The heart behind Miles for Minds

This photograph was taken in March of 2025—about seven months before Joyce’s aneurysm ruptured.

Joyce had woken up one morning with a blood vessel broken in her right eye. It was noticeable, but she wasn’t experiencing anything that made us think we were looking at something serious. We didn’t think much of it.

At the time, it was simply another little health concern that came and went.

Joyce had also experienced migraines for much of her life. She had always connected her headaches to being hit by a car when she was a young adult, and migraines had become something our family was accustomed to hearing about.

Looking back now, we think about those things differently.

We don’t know whether the broken blood vessel in Joyce’s eye was related to her aneurysm, and we don’t want to suggest that it was. What we do know is that there were things happening with Joyce’s health that we didn’t understand—and we didn’t know what questions to ask.

Then, on October 25, 2025, Joyce suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm.

Our family was suddenly faced with something we knew very little about.

And we realized how much we wished we had known sooner.

On October 25, 2025, Joyce’s brain aneurysm ruptured.

We were fortunate that the rupture did not take her life immediately. We were able to get her to the hospital, where doctors worked to stabilize her before she was airlifted to Greenville.

At the time, we thought that meant we had more time.

Instead, it began a week that our family will never forget.

There are so many things that stay with us from those days. So many questions that don’t have answers.

What if we had turned left instead of right on the way to the hospital?

Would those few minutes have made a difference?

What if we had recognized something sooner?

What if we had known more about brain aneurysms?

What if we had known what questions to ask?

Those questions are part of what makes this story so difficult.

We were told that we had been fortunate the rupture hadn’t taken Joyce instantly, because it gave us the opportunity to get her medical care.

And we understood what they meant.

But as the days went on, we began to wrestle with the word lucky.

Because surviving the initial rupture didn’t mean Joyce was going to survive.

It meant we had more time—but that time became a week of uncertainty, fear, difficult decisions, and very little hope.

In Greenville, we learned words we had never wanted to know: aneurysm, vasospasm, stroke, brain death.

We learned about the devastating complications that can follow a ruptured brain aneurysm. We were repeatedly reminded that Joyce’s chances of recovery were incredibly small.

We held onto hope anyway.

And then came one of the hardest decisions our family has ever had to make.

When it became clear that Joyce was not going to recover, we made the decision to donate her organs so that something good could come from an unimaginable loss.

After she was declared brain dead, we still had to sit beside her for another 24 hours while doctors kept her heart beating and her lungs breathing so that her organs could be donated.

Those hours are difficult to put into words.

Joyce was gone, but we weren’t ready to leave her.

So we sat with her.

We talked to her.

We cried.

We said goodbye.

And somewhere in all of that, we kept coming back to the same questions:

Were we lucky because we had those extra minutes?

Or did those extra minutes simply give us more time to experience the worst week of our lives?

We still don’t know the answer.

Maybe both things can be true.

We were grateful that Joyce survived the initial rupture long enough for us to get her medical care. Grateful that we had the chance to be with her. Grateful that, in the end, her decision to become an organ donor allowed part of her to give life to others.

But we also know what those extra minutes cost us.

They gave us time to hope.

Time to pray.

Time to say goodbye.

Time we never would have wanted to need.

And we would give anything to go back and have known more.

Not because we know that anything we did—or didn’t do—would have changed the outcome.

But because we wish we had known enough to recognize the possibility. Enough to ask questions. Enough to understand what a brain aneurysm could mean before we were suddenly living through one.

That is the part of Joyce’s story we can’t let go of.

Not the guilt.

Not the unanswered questions.

But the knowledge that awareness might give someone else the chance to ask the questions we didn’t know to ask.