Episode 54 - KELAIA'S SOLUTION pt 2

Empowering Kelaia: A Path To Healing (gofundme)

Dr. Vanessa Tyler has a conversation with Ty Turner, mother of 14 year old Kelaia Turner. When Kelaia was 12 years old she was a victim of verbal and physical bullying by her South Carolina classmates for over a year. Eventually, Kelaia attempted suicide by hanging herself in 2023. Kelaia now suffers from permanent brain damage and requires round-the-clock care. Ty Turner tells us about her fight to provide care and justice for her daughter and she shares insight into Kelaia's spirit. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And now as a brown person, you just feel so
invisible where we're from, brothers and sisters. I welcome you
to this joyful day.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
And we celebrate freedom. Where we are, I know someone's
heard something.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
And where we're going.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
We the people means all the people.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host, Vanessa Tyler.
Welcome back. When ty Turner walked in her daughter's bedroom
in March of twenty twenty three and saw her then
twelve year old had taken the belt of her bathrobe
and hung herself from the loft of her bunk bed,

(00:42):
all she wanted was for her baby to live. Talk
about what her condition was after the incident.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
I'll tell you about that if you allow me to
talk about her condition before.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Welcome about strained Talk about the strength of your child.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yes, we brought forth to this earth an amazing child,
and I have always told her she was God's first.
I've always believed that just because she's just been different.
You know, she starts speaking very early, before she was
a year old. By the time she was too fully expressive,

(01:20):
I mean using three syllable words to talk about how
she felt. She was just a very active little body.
She loves dance and gymnastics and soccer, and most of all,
she is a creative soul. Loves to cook and she
made jewelry. She had our own business. She's a kid

(01:41):
preneur and she had a business called Creatively k where
she handmade earrings. Most of them were enameled butterflies. She
also did like gummy bears and things like that. She
sang on her choir at school, the concert choir as
well as our youth worship team, and she played piano

(02:02):
by ear She's just a very remarkable girl.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Bubbly, but not anymore. That suicide attempt changed everything.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
After everything happened, Clay has been reduced to someone who
requires around the clock. Here. She has a trick that
serves to help her breathe. She is nonverbal, which is
incredible to us because when I say we had a
chatty Cathy, we did. That's the thing I think I

(02:37):
missed the most. Her sassy sense of humor. She has
a feeding tube. That's how she gets her nutrition. She
currently doesn't illustrate the ability to control her body, to
hold her own head or limbs. And you have to

(03:00):
know that this is a girl that would be bouncing
off of the walls like we have so many pictures
of her in full backbend bridge mode. Or she'll just
come running through the living room and drop into a split.
I mean, she's off the walls, bananas. She really was,
and it's heartbreaking that all of that beautiful potential was diminished.

(03:29):
It's been more than a year.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
Any improvement. I guess she lost oxygen to her brain.
That's the reason why she's in this condition.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yea, she had a severe anoxic brain injury. Kalaia was
clinically dead for eight full minutes. She is a miracle.
It is by the grace of God that she is here.
And I know that there's purpose. There's purpose in the
pain of this. There's purpose in her life still, and
I tell her that I have told her every day

(04:04):
since this happened that the world would know her story.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
The Turners are a family of faith and are doing
everything against impossible odds.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
But there has been progress, you know. The doctors on
day seven gave us the prognosis that we could let
her go or they could make moves to help sustain
her life, but she would be little more than a
vegetable for the next forty years. Kala has broken records

(04:34):
on OT and PT. She went from being told in
the hospital that she was non rehabible to these beautiful
girls who just took on her plight and made sure
that she was seen as rehabible to us, you know,
hitting that cavernous valley of insurance deciding that they would
not pay for her rehab and so we were discharged

(04:57):
hone and we've been home just doing what we can
to support her progress, you know, getting her to sit
on the side at the bed and try to do
weight bearing on her legs in her hands, and to
try to get her to hold her head up. And
we have had success. She can do it from about
a minute to two at a time.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Small miracles, but miracles nonetheless.

Speaker 2 (05:19):
But what she loves to do is put us in
awe and wonder. She will just out of the blue,
and it's always signaled by a big breath. So I think,
you know, she's just I imagine she harnessing her strength.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
And there are signs of awareness.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
We took her to see Wicked. This is a great example.
We took her to see Wicked last weekend. We rented
a van because we lost my father in law, which
was very unfortunate. But the residual of that is we
had to get a van so we could transport her
to the funeral. We had. For the weekend, we went
to go see Wicked because Khalia loves Ariana Grande. And

(06:04):
we're in there and I'm trying to position her head
so that she's able to look, you know, straight on
at the screen, but she has this way that she
likes to hold her head and it's off to the
side where she's not really looking at anything. And so
finally I was like, Okay, I mean, I guess if
you want to look at it, you'll look at it.
And about twenty minutes into the movie, she takes a

(06:26):
deep breath and she swings her head dead sinner, and
that's where it stayed for the rest of the movie,
and she just seemed mesmerized by it, and we were
really excited because that was the very first time that
our little girl had been outside of the house traveling upright,
since this whole thing happened.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Can you believe the bullying of Kaleia still hasn't stopped
even after all of this. In our final segment here
the next step for this family in Kaleia's solution eight