By MIKE COURSON
Great Bend Post
The night of March 30, 2025, was a normal one for Jenna Daily. At least as normal as it could be for a 29-year-old woman nearing her eighth month of pregnancy. Within an hour, everything had changed. Daily, now 31, became unresponsive and was flown first to Wichita, then to the University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City. An aneurysm ultimately caused a stroke, resulting in speech difficulties and impaired movement on the right side of her body.
But there is good news. After months of therapy, Daily is learning again how to speak, and she has made dramatic improvements in her mobility. Best of all, Jenna and her husband, Cayden, now have a healthy 18-month-old boy, Rai.
National Rehabilitation Awareness Week ran from Sept. 14-20, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of Jenna’s return home to Great Bend. Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals celebrates the success stories of its patients, and Jenna is now a proud member of that group.
A scary evening
The Daily’s, originally from Sharon Springs, were sleeping
just after midnight on March 30, 2025, when Jenna woke suddenly from a terrible
headache just after 12:30 a.m.
“By the time she got to the bathroom, which was only a couple of steps away, she was unresponsive,” Cayden said. “She was trying to get Tylenol. From there, she started to lose function on the right side of her body and the ability to walk and talk.”
Cayden was able to get Jenna back into bed but could not communicate with her. Jenna works as a talent acquisition specialist for the University of Kansas Health System – Great Bend Campus, and within minutes, Cayden called the hospital to tell him they were on the way.
“We’re pretty confident that she had a seizure during that time while they in stabilized her, sedated her, and intubated her,” said Cayden. “They told me there was some type of mass on her brain and they could not do anything.”
Jenna was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Wichita. Doctors there diagnosed the aneurysm near her left temple but said the issue was too complicated. Jenna was flown via fixed-wing aircraft to the University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City. Doctors there removed half of her skull, stopped the bleeding, and clipped the aneurysm, which caused the disabilities to the right side of her body and her ability to speak.
“It was really, really scary,” Cayden said. “Obviously, she was seven months pregnant when this all happened. Our little boy, Rai, was born via emergency C-section right before she went into brain surgery, so he was actually the first child born in the neurosurgery unit in Kansas City. Fortunately, but unfortunately all at the same time, it’s not the greatest place to be having a baby, but at that time, we couldn’t really choose.”
The recovery begins
Jenna spent 18 days in the Kansas City hospital, including 16
days in intensive care, and the final two days in intermediate-level care. She
began light physical therapy in those final two days, but the real work began
when she arrived at the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals – Lincoln Campus in
Nebraska.
At Madonna, that was the first place we knew we actually had a chance that we might not come home in a wheelchair, and we could live somewhat of a normal life eventually,” said Cayden. “Jenna had not made an audible sound until we got to Madonna, and that was the first thing they started working on was speech. We weren’t sure if we were ever going to talk again.”
“What Jenna had after her aneurysm affected that left side of her brain where all the language pieces of our brain manage,” explained Amy Potter, speech language pathologist at Madonna. “That can affect a person’s reading ability, writing, expressing verbally as well as comprehending. And when we first met Jenna, she did have some components of all those areas.
“Then as we got to know Jenna a little bit, we noticed there's another component, a motor speech disorder, called apraxia of speech. This is where the brain takes the word that you want to say and jumbles up the sequence of the sounds. If I wanted to say ‘potato,’ all of those syllables would get messed up.”
But, Potter said, Jenna symptoms were severe enough that she made no verbal attempts at all. She was not even able to get her voice started.
“Her brain would not let her figure out how to round the lips for just a kiss, so we started out with having her use a whistle. “We would put that right at the lips and see if we could get that habitual position. Eventually, she was able to coordinate getting her air support, getting the lips around it, and then that blow. You need that because you need air for speech. She just started with that and then ended up being able to say some automatic phrases.
Rebuilding the physical body
Along with speech therapy came physical therapy. Doctors in
Kansas City knew the leg muscles on Jenna’s right side were firing, but she was
too weak to walk. Progress at Madonna came a day at a time.
“Jenna is such a joy, said Karen King, physical therapist at Madonna. “She was just so determined in anything she did. I would give her a task, and she would work so hard and focus so hard. From day one, she was pretty significantly limited. But that didn’t really stop her drive to try to move.”
Jenna went from hardly any ability to move to taking her first steps and moving with a cane, relying on King only for balance.
“Once we were able to get on the treadmill, she was able to get that repetition over and over, especially with that right leg, helping it learn how to take steps again and just retraining that brain to tell her body what to do again and to learn that control.”
The treadmill allowed King to assist Jenna with her footwork and place extra obstacles Jenna could step over.
“We put beanbags on the treadmill so she could step over those, or had her do side-stepping. It gave her the confidence to take those challenges and continue to improve. Before she left, she was able to walk with just a cane and had a brace on her right foot. But she could take those steps by herself and we were doing stairs. She was walking long distances in the hallways with just a little bit of help, and she just had so much more independence moving around.”
Cayden also works full-time, but he spent about half of his time at Madonna with Jenna during the rehabilitation process. Also along for the recovery was Baby Rai.
“From day one, she fought to be a great mom for Rai, and that was very apparent. It totally shaped how hard she worked. When he was there, she would push herself, and you could tell that she was just doing everything so she could be a good mom for him. She’s an inspiration to all moms out there to fight for their littles ones and fight for their family.”
Being mom
Motherhood is always a challenge, but Jenna’s struggles were
compounded by her new medical limitations. Jessica Virgil, an occupational
therapist at Madonna, said that never stopped Jenna.
“One of her biggest new changes to her life was being new mother,” Virgi said. “So, part of therapy should be geared around trying to care for her new baby. With that, it led to different barriers: the communication barrier, and she didn't have a lot of strength on her right side.”
Madonna staffed and the family planned a community outing in which Jenna and Rai were able to shop for different outfits. They also worked in the therapy bedroom.
“We have a simulated crib and a changing table, so we were table to practice changing Rai, taking the onesie off, putting it back on, changing a diaper a few times,” said Virgil. “We also practiced with a few different pieces of equipment to help her be able to manage moving him with one arm. After you have a baby, the emotions are heightened anyway, and when you have a brain aneurysm, you're hospitalized, and you're not able to be with your baby every second of every day and do those normal mom things, emotionally that is hard.”
Coming home
Jenna spent three months at Madonna. Just shy of four months
into rehab, doctors were able to replace the portion of skull that had been
removed during the original surgery in Kansas City.
After Madonna, Jenna spent another three months at Quality Living Inc. (QLI), completing more focus, more intensive, highly-specialized activities to work on balance and shifting her weight correctly.
Finally, on Sept. 19, 2025, the Dailys returned home to Great Bend as a family.
“Getting to come home was pretty emotional for Jenna,” Cayden said. “It’s one of those things were you get ripped from your house unknowingly. Honestly, you don’t know what it’s going to be like when you go back because so many things have changed.
“The home transition was difficult for a little while. We had to learn how to navigate our house again, but we figured it out. There was a time we thought we might have to make it wheelchair accessible, and we were wondering if that was even possible. She ended up saying she was done with the wheelchair while she was at QLI and walking the entire time. That definitely made the transition a lot easier.”
Rai has also made the transition to home with ease.
“He’s doing all right,” said Cayden. “He is close to 18 months now. He is full of energy and won’t sit still. He makes everybody tired, but he’s definitely the happiest little boy you’ve ever been around. He’s definitely a joy.”
Jenna now does all of her therapy – all three types, three times a week – in Barton County. She does speech therapy with Emma Biltoft and physical therapy with Brik Thompson at the University of Kansas Health System – Great Bend Campus, and does occupational therapy with Hillary Cory at Clara Barton Hospital in Hoisington. This summer, she did three weeks of specialized therapy at NeuroAnimation in New Albany, Ohio.
“We saw a lot of gains there,” Cayden said. “It’s a non-traditional thing where they stick you in a virtual reality setting and do a lot of movements and warm your brain up. She made some pretty significant progress that way.”
Cayden estimates that Jenna has regained about 75 percent of her lost functions, but the drive to a full recovery never stops.
“That last 25 percent is the motor skills and speech – the really hard stuff to get back,” he said. “Now, we’re down to the nitty gritty and she’s working really hard. Those things just take a lot of time. Those fine movements with her hand, like picking something up or moving her arm, it’s those very specialized movements that are hard to do.”