Alumna rebuilds her life bigger and better following harrowing injury, memory loss

The year 2020 was one of change for most of the world.

For St. Cloud State University alumna Jenny Neuharth, it was literally life-altering.

As the pandemic began to take hold in the U.S., in March 2020 Neuharth said she was one of the first patients in Minnesota to be diagnosed with the coronavirus. Initially she was sharing her experience navigating the virus on LinkedIn, where she had built up a brand and followers in the corporate world. On day eight of dealing with COVID she started feeling better, before spiking a fever of 106 and going into kidney failure on day 11. She was hospitalized, and said it was at a time when COVID hadn’t yet been operationalized. PPE or personal protective equipment was in short supply — meaning hospital personnel were limiting their rounds, and a special temporary floor in the hospital had been put together for COVID patients recovering from kidney failure.

“I had a nurse who came to discharge me, and found me facedown in a pool of blood on the floor,” Neuharth said. “My first memory that I have is doctors lifting me up and asking if I had shattered my teeth because I had gone facedown on the concrete.”

A CT scan as well as other tests were done, but a cause could not be definitively determined for Neuharth passing out and hitting the floor.

“There was just so much we didn’t know,” she said.

She was ultimately discharged and returned home, where she found there was still something wrong.

“I started to realize there were these giant holes,” she said. “I went home and saw pictures of my kids and wondered, ‘Who are these people? They must be my kids. Who am I?’”

Neuharth had significant memory loss from her head injury. She started to ask questions internally and connect the dots, but really didn’t know her own history. Some pieces stayed — like her ability to understand what a problem was and to build a strategy or business case to solve it — but others were just gone.

“I was very lucky that I lost fear, because fear is typically learned through life,” she said. “So nothing that I encountered post (injury) I thought was scary, because I didn’t have the social conditioning that was, ‘Oh yeah, if you lose your entire memory when you’re 30-plus years old, that’s a big thing to overcome.’ I just didn’t know that.”

Her neurologist suggested Neuharth work with puzzles and legos at first to retrain her brain to complete basic steps and reconnect some of those pathways. At that point she couldn’t use any kind of screen for more than 15 minutes at a time, otherwise she would pass out.

“This was at a time when the whole world went virtual,” she said. “There was no in-person cognitive therapy at all; it didn’t exist.”

Neuharth and her doctors had to have abbreviated appointments via Zoom, each setting timers to make sure they didn’t run into that 15-minute wall. Neuharth kept working through the puzzles and legos, until she felt it was time for the next step. She was living in a temporary apartment at the time, as her house had previously been water-damaged and was in need of repairs and rebuilding. So, she asked her neurologist to clear her to do electrical work.

“Here’s the deal: You need me to do basic puzzles and tasks to help retrain my brain. I have a house that needs to be rebuilt. Clear me to do electrical. I have 70 outlets to do. It’s a basic puzzle, it’s a repeatable task that will get me closer to what I need, but it also gets you what you need,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Do you have a thing against puzzles or legos?’ I was like, ‘No, I have a thing against strategies that aren’t going to be successful.’ So that’s where having that drive toward the business side was still there innately.”

Neuharth started with the outlets, then moved on to installing a full electrical panel and running a 220-volt line. She then requested her doctor clear her to work on flooring — another life-size puzzle with pattern-matching, in Neuharth’s opinion. Her doctor gave her guardrails, clearing her to do flooring but telling her she couldn’t lift more than 10 pounds at a time due to recently surviving kidney failure. She eventually installed 1,300 square feet of flooring one piece at a time, all on her own.

At that time Neuharth wasn’t talking much, and had only been cleared to listen to either classical or country music — her doctor said those genres were simple enough for her brain to understand. She couldn’t talk to anyone in-person or on the phone much without it short-circuiting her brain. Still, she was seeing progress.

“Historically, I’ve always been somebody who could learn. That was my superpower; it didn’t matter what the task was, I’d figure it out,” Neuharth said. “But after my head injury, how I learned had to change.”

At one point she needed to learn how to put a new roof onto her backyard shed. She had a background in project management for a roofing company, and had plans for how to install a roof. She couldn’t read the plans for more than 15 minutes, though, or watch video tutorials. She eventually had a friend who was in the roofing business come over and go through step-by-step instructions with her verbally, and she was able to complete the roof.

While her problem- and puzzle-solving skills were sharpening, Neuharth’s language skills were also returning and she was able to converse more and more. Unfortunately, her memories of her family were still void. Initially she tried hard to focus and almost will herself to rediscover those memories, as she later realized was similarly done in the movie “The Vow,” but it didn’t work.

“It was preventing me from healing or moving forward. One day I realized, ‘This isn’t going to work. I need to try something different. I’m going to approach this like a business case,” she said. “I had this a-ha moment. Just because my memories of them are gone; their memories of me are inside of them. So if I figure out how to get those out, I can at least kind of connect the dots to all these experiences that I’ve lost.”

Her children have been a huge support for Neuharth, and in turn she thinks the experience has helped them in some ways. As she has children in elementary, middle and high school, they bring their different curriculums home and discuss them. Her daughter in high school was able to teach Neuharth about the Russian revolution while reading “Animal Farm” for one of her classes.

“They know, obviously, that I don’t have my memory and they’ve come alongside me and helped me. ‘Hey, Mom, you might not remember this, but …,’” Neuharth said. “It’s been really cool. They say the best way to understand something is to be able to teach it, so it’s given my kids these opportunities to teach things back to me.”

Her memory loss has removed some of the negative feelings she may have shared with her ex-husband as well, making it easier for them to co-parent. In addition, some of her views have apparently changed since her injury. Neuharth understands she was raised Orthodox Christian, but doesn’t have some of those conservative viewpoints anymore. The 180 stumped her ex-husband at first, such as when they discussed whether or not it was okay for their teenage daughter to have purple hair.

“Isn’t our goal as parents to help her figure out who she is as a human? That’s our job. Wouldn’t we want her to go through that discovery process when she’s under our roof versus out there in the real world, where she doesn’t have a safety net? Why wouldn’t I let her embrace having purple hair if that’s who she is? I don’t want to tell her she’s someone she’s not,” Neuharth said, to which her children’s father ultimately agreed. “It’s more about figuring out what is our goal, and how do we reverse-engineer to solve that versus all the historical ‘here’s how it’s always been done.’ I lost a lot of that. My job is not to teach my kids how to do something or to give them all the right answers, because they have to learn how to fail. It’s only through some of those things that they’re going to get it right. But if I go and do it for them every time, they’re not learning anything besides the fact that Mom can just do it for them. I always joke that we’re a house of enablement, so if you want to learn how to do something, I’ll come alongside of you and teach you how to do that — whether it’s using a power saw or a drill or whatever.”

Her memory loss also removed some of the trepidation toward dating again, as Neuharth was able to get back out there and figure out what she wanted in a partner and what she didn’t want. She remarried this year.

It’s been a journey for Neuharth to not only rebuild relationships with her family, but within the professional world as well. Coming from the human relations and technology world, she was anxious about returning to the corporate landscape.

“The thing that I was so nervous about was the fact I didn’t have my memory, and I thought people were going to look down on me. So I didn’t tell anybody for probably the first year and a half back into the corporate world that I had massive memory loss, because I was female and a single mom at the time, thinking they’re just going to bias against me, right? That was my internal monologue,” she said. “I came to find that what made me different from everybody else was the fact that I hadn’t seen it all before and I didn’t have — what one of my mentors had called — my design bias for how we had solved problems before. So when I hit my head I lost that bias, and was going in with a fresh set of eyes asking those probing questions. I wasn’t assuming I had the problem right, I was really kind of digging in.”

While overcoming some hurdles both from her memory loss as well as general professional bias, she’s now director of talent-centered transformation at Eightfold, essentially helping to partner with organizations shifting to a skills-based organization to help enable needed changes.

“I came to realize I couldn’t just tell somebody what the problem was. They had a design bias that said I’m young, I’m a female, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about — so I got really good at storytelling the data, because I needed my problem statements when I came to these leaders to be so concrete that they couldn’t ignore them,” she said. “My story is a unique one. I work in a world of HR, where we can’t get out of our own way and we keep perpetuating these same problems and we’re not moving forward fast enough. And then you have me come in and I don’t remember how it’s been done, but I’ve been able to learn to get to this point where, if you have a conversation with me, I’m pretty sharp and can hold my own. But that’s only from the last almost-four years.”

Neuharth earned her degree in communication studies and business management from SCSU in 2009. While she isn’t able to remember her time at the University, she knows she was a part of Residential Life and still has a number of friends from her time in the department as well as from her time on campus in general. She said she’d love to go back to school one day as she loves to learn and is disappointed she doesn’t remember her undergraduate experience. She wants to continue to raise her kids with the mission to find “their good” in life — what’s going to make them happy and thrive. Neuharth also wants to be kinder with herself, and said that’s something most people should apply to their own lives as well.

“My advice is you’ve got to put the mirror in front of yourself. You have to figure out what is good for you — not what is good for your mom, for your dad, for your boss, for your friends, for your kids, for your spouse, for whoever. You’ve got to figure out what is good for you. The only way to solve a hard problem is to choose to begin. At its core, you’ve got one life. I almost died. I genuinely believe when I was on the floor, that could’ve been the end of my life, and it wasn’t. Life is too short to do anything that you don’t love. Say ‘I love you’ to the people who are close to you, leave the relationship that doesn’t work for you — whether it’s a corporate standpoint, a personal one — be intentional with your kids… all these different pieces. We’ve only got one shot,” she said. “I think I’m most proud of my ability to keep getting up when things get in my way. Things will push me to the ground, but I’ve been through a lot in life, and the universe’s consistent theme through the things I’ve been through, is I keep getting up. I haven’t been jaded. It’s never too late to create a life you love. If you went to school for something that doesn’t light your fire; go back, figure out what’s good for you. Light the internal fire of trying to figure out what that is. Because again, life’s too short to be miserable. Go find good for you.”