Woman with brain injury grins at bridesmaid request
INSIDE EDITION - A woman with a severe brain injury couldn’t help but to grin from ear to ear when her soon-to-be sister-in-law asked her to be her bridesmaid.
Nichole Sullivan of Memphis, Tenn., brought out the toothiest smile on the face of her fiance’s sister Jessica Torres when she presented her with a card that read: “Will you be my bridesmaid?”
“There’s no reason not to include her — anybody that I would have married, I would have wanted their sister to be a bridesmaid,” Nichole told InsideEdition.com.
Jessica was in the car on her way home from a date in 2011 when the tire blew out and she was ejected from the front seat. Her mom, Lenore Torres, said she had not been wearing her seatbelt.
For the first several years after the accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury, Lenore explained her daughter had “no communication, no expression, nothing. You looked through her, she looked through you.”
But in the last few years, Jessica made progress, including smiling, laughing, watching television and following people with her eyes.
“It was one of my dreams that Jessie would be in her brother’s wedding,” her mom Lenore Torres explained. “With that accident, you’re never sure of how things will play out.”
For Nichole, including Jessica in their wedding was always the obvious choice.
“I knew her briefly from high school. She was a year above me, so I knew who she was before,” she explained. “It’s actually something I was thinking about long before we ever even thought [we would] be married. If we ever got married, I was going to have Jessie as my bridesmaid.”