylord Evangelical Free Church for what they believed was Cerak’s funeral. But it actually was VanRyn who was buried beneath a grave marker with Cerak’s name on it while Cerak, who closely resembles VanRyn, was recovering in the hospital bed.
On a blog they had been using to record details about the injured woman’s medical progress, the VanRyn family disclosed the error May 31. VanRyn’s body was exhumed from the Gaylord cemetery, positively identified and reburied last week near VanRyn’s hometown.
The Ceraks recently started their own blog to provide updates on Whitney’s condition. The Christian family often praises God and quotes Scripture in its entries. On Friday, Newell Cerak, her father and pastor of young adults at Gaylord Evangelical Free Church, wrote that Whitney has started using a four-legged cane to walk during her physical therapy and “keeps gaining more strength each day.”
Colleen Cerak wrote that her daughter went outside, played cards and watched a movie on Saturday. She also said Whitney “is now becoming more aware of lost time” but still has some lingering memory lapses.
“This frightens her and was difficult to watch,” the mother wrote.
When senior pastor Jim Mathis and other staff from the Gaylord church visited Whitney on Monday, she greeted them all by name, her sister wrote.
Whitney smiled and laughed throughout the visit, Carly Cerak said. As the group was saying their goodbyes, Whitney told Mathis, who had eulogized her in April, “Thanks for speaking at my funeral.”
Cerak blog
Whitney Cerak blog: http://efree.alpine-web.net/blog.cfm
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