Briar’s Story

Site created on December 22, 2019

On the morning of December 22, 2019 Briar was involved in a snowmobile accident. She was airlifted to Mayo in Rochester, MN. Her injuries we are aware of currently are a broken jaw, laceration on the bottom of chin and broken teeth. She is currently still under sedation to monitor pain and better evaluate the situation. She has a long road of recovery ahead of her. She will undergo a surgery to repair her jaw injury. We will use this page to update everyone as updates become available. We appreciate all of the thoughts and prayers during this time! 

Newest Update

Journal entry by Andy & Lisa Buechele

We apologize for not many updates lately but we have been trying to get our lives back to our normal routines while juggling appointments, work and paperwork. Yesterday marks 4 weeks since Briar's accident. It still sometimes seems like it was just days ago. She has came so very far in just 4 weeks though! She really has amazed us all!!! In the beginning we were told to prepare ourselves for her to be in the hospital for weeks. She ended up being in the ICU for the 3 1/2 days, then moved to the trauma floor and discharged after 9 days.  She has had lots of appointments that have kept us very busy. Her last appointments were this last Thursday the 16th. We had a whopping 7 appointments that day to hop around to! All of the doctors and therapists are totally amazed by her progress as are we! Last Thursday she was released from physical therapy and the brain clinic is happy with her progress with her brain injury as well. We also saw the surgeon that did her jaw surgery and he assured us that everything is looking good. She still has the braces type looking wires on her teeth but can have the bands off and just wear them at bedtime or when she feels she needs. This means she can now open her mouth more and move from strictly the liquid diet to very soft foods that don't really require chewing. She is super happy about that! She even had to go to Sue's Corner Post on Friday and have her first real soft meal of a hot beef. Of course Suzan took good care of her and made sure the the roast beef was super soft and crumbly. :) It still really bothers her to chew much so most of her meals have been ran through the Ninja blender. She will still have more appointments coming up and also the process of dental work will have to begin fairly soon. She had many teeth that were knocked out, loose, cracked, chipped and some even driven down into her jaw bone. Thankfully it appears that her front teeth are all fine. We know they removed 5 teeth during surgery but we still are not even sure how many are seriously damaged until her jaw is healed enough to be able to open that far to see. Also her tongue was pretty cut up and had many stitches and has to heal fully too. She still can not go back to work. She was cleared to drive, which she is super happy about. Her and Damian had both made such amazing progress and we are all so very thankful for that! We seriously can not even express how truly thankful we are for all of everyone's prayers!!! They had a pretty large strong team of prayer warriors out there!!!! God has definitely been looking over her and healing her!!! It was very hard to respond or keep up with all of the text messages and phone calls we received.  Please know that we still appreciated each and every one of them. We have also been so very blessed by everything that has been done for us whether it be a phone call or text to check in, visits, food or goodies dropped by, and just so much more that has been done to help out Briar and our family during this difficult time! We are really so very very blessed! I am going to post a couple pictures that I have held off on posting. They were taken because we knew Briar would have questions and want to see them for one. Also, it is a good thing for everyone to see just how scary of a situation we were in, especially other teenagers or kids. It is something as a parent that you never want to have to deal with or walk in and see your child or any loved one in this type of state. Also, please rememeber to wear helmets. Seriously, you never know when something like this could happen. They were just going for a quick ride around a flat field on a snowmobile. They did not see the drainage ditch/creek. Seeing the accident area later on I can say I probably wouldn't have seen it either and maybe could have even came upon it quickly even in the daylight not being familiar with the area as they were not either. It is also a very small creek. Just be safe, wear your helmet, buckle up, etc. Thank you all again for all of your thoughts, prayers and support!!!! 

Well, photos are not uploading tonight so I will have to include those in a later post but I am posting this now because I want to get an update out there for everyone. 
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