Jeremie Berg Jeremie Berg

As many of you may be aware, Jeremie has been fighting the demons of addiction for much of his life. But in the last decade, he has done extremely well keeping those demons at bay. He’s built a successful small business, been an incredible father, found love and got married. He even became a goat farmer of all things!


But he slowly started sliding back to alcohol and this fall he was drinking far too much. He knew he wasn’t the best he could be for his family and for himself and he vowed to quit. And on December 9, he took his last drink. But somewhere between then and Christmas, the drugs that robbed him of much of his youth got ahold of him. Since then, we have been doing everything possible to get him to see that he needs help. It has not been an easy road. But we never gave up on him because we know what a truly incredible man he is.


On Friday morning, March 22, he was on his way home where I was waiting to take him to detox and later to treatment. He was finally ready and very willing to get help. But tragically he never made it that far. He was in a devastating head on collision just a mile from home. We think he must’ve fallen asleep at the wheel, crossed the centerline and hit an oncoming truck. Blessedly, the other driver is OK and only had a broken arm. But Jeremie was not so lucky. He was airlifted to North Memorial hospital around 7 AM on Friday morning. And his injuries are very severe despite the seat belt he was wearing.


He entered the hospital with multiple skull fractures, multiple facial fractures, a dislocated hip, broken arm, shattered and broken femur, some small fractures on his back, a lacerated spleen and liver damage, among other calamities.


They intubated him, gave him a blood transfusion and immediately began neurosurgery to release the pressure on his brain. He spent most of Friday in surgery where they removed part of his skull to relieve the pressure on and swelling in his brain. He had multiple bleeds in and around his brain.


Once they had him his head injury stable, they begin to work on his leg and hip. His femur bone was sticking out of the skin so that took hours of surgery to get that somewhat put back together. Rather than doing the extensive reconstructive surgery on his leg that‘a ultimately necessary, they placed an external fixitor on it - what is essentially a long steel rod on the outside of his leg to hold everything together. They will go back and do surgery on it after his more serious, life-threatening injuries are taken care of.


His surgical team is hopeful they can start reconstructing his face and put his skull back together on Thursday if everything goes well between now and then.


It was incredibly scary to see him after surgery. When I asked the doctor about his facial fractures and what bones in his face were broken, the doctor took his hand and waved it around his own face and just said “all of them”. Friday night was a long night. Thankfully, he had a lot of family there to support him including Breanna, Austin and his parents.


Today was a day that brought hope. When the wonderful nurses would shift him around in bed or mess around with any of the umpteen wires connected to him, he’d get agitated and move around a lot. So that’s a great sign that he’s in there fighting. He squeezed my hand several times on command and wiggled his toes when asked to do so by the neurosurgeon.


And August flew in to be with him today so he had his three kids surrounding him, which surely brought him comfort.


He’s obviously not awake though and until he is we won’t know the extent of his brain injuries.

We all know how strong J is and he’s proving it now. We don’t know what tomorrow brings but ask for your love, support and prayers.