Jamie MoCrazy and Jeanee Crane-Mauzy prove recovery and alternative peaks are possible through the documentary #MoCrazyStrong.
The #MoCrazyStrong film, a short-film documentary highlighting the invisible challenges Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) survivors and their family caregivers face during recovery.
Besides being ranked #1 for three consecutive years, Former Pro Skier Jamie MoCrazy is the first woman to double-flip in a slopestyle ski run and is the epitome of strength, perseverance for all female athletes. In 2015 at World Tour Finals upon landing a trick Jamie caught an edge and whiplashed her head into the snow causing her brain to start bleeding in 8 spots and she immediately went into a natural coma, facing paralysis on her right side. In fact, doctors wrote her time of death in the helicopter on the way to the hospital where doctors informed her family that there was a 0% chance she lived. Miraculously, 10 days later, Jamie woke up to severe memory loss and a loss of ALL motor skills (speaking, walking, eating, etc.). During the relearning process, she was 100% dependent on her family – sister Jeanee and mother Fruit. Their sacrifice, determination, and mindset are why Jamie is who she is today. Jeanee is still a professional skier and will be representing Vanuatu in the 2026 Olympics. She is also the co-founder of the charity, MoCrazy Strong: a charitable foundation raising awareness on traumatic brain injury and methods to recover. Today both sisters work on MoCrazy strong and Jamie is a keynote speaker, traveling across the nation raising awareness of TBI’s.
By sharing Jamie’s inspirational story, the family hopes to ignite a passion in the minds of TBI survivors and family caregivers for inspiration that they, too, can recover and come back strong. Many aspects of Jamie’s recovery are miraculous, and the incredible fact is most of those improvements are re-creatable for other individuals. In early March, the sisters presented in the U.S. Capitol, going face-to-face with our biggest policy makers showing the importance and role through TBI recovery of family involvement, person centered practices, complementary medicine and healing opportunities. The MoCrazy sisters will NOT STOP until change in the government is made for anybody and everybody to receive access to recovery, just like Jamie.
You can show your support by donating to MoCrazyStrong or the Brain Trauma Foundation in the US and Brain Injury Canada Foundation in Canada.
Check out our interview with Jaime and Jeanee Crane-Mauzy!
The documentary was very powerful. Thank you for sharing your story. What was the main reason you created this documentary especially now that some time has passed since the accident?
Jeanee: Sure. So, we always wanted to do a documentary because what we found in the brain injury support world is everyone kind of echoed the same thing that severe brain injury was a sentence to disability for the rest of your life. And we never believed it was going to be Jamie’s story and it wasn’t jaime’s story. But it took a long time to get to where we are. As Jamie says in the documentary, it took a good five years of recovery. And then there was some life that happened. There was, you know, a pandemic and other stuff. And so we we got to the point now, where Jamie was getting married on the top of Whistler and we were like, ‘well, we have to we have to capture this footage because this is the once in a lifetime opportunity where she’s marrying the love of her life on the mountain that almost took her life.’ And as we hired a videographer, at first he was like, ‘I’m not a wedding videographer. I do documentaries.’ And we’re like, ‘No, we know. We want this done in a documentary way.’ He’s like, ‘are you doing a documentary?’ And we were like, ‘well, we want to,’ and he was like, ‘Okay, so like, am I filming for a wedding or a documentary?’ And we thought, well, everyone that we want to interview is going to be there. So let’s just do the interviewers there as well. And so we did and it just worked out really well. We had a lot of footage we already found that we could use and put in. So, he did all of the videography work and codirected and executive produced and really got on board. It was just timing.
Jaime: And one of the big things was, from the very beginning from like a year out of my accident, people started contacting me about wanting to tell my documentary and a few of them wanted to tell a story about tragedy and loss and sibling rivalry and trauma with a negative focus to it. And that’s not my story. And that’s not the story I wanted to be told. And so it took years and timing and also I had to create the life that I wanted to tell the story about. I wanted to have a full recovery and I wanted to climb an alternative peak and I believed I would do that for years before I had actually done that. So, it’s taken a lot of time for us to actually be able to have had a full recovery, like Jeanee said, that arc of marrying Reggie at the top of Whistler, it just really adds to the story. She also mentioned live stuff, we actually were really close to confirming with a different group in March of 2020. They were flying out here from LA and March of 2020 is when COVID hit, so that put a stop on that. However, because now we can have the wedding kind of give an arc to the story and really, you can see it becoming an alternative peak and you can see the success and the happiness and the joy that you can have a full recovery, that’s what we really envisioned and wanted years and years before it came true.
It is a really nice full circle moment for you for sure. When putting this documentary together, what was it like for the both of you to relive this?
Jeanee: Yeah, so the most emotional part was actually the first time that I saw it when it was pretty much finished and editing was done. All the music is customized scoring for our film and it really adds another level to it. I’ve talked about the accident so much that the interview itself wasn’t super emotional, but the way that it all got put together, like now, it’s our story, we lived it and every time that I watched it at the festivals, on the big screens, I still tear up. At our premiere last month, that our whole family came to, everybody was basically sobbing by the end of it. Seeing it in a cinematic format versus just reading an article really makes it real, like, it makes it alive again, and it shows emotion I think, in a new way that we hadn’t really been able to express before because we didn’t have a documentary before.
Jaime: Some of the things about the documentary that really get me are the recreation scenes and then when my mom is talking about when I heard her footsteps in the hospital and stuff, there’s a lot of tears. I think our mom does an amazing job. It’s all so true, but it’s like an Oscar winning performance. And she’s just so vulnerable about it and it always makes me tear up to see how much it did affect her. And when my dad’s choking in conversation, it’s just like everybody is so emotionally affected by it that it makes me remember. I don’t have any memory for six weeks after the accident, however, when they relive it, it makes me feel how it must have been for them to live it the first time.
When you both first started skiing, did it ever cross your mind that what you were doing was dangerous?
Jeanee: Our family has a long line of skiers, so our mom taught us to ski when we were one. So, you know, at that stage we didn’t cognitively think of much. And so skiing has always been second nature. If you could walk, you could ski basically in our family. There were levels of getting into professional skiing that we did understand to be risky, it is an action sport and there are levels of risk. And a lot of people were like, ‘I can’t believe you let your children do dangerous things.’ But our mom was like, ‘you know, the number one way your child will actually be seriously hurt is in a car and none of us give up driving because of how dangerous it is. So, I’m not gonna give up this life for my children that is so much farther beyond just, you know, the trophies or the worry that I have as a parent, of whether they’ll get hurt or not. It really is what is shaping them into the human beings that they’re going to become.’ And actually with brain injury, the number one place is actually a bathroom. The number one place people get brain injuries is in their bathroom, and the second is in cars. So, I’ve gotten a few funny responses where people are like, ‘well then we really got to stop using those things if we really want to avoid brain injuries, right?’ But it’s true. You’re more likely to get a brain injury from slipping on the sidewalk if you live somewhere with ice than doing a high active sport. But the sport is what’s talked about.
Jaime: Yeah, and my story is so extreme, the fact that I was a professional skier, and was the first woman in the world to double flip at X Games, I had accomplishments and then my accident was so severe. My fatality report was written and, as you saw on the video the doctor says, ‘we all thought she was gonna die,’ but then I have my recovery. It’s very attention grabbing. One of the things that we hear a lot from people and organizations involved in traumatic brain injury recovery, so hospitals, brain injury alliances of different states and things like that, is that one of the challenges for brain injury is that unless it’s very critical, you never see visible deficits. And the emotion and the cognition are the two deficits that take the longest to heal, and I was definitely very affected by them. It took a long time to heal and those are all invisible challenges. So, you don’t really have the story of like someone who became paralyzed from the waist down or broke their back and is doing backflips on a sit ski. You don’t have those stories, so people just ignore it. And that’s one of the things that everyone’s so pleased about is that this film, #MoCrazyStrong, can be a voice for the invisible. And it is such an engaging, gripping story that it can help bring the narrative that you can have a recovery and here’s the opportunities that you need to have that recovery.
Has this affected your relationship with skiing?
Jeanee: It did for me. It was interesting because I couldn’t really put it into words for a while and then there was an older snowboarder, her name is Torah Bright and one of her best friends, Sarah Burke, had passed away skiing a few years before Jamie’s accident. And she reached out to me and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re going through because everybody’s experience is so different. But I know that when Sarah passed away, I was like just so mad at the mountain. How could it possibly do this horrible thing to somebody that loved it so much,’ and she was like, ‘it wasn’t so much that I was scared or sad, like I was both, but I was also so mad.’ And talking to her and her just explaining her experience and being really understanding that she didn’t understand everything that I was going through was really helpful for me because I’ve had so many people being like, ‘Oh yeah, like when I had a concussion last year,’ ‘when I tore my ACL,’ or like, ‘oh blah blah…’ and I was like, that is not at all the same. Like, you don’t die from a torn ACL. And sure, if you have too many mild concussions, but it’s not the same as a near fatal brain injury. They’re just not the same. And people were trying to be nice, but at the beginning when this was really raw and really fresh and it was really hard and I mean the beginning as in the entire first year so me going back to sport as well, it was kind of lonely in a way because people couldn’t understand. It was just impossible if you weren’t living through it the way that I was. And I followed Jamie into the sport, like I was a younger sister, I got into it because she got into it. And then I had to decide that I wanted to stay in it for me and I had to be motivated by myself to do well enough to go to competitions. I couldn’t just go to X Games to watch Jamie. I had to do it all by myself. And so that is something that I did decide to stick with and it was worth it for me and it still is but it definitely changed it a lot.
Jaime: For me, it definitely changed. It took away competing. It made me feel old and washed up at 23 and very confused as to what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And, you know, we stayed very involved in brain injury and now we’re active brain injury advocates for recovery opportunities, and we work on policy and protocol change and peer-to-peer guidance and things like that. But I made the choice to stay involved in brain injury and now I’m actually the chair of the Utah Brain Injury Council. But when I was 23, I didn’t know. There’s so many paths I could have gone on. Something that happens is for people who have experienced brain injury, addiction is way more prevalent. I could have become addicted to things. I stayed away from drinking and coffee for two years. It could have happened that I went down a lot of different paths. But I had the support of my family which is one of the things in the video, family involvement and the family support. A huge component that helped in my recovery was my family’s support. They made the initial recovery happen because for the first six weeks, I have no memory and then for the first six months, I was not legally in charge of myself. I didn’t have a license, I couldn’t drive, so they had to do everything and make the decisions and they made the decisions that set me on the path to the recovery that I experienced.
Kind of going off of that. I really thought that it was interesting how the doctors mentioned that in the initial recovery they were afraid to stimulate the brain and how your family, kind of through your recovery, shed light on what doctors in this situation should be doing. And I was wondering if you have heard about how your story has impacted others.
Jaime: Yeah, specifically with the hospital in Canada, they actually have legally changed their protocol for family involvement. Prior to my accident, families had to leave the room when the doctors made the rounds in the hospital. And now the family members are required, like at least one family member is required to be in the room, unless they sign off on it, when the doctor makes their rounds so they can talk to the family member about stuff the family member would notice like liking pink and what their dreams are instead of just being a patient, which is another thing we said in the video with statistics and numbers, how to treat them as a person with person centered care. So, that has directly changed.
Jeanee: As well as the doctor has passed on our information to other survivors or other people coming in, in a coma pretty much straight away for us to do our peer-to-peer guidance work with. So, the mother, Jocelyn, who’s in it with her son Cody, we started working with them pretty much straight away. And part of that is also because there are a lot of things right now that if the caregiver asks for, then the doctor can comply with, as long as it’s safe for the recovery. But it is not put into levels of their protocol where they’re the ones that can prescribe it, which is a little interesting. Like with medicine, which is the same in Canada and in the US, to have something be part of the prescribed treatment, it needs to have so much statistics and so much data. But, it’s hard to get that data when you’re talking about brain injury recovery. So, there are certain things like we started doing fish oil, vitamin C, and vitamin D in Jamie’s feeding tube like 24 hours afterwards. And those were all approved by the doctor, they have scientific backing of why they would help the brain and her body heal, but it is not a standard protocol. So what we kind of do is able to kind of get around some of that is by us telling people to ask. And each brain injury is a little different, so if a doctor has a good reason why something like that is not good for a patient, then that’s very valid and that’s what you go with, but people don’t know to ask. And some doctors don’t even know that they should be asked. Like, if you sit them down and be like, ‘did you know fish oil is good for your brain?’ They’re like, ‘well, yeah, a lot of people know that.’ You’re like, ‘okay, well, did you ever think of putting it in a feeding tube when someone is recovering from a brain injury?’ And some of them wil be like, ‘yeah, I’ve thought about it but I can’t because of the way it works.’ And some of them haven’t thought about it. But doctor (Mypinder) Sekhon was very progressive and open minded. And, you know, he is still in the younger years of his career in really wanting to make a difference and bring injury recovery and that’s what he’s doing. And that’s what we’re able to do together with him as well.
It is amazing that you were able to bring about real change to the situation. Can you explain a little bit more about the MoCrazy Strong organization and what you do with it?
Jeanee: Sure, so we have three main avenues. There’s the awareness of talking about brain injury and brain injury recovery. Brain injury is the number one cause of disability in the US and is considered a national health crisis. And almost everybody knows somebody that has had some level of brain injury, whether it be a concussion, an aneurysm, a more severe brain injury, so it really affects everybody and it is not nearly as talked about. And so being able to be that voice to talk about it, as well as educate, like we said, we do peer-to-peer guidance with families that are recovering from brain injury. We also have spoken with schools, like high schools, universities, medical schools, with professional staff that have worked with brain injury recovery, and a lot of that is very education-based. It’s based on our collaboration with Jamie’s doctor, our post hospital care and our mom is getting a doctorate in mind body medicine. And then we do policy work. So, we were in DC and showed the film on Capitol Hill and then had meetings with members of Congress and their staff to talk about the importance of increasing support and locations for brain injury recovery. Right now, it is wildly different based on the location that you live in, if the treatment is even an option for you. Not to mention the financial aspect of what insurance will or will not cover and which states actually have grant opportunities to help cover care. It is actually, on a financial level, much cheaper to give people a few years of upfront care to be able to be independent intellectual adults giving back to society instead of telling them that after a few months to a year, they’re just sentenced to disability forever. And that impacts society, because we have the science and we have the technology that that doesn’t need to be the case. The problem is getting that technology and science and support to be available to everyone.
Jaime: And that’s why our mission is about raising awareness and education. And even a lot of the policy work that we’re doing is about awareness and education. So, screening our film on Capitol Hill is raising awareness to the fact that you can have a recovery. Most of our audience for the film, #MoCrazyStrong, also respond to us raising awareness and educating because the different members, like the hospitals and the policymakers, even though they have these other components, what we do is we raise awareness about brain injuries and we bring it to the forefront of their minds. And then we educate them on recovery opportunities and putting things together that they might not have thought about. So, something that we’re looking to grow this year with #MoCrazyStrong, with the film is we’re doing a film festival run and we’re also doing an impact campaign. For the impact campaign, anyone who thinks that we could bring value, like say, hypothetically, you’re having a medical conference, you could bring us in and we could screen our 18 minute film and then educate and motivate with a speech specific to the audience.
And if people want to look into that more, they can go to the website, correct?
Jaime: Yes, just contact us and we will be happy to talk about it. We do in-person events, so we can go to your conference in-person or we could do a virtual event.
Through #MoCrazyStrong, Jaime and Jeanee, in telling Jaime’s story, want people take away that the ability to recover is possible.
Jaime: Climbing an alternative peak, rebuilding identity, family care, we think that’s really important. Yes, people experienced traumas in their life and unexpected things happen, but you can recover.
You can follow Jamie and MoCrazy Strong on Instagram and Facebook.
