EDWARDSBURG — About 50 days ago, Heather Zile and her family were given news that no mother ever wants to hear.

After over a month in the hospital and various medical treatments, Zile’s daughter, Edwardsburg High School junior Ella Merril, was given a prognosis that she would likely remain in a vegetative state for the rest of her life. The 16-year-old had suffered significant damage to the left side of her brain during a car accident on Dec. 13 of last year.

This prognosis came at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, where Ella had just received a second MRI. On Jan. 15, she was sent back to Mary Free Bed Hospital in Grand Rapids, where her parents had two weeks to learn techniques necessary to look after their daughter going forward.

“It was to prepare us to be able to care for her in the way she needed,” said Zile. “At that point, she still had a feeding tube, and she was still in a coma. She would have come home in a hospital bed.”

However, one week later, Ella made an incredible recovery and progressively began to regain her consciousness and cognitive capabilities.

“It’s interesting because when you’re coming out of a deep coma, it’s not like what you see on TV,” Zile said. “The type of brain injury that she had, there’s a scale that’s followed, so she had to clear certain levels.”

At first, she could only express emotions through tears or laughter, but after another week she was talking and gradually regained her short-term memory. Pretty soon, she started physical therapy in order to help her walk because her gait had also been impacted by the accident.

Then, this past Sunday, the teenager returned home.

“[Members of her medical staff] will openly admit they can’t figure it out, which for us is where our faith fills in the gaps,” Zile said.

However, one of the few people who are not completely astounded is Ella.

“I beat the odds,” Ella said. “I like to surprise people.”

Her recovery has been so rapid, in fact, that the wheelchair ramp the family had installed leading to their front door is already scheduled to be removed without her ever having to use it.

Ella said the speed in which she has recovered is at least partially due to her drive and determination. She said she treated her recovery like it was school, by constantly asking her nurses and therapists if she got an “A” when it came to how well she did on her exercises or how high her blood pressure was.

“They’d offer her breaks and she’d say no,” Zile said. “She had that type of personality going into it, so that definitely helped her in her recovery — just her persistence.”

While Ella is able to move and walk on her own, she still has a ways to go before she is able to fully participate in many of the activities she enjoys, such as playing tennis.

When she was still at Mary Free Bed, she worked on rehabilitation six days per week. Now that she is home, she will receive physical, occupational and speech therapy three days per week at Healthwin in South Bend.

Fortunately, Zile will be able to attend most of Ella’s therapy sessions, as her employer, Southwestern Michigan College, has allowed her to do most of her work remotely. The only day she needs to go to the college to teach is on Mondays.

Additionally, Ella will need to begin catching up on her school work, which she will do through homebound education service.

“She was a little bit of makeup to do — a semester of chemistry, algebra two and English,” Zile said. “We’ll slowly approach those. There’s still brain repair going on and just [for her] to be able to concentrate to that degree for a length of time.”

Her goal is to be back at Edwardsburg High School by this fall, for the start of her senior year. This will allow her to once again be a part of the community that has been so important to her and her family throughout her time in the hospital.

“It’s nice,” Ella said. “I think that, at first, I didn’t want [the community] to know everything, but I think it’s good that they do. People my age have been very supportive.”

Encouragement for Ella and her family began shortly after her accident and continues today.

It started with GoFundMe pages and local businesses displaying signs that read ‘Pray for Ella,” and progressed into T-shirts, wristbands and countless fundraisers. Then, when Ella came home on Sunday, members of the community were lined up along street  in her neighborhood, cheering and holding up signs.

A large portion of support also came from social media, where the hashtag “prayforella”  was shared on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

“It’s an example of the good use of social media because, for a while, I didn’t sleep a lot,” Zile said. “At night, I would read all of the comments and messages…. In moments of doubt and serious sadness, you read those things and they are extremely encouraging.”

Now that Ella is home, she and her family are looking forward to some level of normalcy. Zile, for instance, cannot wait to do some of the things she once used to dread, such as grocery shopping, which she hasn’t done since before the accident.

However, the first thing they had to do before establishing a routine was finish celebrating Christmas.

“She had Christmas on Sunday when we came home,” Zile said. “We left the tree up and all her presents under it. She is the Christmas queen around here. She is my Santa’s helper for all of it. Her absence on Christmas was so felt because she was the one who wears the Santa hat and hands out the gifts.”

One thing this experience has solidified in Ella’s mind is that she would like to be a nurse when she is an adult. She took pre-nursing courses at a local college this past fall.

“This kind of made me want to be a nurse more, so I’ll be able to relate [to patients],” she said. “I think that will be good. I used to want to be an emergency room nurse and I still want to after all this.”

This realization does not change the fact that Ella’s accident is one of the hardest things she and members of her family have ever had to endure. While they would not wish these experiences on anyone, it is helpful for them to know that some good has come from it along the way.

“It’s a hard journey,” Zile said. “But if you can find things along the way that make you feel a little bit of peace, it’s extremely helpful.”