We've pushed pause on our fundraiser. We will be back in the near future.

Funds are raised and managed by Pamela's children in a fiduciary capacity to support her care and quality of life while protecting her SSI and Medicaid eligibility.

Why a GoFundMe campaign? Our mother, Pamela Beavers, is a former ballerina and a 20-year survivor of a debilitating Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and stroke. At 54, she has enough strength left to improve her mobility and health through consistent and prolonged physical therapy. She’s far too young to waste away in a nursing facility for 20+ years. Our mother is now largely immobile and in immediate threat of becoming bedridden for the rest of her life. The nursing care she is receiving is not enough to keep her from wasting away. We want to provide her a meaningful path to regaining mobility and improving her health. To that end, we are raising funds to place in a trust to use for an extended 2-year program of supplemental care. Currently her insurance only pays for a few weeks of therapy per year.

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These funds will also help our father, Aaron Beavers, who is suffering from the tragic Caregiver’s Paradox. His unwavering 20-year commitment to improving our mother’s life has come at the expense of his own mental and physical health. Without respite from providing personal care to our mother 2-6 hours per day for things the nursing facility cannot or does not cover, we fear losing him as well. In the 20 years since our mother's TBI, the siblings in our family have left the house and started families of their own. Our father is the lone remaining member who can provide daily care. Despite his heroic daily efforts, it's hard to imagine our father having the mental and physical strength to persevere another 20+ years of intense caregiving.

Our mother's insurance covers only a few weeks of physical therapy per year and does not cover occupational therapy at all. We want to fund supplemental care and therapy for our mother in ways that reduce our father’s caregiving burdens. Giving him the time and space to improve his health as we improve our mother’s health and mobility with the goal of bringing her home and caring for her ourselves.

To accomplish this, we are asking for your help in raising $100,000 to fund a 24-month intensive recovery program for Pamela, to include:

To protect our mother’s eligibility for state medical benefits, all donations will be deposited directly into an appropriate Trust managed by her children for her sole benefit. Funds are being raised to be placed into a trust for our mother with some of her children acting in a fiduciary role.This ensures your gift provides the supplemental care, therapy, and equipment she needs without jeopardizing her essential nursing care.

As the children of Pamela and Aaron, we want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for listening, and hope you'll help us fund Pamela's recovery trust by sharing this campaign with your family and friends.

— Ashton, Delene, Rochelle, and Dalon

Below is additional information about Pamela's disabilities and her backstory.

Pamela's Disabilities:

In September 2004, a year after giving birth to her fifth child at the age of 32, our mother, Pamela Beavers, suffered a severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and subsequent Stroke on the right side of her brain. Initial treatment consisted of removing a large portion of her skull plate and placing her in a coma. The TBI caused significant damage to her frontal lobes, resulting in Organic Personality Disorder and Severe Emotional Disinhibition. Meaning, nothing of our mother’s personality remained or was recognizable and her brain circuits responsible for patience, empathy, and impulse control were severely damaged. She acquired Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Narcolepsy, and Pseudobulbar Affect (PA). PA is a condition that, in her case, causes uncontrollable responses and episodes of heightened emotionality, mainly crying and wailing. The injuries to the right side of her brain caused Left Hemiplegia/Hemiparesis, causing the loss of control and mobility in her left arm and partial mobility in her left leg. Due to brain swelling, she experienced Compressive Optic Neuropathy that led to Optic Atrophy. These conditions describe a crushed the optic nerve in her right eye that contributed to her legal blindness. She suffers from an inability to stay focused, keep track of time, estimate distance or volume, and has Hemispatial Neglect, a neurological condition where her brain simply 'ignores' the left side of her body as well as anything in the space immediately to her left. This could be a person talking on her left, or food on the left side of her plate. She subsequently lost ⅓ of her brain to Liquefactive Necrosis, a process where her injured brain tissue dissolved and was replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Her severely Impaired Hypothalamus led to a host of metabolic disorders and acquired conditions. Perhaps the most cruel acquired condition was the development of Hypothalamic Obesity, a condition that causes uncontrollable weight gain regardless of diet. It makes weight loss almost impossible without specialized medication and robs her of her life's second greatest passion, dancing. Her obesity greatly intensifies her physical disabilities and magnifies the mental challenges she acquired from her brain injuries. The accumulation of her many injuries and traumas has severely impacted her mental health. She has battled Clinical Depression and Suicidal Ideation. Additionally, she suffers from Neurotic Excoriation, a disorder that drives her to compulsively pick at her skin as a physical coping mechanism for the overwhelming anxiety her brain cannot process. She sustained permanent physical injuries that resulted in Incontinence and severe Peripheral Neuropathy, causing chronic, debilitating pain in her legs and feet.

Pamela’s Story:

The 2004 TBI our mother experienced set off a tidal wave of change in our mother and our family. She experienced a complete personality change, became more angry and aggressive, and at times violent. Those changes justifiably get the lion’s share of attention in the arc of her story. However, it's not the real story. Our mother’s favorite phrase is ‘grow where you’re planted.’ She has tried to do her best to live by those words as she has met her daily tragedies and challenges head-on. That phrase is especially poignant, and at times painful, since she’s experienced such dreadful growing conditions over the last 20 years. To those trying to understand our mother, she presents a heartbreaking riddle. She lives in a state of neurological paradox that is often profoundly bewildering to outsiders. While her injury has triggered impulsive, selfish, and at times violent behavior and outbursts, she's always retained a deeply sweet and faithful spirit. Her expressions of aggression and compassion are jarringly opposed to each other, but they exist simultaneously in the same person, often expressed within the same breath. She is a gentle, caring soul trapped in a brain that can lose the ability to control or manage itself. Anger, selfishness, and impulsive behavior are not who she is; they are symptoms of what was injured, her brain. The real Pamela is kind, gentle, and considerate, and has been held hostage at times by a brain injury that overrode her true nature. This story is not an attempt to overwhelm you with the worst of what’s happened but to show she has challenges and she's not a lost cause. There is sufficient evidence that our hope for rehabilitation and recovery is not in vain.

Pamela was born in Provo, Utah, one of eight children. She suffered abuse and neglect in her home, her parents divorced, and many of her siblings ran away from home as teens. Her young life was fraught with difficulty as many are. But despite all, she fought to pursue her dreams of becoming a professional dancer and creating a family of her own. She was born with the nature to be kind-hearted, service-oriented, and disciplined; a real go-getter. She further developed these traits pursuing education, sports, and dance. Eventually, she met our father, settled down, and had five children. They struggled as all young couples do. At the same time, there was a recognition and gratitude that she'd honestly created her own happily ever after; a true rarity. She continued in her passion for dance, organizing and participating in recitals such as Swan Lake and the Nutcracker. She volunteered at her children's schools and even homeschooled for a time. She regularly served in her church, often housed extended family members in need, and extended that service to those in her community, housing a young person in danger of homelessness. Some of us are old enough to have fond memories of those pre-accident times, others are not. Dalon, our youngest sibling, was only 14 months old when she was taken. The oldest, Ashton, was 11 years.

Our mother's discipline to overcome challenges was the hallmark of her personality before the accident. So it was not shocking that she took it personally when doctors said she might never walk again. She called upon her ballet training as the framework for her damaged mind and body to relearn how to walk. In a few short years after her accident, she participated in a 5k.

Through the early years, there were periods, or situations, that seemed to rewind the effects of mother’s personality change. When she was more mobile, she provided dance lessons to another disabled young woman, she wrote letters to church members re-activating them into full membership, and she volunteered her time to genealogy efforts indexing over 3,000 names with one working hand and half of a working eye. She was the Resident President at Rocky Mountain skilled nursing facility in Heber, UT previous to Covid. There she worked with the Heber City planners and engineers to have a cross-walk constructed specifically for Rocky Mountain residents to have safe access to the Prestige Senior Living Center across the street. When her needs have been met, there have been periods of blossoming and improvement, despite her challenges. She has been a giver to all, not only growing where she was planted but encouraging and helping others to do the same.

In 2000, our father completed a 6-year enlistment in the Army and moved our family to California. He served in Germany (Landshul/Pirmasens), Texas (Ft. Sam Houston/Ft. Hood), and North Carolina (Ft. Bragg). In the spring of 2004, he completed his AS degree at Merced Jr College in Merced, CA. In the summer of 2004, he moved our family to Provo, UT where he transferred to BYU as a civil engineering student. It was then that our mother got a job working evenings as a ballet instructor to help pay the bills. One evening in late September of our father’s first semester, she decided to get a snack. As she crossed the street near Lindon, UT she was struck by a vehicle. She was life-flighted to Timpanogos Hospital and then to LDS hospital in Salt Lake City, UT. Overnight, our father became a single dad of five and our mother’s full-time caregiver.

Our mother was placed in a medical coma after it was discovered her brain was swelling and might take her life. As we anticipated her recovery, our family tried to celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving, and then Christmas without her. When she woke, the wife and mother our family knew were gone. Previous to the accident, she was a fit, energetic, and dutiful wife, mother, and professional dancer. That person was replaced by an individual who had little ability to control or manage her emotions and actions. She became fixated on selfishness, manipulation, and at times violence as the main tools to obtain her needs and wants; sometimes posing a real danger to herself, our father, and us. At the time she awoke from her coma, her doctors described her TBI as the most devastating they had seen in a survivor.

Within the first year post-accident, our mother developed Hypothalamic Obesity resulting in her weight increasing from 105 lbs. to over 200 lbs. Over the next few years, she would reach a max weight of over 330 lbs. Her obesity is a multiplier of grief as it greatly intensifies her physical disabilities and magnifies her mental challenges acquired from the TBI.

Those first several years after the accident, our family received an enormous amount of help. This gave many of the people around us the impression that there would be a point at which we could manage on our own. That expectation never materialized. For those who had a first-hand view of the inside of our home during those early years, their opinion was the exact opposite. They saw everyone in the family really struggle with a challenge they were not prepared to face and a burden they knew would not end in this life. The prospect of seeing no end to the need for service can be debilitating, even in those who strongly desire to help. There was a natural ebb as less and less individuals had the energy and time to provide our family service. Eventually, it was just us. Our struggle has always been constant and relentless.

Our father graduated in 2008 with an MS in water resources engineering and got a job in Portland, OR working for NOAA fisheries and US Fish and Wildlife as a Hydraulic Engineer. It was at this time that family and community support began to deteriorate quickly, initiating a period of intense struggle and challenge. By 2012, it was just our father and 5 school-aged children doing the best we could with what felt like tape and string. We struggled daily. Every day felt like a repeat of the previous day.

In 2014, the children began graduating high school, serving missions, starting college, and getting married. With every one of these milestones, the burden of taking care of our mother was placed more and more upon the shoulders of our father alone. It was almost impossible for him to take care of our mother with such little help.

In 2016, with just our father and the two youngest siblings at home, they realized they could not manage the heartbreaking violent outbursts that became a physical danger to them. Through a long series of family efforts, we were able to move our mother into another residence in 2016 and into a skilled nursing care facility by 2018. Her struggle in skilled nursing has been deflating. Her brain injury creates confusion amongst staff as they try to engage her as they would a ‘normal’ person. She has been continually misunderstood and often labeled a ‘problem’ resident.

Covid resulted in her being separated from family for almost 2 years, plunging her deeper into depression. Her physical abilities during this time deteriorated exponentially, leaving her with only a fraction of her former strength. Since Covid, our mother has required a wheelchair to get around and is mostly bedridden. Her confidence and quality of life have greatly suffered. We can feel that we are reaching a point of no return. Her age and health won’t hold open the rehabilitation window of opportunity forever. We see it closing. Without immediate action, it's likely she will remain in bed for the rest of her life. So we are literally at the crossroads of determining the longevity and quality of the rest of her life.

She only recently became a grandma, her youngest two children will get married in 2026, her life as a mother-in-law and grandmother has only just begun. She wishes deeply to be there for her children as they get married and have their own children. She's always said her lifelong goal was to be a grandmother. As her family, our greatest desire is that she can actively participate in the wonderful experiences of our young families starting and growing. We are asking for your help to ensure she can participate more fully in our lives.

Although Covid represented a deterioration of her body, at the same time there was a miraculous change in her personality. Since 2021, we have experienced a mother, who by the grace of God, has lost her selfish, manipulative, and violent tendencies. We are rediscovering her as she recognizes how destructive her TBI has been to the fabric of our family. She is now actively promoting and participating in the healing process of our family.

We want to give our father the rest he deserves so he can start taking care of himself again. We want to give our disabled mother a chance to be connected to her family again.

Our family's burden will be constant, there is no finish line, not in this life. We pray for and await God’s help. We hope you can be a partner in providing that help.

If you've read the entire page we thank you! We know it was a lot to read. You now have a much better understanding of our family's situation and we hope an increased desire to help and share.

Again, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for listening, and thank you for your support.

— Ashton, Delene, Rochelle, and Dalon