At 17, Jayme Louis Severance survived a traumatic, life-threatening, and permanent disability from a car accident during the senior year of high school. When he realizes he had a girlfriend before the crash, he steps up all efforts to recover enough to attend prom with his significant other by his side before the academic calendar ends.

Senior year of high school is often a transformational turning point between adolescence and young adulthood.

In an unfortunate turn of events, hapless high honors senior Jayme Severance finds an alternate way to spend the last year of high school: waking up from a coma at a rehab center after a near-fatal motor vehicle accident.

Closing his eyes in 2006 and opening them again in 2007, Jayme must come to terms with traumatic changes to a body that isn't his own. Torn from his family and friends, Jayme is forced to find community with strange hospital staff and stranger bedfellows.

But when he realizes he had a girlfriend before the crash, he steps up all efforts to recover enough to attend prom with his significant other by his side before the academic calendar ends—a mere five months away.

Conflict: it's what makes a good fiction book. But The Hayden Diary is stranger than fiction—it's non-fiction.

Born in the urban romps of New Hampshire's biggest city—Manchester—Jayme discovered his talent for writing as he was recovering from a traumatic brain injury secondary to a motor vehicle accident on October 29th, 2006.

When he was released from the nearly half-year stint in inpatient rehabilitation that followed the three-month-long coma induced by the accident, he set to work almost immediately at writing The Hayden Diary, believing that the stories of the rehab center that housed him needed to be told.

Still hindered by the effects of the accident, Severance originally began The Hayden Diary as a short story that expanded into what would be the first of the five parts that make up The Hayden Diary as it exists today.

In consultation with the medical professionals of the rehabilitation establishment that once housed him, he wove in their input as he added more and more to The Hayden Diary.

Completing the book in August 2008, it's packed with brain injury observations, insights, and musings while his experience in inpatient rehabilitation was still fresh in his mind.

Going to college two years after the very incident that transformed his life, he went on to graduate from Colby-Sawyer College with a bachelor's degree in creative writing, double minoring in English and sociology.

Severance now works as a junior copywriter at a marketing agency, doing his part to help businesses achieve their goals in the life sciences industry.