Maggie’s Story

Site created on February 7, 2024


*** Donations made through CaringBridge will not be going to the family, so please no donations through this site right now. The best way to support Maggie right now is to send her love and keep her in your thoughts. ***

As many of you have already heard, Maggie was unfortunately involved in an accident around 6 a.m. on Tuesday February 6th (4:30 p.m. Monday February 5th m.s.t) during her travels to Lombok, Indonesia. She sustained extensive injuries to her head and her face along with some other injuries.

Maggie has been traveling around Southeast Asia for a few months now with her good friend Cal. They had just been joined by their friend Charlie about a week ago. It has been great to see Maggie experience all of her wonderful travels in her post grad life. She has really been living her best life during the last few months in Asia, a trip she has been planning on doing for many years. On this particular day Maggie and a group of her friends had taken a 6-hour ferry from Bali to Lombok, an island close to Bali. After arriving in Lombok, they were driving to their final destination when unfortunately, Maggie was involved in a head on collision on her scooter. Thankfully, she was transported quickly to the closest hospital where she received treatment and then was transferred to another hospital with a neurology department. She has received great care and her amazing friends have been right by her side the whole time. Her cousin Bryce and his wife Val were thankfully in Singapore and were able to travel to be with Maggie within the day, so she is surrounded by loved ones despite being so far away. Her dad is on his way (3 days of travel to get there) and mom is staying in Charleston to communicate with doctors and hospitals about any questions and decisions and prepare for her return, with Natalie and Luke.

We continue to receive new information and updates on her progress throughout each day, so we will update this platform as often as we can with the information we have. We wanted to be able to provide these updates to everybody who loves and cares about Maggie in one place.

 

Maggie sustained a frontal skull fracture, two brain hemorrhages, and a few facial breaks that will need to be operated on, as well as a broken finger. Luckily, she did not have to do emergency surgery for the brain hemorrhages, and they have since been monitoring the swelling on her brain as well as the bleeds. We were unsure of her level of consciousness, but she has been recognizing Bryce, Val, Charlie, and Cal’s voices and she called Val by name and asked her to loosen some straps, so that is a very good sign. She is still unable to open her eyes due to the swelling, but we are hopeful that soon that will go down and she will be able to see her loved ones there with her. She was also able to speak a bit to our parents which of course was huge. With all that being said, they are now beginning to care for her other injuries. We are hoping she can come home in the near future to have her operations done in the States, but it’s a possibility that she will need some procedures done in Singapore first before she can travel back. 

Please keep thinking of our sweet Maggie and sending her love and strength. We feel all the love and it is definitely uplifting.

We love you all.


 

Newest Update

Journal entry by Natalie Berger

Hello everybody. 
I have been wanting to give everyone an update as soon as possible, but as many of you are aware, there has been a lot of tragedies in the valley this week. Our hearts are with the Dillings, the Hardings, and the Zuckermans right now. 
With that being said, this will probably be my last update on here. 
Maggie has been doing great. She has had 2 doctor appointments for her hand since being on Bali. We were hoping she could get the 18 stitches out of her hand before flying home, but it is still too swollen to remove them and it still has some healing to do. She will be needing to get her hand operated on when she gets back home, too, as the bones were not set correctly and it is not healing the way it is supposed to. Her hand is still heavily wrapped up. 
We spent many, many days trying to brush her hair out, but we were not able to do it ourselves. We spent 5 hours in the salon with her in order to have a professional save as much of her hair as possible. It was a success. She looks great and can finally rest comfortably without a massive ball matted to the back of her head. 
She has been slowly getting back to doing some normal activities, like going for little walks and going out to eat when she feels up for it. That has been really good for her both mentally and physically. 
She got the okay to fly back home this weekend. She feels strong enough and ready to make that journey home. We will try to do it in one go instead of breaking it up into little parts, like we originally planned. She agrees that would be the best way to do it, to get it over with instead of dragging out long travel days. 
Her foot is still bothering her, but it is slowly feeling better day by day.
All of your love and support has gotten Maggie to where she is now! She is so strong and such a fighter, but we couldn't have done it without all of you. Hopefully when we get home it will be easier for us to catch up on all of the wonderful messages we have received. 
We love all of you! 
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