My Path in Brain Injury Recovery
Minimize Your Problems and Maximize the Good Things in Your Life: My Strategy for Creating a Hopeful Path in an Anxious Time
It has been almost 8 months since a drunk driver tragically hit me, and if I’m being honest, it has been the most challenging period in my life. Becoming a first-time parent, navigating a global viral pandemic, and getting a severe brain injury all within one year, to say the least, was not what I was expecting. Life often throws you experiences that you don't expect; some are great. But often, many are not. First, I want to thank everyone who has supported us with kindness, prayers, and donations during this difficult time. Your love has been a deep blessing that has given us hope and peace during what often has been burdensome days. I am grateful to have survived despite the injuries and significant changes this tragedy has placed upon my life. Wanting to be alive to support my wife and new son has been the foundation of my drive to recover.
I've come a long way in the last 7 months. I woke up in a hospital bed unable to walk without support, unable to remember my child's name, and I could not properly swallow and had to be fed through a feeding tube for nearly a month. I spent just shy of a month in the hospital, and for the first few weeks, due to COVID restrictions, received no visitors. I simply laid in the Trauma Unit, watching other very injured people be wheeled in and out, and staring out of the high story window next to my bed, looking into a blue sky and seeing a world that I felt totally cut off from. I laid there piecing together what limited information I had been given about the condition I was in, and I had no idea what my future would look like or if I would ever be able to return to a "normal" life.
At that point, I decided that I would do whatever I could do to pull myself together enough so I could get out of that bed and go home to be with my family. It took weeks of therapy to train my throat to swallow properly and for me to be able to safely walk without someone constantly monitoring me and supporting my balance. After weeks of lying in a hospital bed almost all the time, my body was very weak. It took months of basic exercise to gain the confidence to move around freely without continuously observing my every move to make sure I didn't fall.
But, here I am almost 8 months later, and if you saw me, you would think that I look normal and would probably not guess that I was recently in a near-death car wreck. I've returned to work part-time, I've had some very good medical assessments of recovery so far compared to what was possible, and I've been able to be a father to my son, walking and playing with him every day.
Under the surface, however, there are major changes to my life. I've dealt with ongoing imbalance issues due to a pretty extreme injury to my head, specifically, my left inner ear. Due to the temporal bone fracture to my head's left side, I lost a significant amount of hearing in my left ear. I also received damage to the inner ear, making learning how to rewire my brain's perception of my movements one of my continuing challenges. I can still see fairly well, but there are some injuries to my vision that I am learning to adjust to, and I've had to come to terms with a constant ringing in my left ear (the medical term is tinnitus: a neurological symptom that often accompanies significant hearing loss). I've worked hard to migrate the stages of survival, shock, and emotional tragedy due to the extensive injuries to the brain and body. The broken bones in my back, shoulder, and skull have healed, the pain in my neck is doing better, and even my brain seems to have come a long way from the early days of my injury. But some things are just different, and I've had to make a lot of changes to my life and teach myself a lot of new things during a period when your mental ability and stamina feels challenged compared to what you remember life being like before. It takes time to come to terms with the “new you;” to let go of old habits and expectations, find a new way forward, and figure out how to contribute to the lives of the people around you and not always be the one who needs support and special attention.
Things have gotten better, but new challenges keep coming; new symptoms and suffering materialize on their own schedule. Often, you overcome one injury to experience or conceive of another that has taken root in your life. Through all of this, I've had to choose what I want my decisions to be each day. I can either stay obsessed with the pain and suffering, with the new direction of my health, with the terrible behavior of another person that has put me through this, or with the perceived failures of the systems around you, like insurance, law, and medicine that you are relying on during a very tragic period. Or, you can choose to focus on whatever positive things you find in each day - even when it often seems very small or at first glance, insignificant.
The spiritual support of my friends, family, and coworkers has been invaluable; the love of my parents and Heidi's family to help me pull myself up during the early days of recovery has been, without question, at the heart of my ability to make it this far. I've listened to many audiobooks and podcasts pertaining to brain injury and recovery because I often haven't been able to read for very long periods of time.
One of the most helpful things I've found is the Adventures in Brain Injury podcast. It covers the story of and introduces you to the caregivers that treated Cavin Balaster, who had a major brain injury falling from a water tower in New York seven years ago; an injury he was not likely to survive. His work interviewing caregivers, therapists, and patients who employ new and developing forms of brain treatment and therapy has given me a whole new world of information I’ve needed to try and maximize my recovery. He took the worst thing in his life and tried to make something good out of it so that he can help other people. In one of his podcasts, a story is told about one patient, a successful doctor who had a significant illness, and from this illness, lost much of his vision. It talks about how he and his wife, who was suffering an illness of her own that made her very weak, decided to continue to paddle their kayak around the water by their house. He couldn't see very well but had the physical strength to paddle. She did not have the physical strength but could use her vision to guide them safely through the water. He shared with others that he had chosen to focus on the positive things in his life and to minimize the problems. He would make the problems as small as possible and the good things as big as possible. This was the foundation of how he and his wife continued to live an engaged and enriching life. After going through so much this year, I have determined that I can't change what has happened to me. But I can choose to take this tragedy and figure out what good things I can create from it. So, I've decided to share my story as it develops - to talk to others about how it feels to travel down an often scary and unclear path. To realize that traditional medicine can help save your life, but doesn't necessarily provide all the answers for rebuilding a damaged body and living a meaningful and happy life.
Fortunately, there are friends, family, and caregivers who can help; emerging therapies and spiritual practices provide new understandings of the body's healing that doesn't focus on medications and surgeries. I still have a lot to learn and a lot of challenges to overcome, but I've decided that I'm going to share what I learn and experience as I travel this path, and I am going to try and be a resource for others who are facing their own tragedies and challenging struggles towards recovery. I am not sure exactly what this will look like or how best I will do it, but this is, in a way, the public beginning of that journey, and I hope whoever reads this finds it helpful or gains something of value to share with others who may be traveling their own challenging path.
