Jenny White: Rewiring Your Brain with Pen and Paper
Hey, Hive. Some conversations settle in and stay a while. This is one of them.
Jenny White spent more than thirty years as a nurse. Then a brain tumor — sitting at the base of her brain, wrapped around the arteries that keep everything running — sent her into surgery and a days-long coma. When she woke up, she recognized the ICU instantly: the equipment, the routines, the rhythm of the unit. The man standing at the foot of her bed in street clothes? A stranger. He turned out to be her husband of twenty years.
Thirty years of shared history, gone. Her own name, gone. Walking and talking, relearned from the ground up.
Here’s where the story turns. Lying in bed recovering, Jenny decided her days would hold more than a television. She let herself dream the way a child dreams — her dog curled beside her, her imagination asking, if I were five years old again, what would we get into? Simple children’s stories came first. Then, as her strength returned, something bigger: a medical thriller with a heroine who carries Jenny’s own struggles — the memory gaps, the insecurity, the search for a self.
That book is The Triggering Scent, the first in a planned series. Book two, Terror at the Manor, arrives this fall.
Key Takeaways
- Writing can help rebuild a brain. Jenny credits imagination and putting pen to paper with starting her rewiring process — and Michael, ten years past his own traumatic brain injury, knows those connections take time to find themselves again.
- Recovery includes the people who love you. Jenny and her husband are learning each other all over again — she compares it to having a college roommate, and he is adjusting to a new version of his wife.
- Invisible symptoms are still real. Word-finding trouble, fatigue, headaches — Jenny looks fine from the outside, and the work continues underneath.
- Nurses see the whole person. Where doctors fix the problem, nurses tend to the emotional, spiritual, and family sides of healing — a lens Jenny brings to every page she writes.
- Reinvention is available at any age. Jenny had never written fiction before her surgery. She took online courses, leaned on nurse friends to fact-check her memories, and built a new craft one day at a time.
Curious where her story goes next? Visit Jenny at jennywhite.ca, and find The Triggering Scent anywhere books are sold.
And if Jenny’s reinvention has you thinking about your own next chapter, Michael would love to hear from you — book a conversation here.
Always consult your healthcare provider before making changes based on health content.
Leave a Reply