On Friday, December 9, Ahs science students took time out of the academic pursuits to help raise awareness for a great cause. Mrs. Pam Schnell, with the help of Jaden Thacker, taught her students how to make origami cranes for project Cranestorm.

Cranestorm is a project by BIA-NE (Brain Injury Awareness- Nebraska)

Whose goal is to make 36,000 paper cranes, one for each Nebraskan who has suffered a brain injury.

Mrs. Schnell was inspired by Jaden, who has suffered a brain injury, and asked him to show her classes how to make cranes. She had all of her classes take the day off from school work and made over 70 cranes.

After being displayed in Mrs. Schnell’s classroom, the cranes will be used to create a new art insallation that will be displayed in the stat capital building during Brain Injury Awareness Day in March 2012, at the Rowe Sanctuary near Kearney in April 2012, at the Brain Injury Conference, and at the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney, among other sites.

Jaden, a sophomore at AHS, lives with a brain injury and is involved with BIA- NE. Jaden’s medical problems began when he experienced his first seizure in late April last year. He was taken to a hospital in Sterling, Colorado, where he was told to seizure was caused by a spinal jolt. Later, he had another seizure in Kansas while he was staying with his grandma. This time he underwent an MRI scan that revealed a “fuzzy spot” on his brain that was actually cancer. The doctors operated and removed the cancer, but the surgery left his left side immobile. When they searched for the cause of this, they found a hematoma. The doctors went back in to fix the “leaky vein.” The discovered that his cancer was Oliodendroglioma, an extremely rare brain cancer that is almost never seen in pediatric, or young, patients.

Jaden is now done with surgeries, though he still has occasional seizures, and his begun rehab twice a week; on Monday’s he goes to speech therapy and on Tuesday’s, he goes to occupational therapy. He has regained complete control of his left side of his body, and says, “I am still able to play video games, do origami, and behave like a normal person.”