About

Jackie and Jim celebrating one of the Steelers Fall 2010 playoff games.

Creator and Administrator:  Jacqueline Burson   

In honor of:  James Kleyle

Jackie is graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, earning her Masters of Science in Clinical Community Counseling.  This blog began as a University course project, but quickly became so much more.

She was inspired to create this site because her best friend Jim – her “brother-from-another-mother” and “Wondertwin” – was in a car accident on April 7th 2010, sustaining a C5 spinal cord injury as a result.  He returned home in August after undergoing intensive rehabilitation at Shepherd.  The Shepherd Center, located in Atlanta, Georgia, is a private, not-for-profit hospital specializing in medical treatment, research and rehabilitation for people with spinal cord injury and brain injury.

Jackie has been supporting Jim (now a quadriplegic) and his wife Karen as best she can, and continues to be inspired by their courage and positivity in the face of catastrophic change.  Karen and Jim have graciously agreed to partner with Jackie on this site and lend their first-hand experiential knowledge, expertise, and photography to its pages.

Jackie is currently Past-President of the Johns Hopkins University Lambda Chapter of Chi Sigma Iota (the international counseling honor society), and a member of the American Counseling Association, the Maryland Association of Counseling and Development, and the JHU Student and Alumni Counseling Association.

Jackie received her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from L.S.B. College in Dublin, Ireland.

She is a trained mediator, an award-winning community theater actor, and community theater adjudicator.

Jim, an English teacher, Shakespeare buff and avid Steelers fan, is an award-winning community theater director (“One more than Scorsese!”)…and is Jackie’s favorite director, too.

Jackie & Jim in Pittsburgh, March 2010

(about a week or two before the accident)