When Caelum Came Back Part I | Talk Tracks
The Telepathy Tapes
The episode chronicles the miraculous recovery of Caelum Miller, who suffered a severe traumatic brain injury following a near-fatal drownin
Key takeaways
- Caelum Miller survived a non-fatal drowning that resulted in a massive traumatic brain injury.
- Doctors initially advised the family to withdraw care and donate organs due to the severity of the injury.
Main topics
- Traumatic Brain Injury recovery
- Facilitated Communication (FC)
Notable quotes
I am very intelligent and I know how to read.
Conclusion
A profound exploration of the boundaries of human consciousness and th
Transcript preview
Speaker 5 (0:00) Hey everyone, it's Kai. Mark your calendars for October 7th, because Season 3 of the Telepathy Tapes, The Reincarnation Records, is coming. Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens, and welcome to the Talk Tracks, brought to you weekly by TTT Media. In this series, we explore the threads that weave together our understanding of reality, science, spirituality, consciousness, and even unexplained phenomena. Because every era has ideas once dismissed as impossible until someone was willing to investigate them seriously. And on this show… We Speaker 4 (0:33) do just that. Speaker 5 (0:35) Today, we welcome Anne-Marie Kalem and his brother, Jacob, as we hear a remarkable story of perseverance. At 17 months, Kalem experienced a non-fatal drowning. After a month in a coma and severe traumatic brain injury, the doctor said that Kalem would likely live in a vegetative state the rest of his life. In a remarkable choosing of hope, the family did everything they could to rally around Kalem. The family's perseverance paid off, beating so many of the odds, And what surprised and shocked doctors the most was Kalem's ability to learn to communicate via facilitated communication. And Speaker 3 (1:10) when he started typing, he changed the family's, Speaker 5 (1:12) I think, views on life and reality and even death forever because Kalem expressed information that he should have no way of knowing and what he has learned and gleaned from that near-death experience. So welcome to the Talk Tracks, Kalem and Anne-Marie. It is such a pleasure to have you both here. Why don't you start by introducing yourselves, where you're from, and tell us a little bit about your... backstory, what led you here today? Sure. Speaker 3 (1:34) So I'm Anne-Marie Miller, and this is Kalem Miller, our youngest son. And we're from Laverne, California. And this is a very long story, but Kalem was a 17-month-old when he sustained a traumatic brain injury from a non-fatal drowning in our backyard pool. And somehow he made his way through a closed gate. We still don't know how that happened even to this day. My husband had to open the gate to get in there. I started CPR and aspirations poolside. And then Kalem was taken to our local hospital where it took over an hour to resuscitate him. Oh, my Speaker 5 (2:19) goodness. Speaker 3 (2:19) Yeah. Speaker 5 (2:20) And up until that point, Kalem was— healthy, everything was a typical developmental progress, correct? Yes, and Speaker 3 (2:30) he was the youngest of six, so he had a lot of interactions with his older siblings. So he was a little advanced for his age at that time, very curious, very stubborn, always wanting to learn things. So sometimes that curiosity can be problematic, as it was in this case. Speaker 3 (2:49) He was resuscitated at the hospital, and then he was transferred to Children's Hospital, where he was for a month. And at that time, they wanted us to withdraw care at the beginning and donate organs, and we were like, no, we're not doing that. We kind of thought, well, maybe there is some possibility of repair, recovery. Thirty days later, he came out of a coma, and he was transferred to a rehab facility. Where then the conversation became, you know, you need to institutionalize him and just go home and raise your other children. And we said no to that, too. And we thought, OK, we're going to bring him home and see what could be possible for him. Speaker 5 (3:29) Wow. Kalem, you're lucky to have your parents that you do. It's incredible. An act of just persistence and hope, right? To just not listen to the worst outcomes, but try to create the best ones for your family. Speaker 3 (3:43) Yes, and just see what was possible. I mean, we didn't want to close any doors, which they were recommending to us. It's like, let's go home and see what we could find and what could give us some more hope if we pursue and let him show us what he can do. Yeah. Speaker 5 (3:58) Yeah. So, okay. So what happened next in the journey? Speaker 3 (4:02) So we found an institute in Philadelphia called the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, which when I first came upon that title, I thought, that's a really cool name. I wonder what they do there. And what they do is they teach parents how to rehab their brain injured children at home. They have a huge comprehensive program that they offer you. You have to take training as parents, and then they evaluate your child, and then they tailor everything specifically to your child. So we took Kalem there about, it was 10 months after his injury, his accident, and started with this organization. And they're our family now. We've been with them for many, many years now. Speaker 3 (4:49) The first thing they did was focus on getting his physiology in order and cleaning up the diet and all kinds of things like that. And then taught us that children who are immobile can take in copious amounts of intellectual materials if they're given the right opportunity to do so. So we had that as a huge component of the early progress with Kalem, which also included language development. Speaker 3 (5:13) When Kalen was, he started that program when he was two years and four months old. And then when he was three and a half, they introduced facilitated communication. And the first thing that came out of his mouth was, or his typing, was, I am very intelligent and I know how to read. And at that time, it was the only time that my husband and I did not have video going to record that. But it was just so moving. It brought me to tears because it was like, oh, my gosh, we have the ability to communicate and he can tell us how he's feeling, if he's thirsty. Sorry. If he needs something, I mean, and we had done something prior to facilitated communication using a choice board. So he could say yes or no to things. But then for him to be able to complete sentences and really expound on. What he was feeling and thinking was just, I mean, I'm still very emotional about it, thinking back all these years that that's how he was able to express himself from the get-go, which also led to me cleaning up his reading materials because Kalen was very motivated by reading, loved to read. So a lot of his mobility program was attached to his intellectual program, which is reading. And so it took us. tens and tens of hours. We spent a lot of time. Kalen was very spastic and the typing was extremely slow, about like this. But then I would just sit with him for hours on and off during the day until we got into some kind of a rhythm and he became more and more efficient as time went on. Wow. I think this is so Speaker 5 (7:02) important for audiences to understand, though, that Kalem had a traumatic brain injury, you know, and that spelling through facilitated communication was possible. And it sounds like the same thing so many parents of severely autistic children hear were true for you, which, well, often those parents are being told their child isn't in there and isn't competent. Speaker 4 (7:24) Were you being told that as well, or were you being Speaker 5 (7:27) told something different that he was in there despite the TBI? Speaker 3 (7:30) Oh, no. They were telling us that there was no hope for his recovery. The brain injury was so massive that there was not going to be anything but a persistent vegetative state. And, you know, didn't even bring up anything that would be meaningful as far as his recovery or his potential for recovery, which included any kind of communication. So, but we knew, I mean, I knew. The first or second day that he was in the intensive care unit, I kept telling him, I see you in there. I mean, I remember telling him that I see you in there. And then he started to show us that he was in there. At the onset of his injury, he was cortically blind. He was immobile, and he was also insensate, couldn't feel anything. And so we started working to change those things. We all, even his older brothers and his sister and dad, we all knew that he was in there because of the way that he was responding. And we also found out through the institutes, too, that any sound that he was making was language in his own brain, kind of like a stroke patient. Speaker 5 (8:37) The Speaker 3 (8:37) words not coming out the way that we could understand, but that they're speaking. But when it translated into him being able to communicate through facilitated communication, it just confirmed everything that we already knew. The medical doctors actually were kind of astounded. His pediatrician wrote us a personal check to fund our trip, the second trip to the institutes, because he was so moved by what he was able to witness in Kalem's recovery. So that became, you know, really a significant. Plus to have a medical doctor now verifying it back to us, which we already knew. It's Speaker 5 (9:17) beautiful. Speaker 3 (9:18) And so what Speaker 5 (9:20) were some of the first things Kalem started expressing to you when he had language? Was he able, because at the time he was probably, what, a little over two? Yeah. So