Coming Back from Brain Injuries--Yes You CAN!

An Art of Wellness POV

Getting Well again from brain injuries is possible--I’m living proof. When the blind woman got her sight back and could all of a sudden see--a lot of people thought “Oh she’s ALL BETTER now.” Catching up to life after being blinded and worse from toxic chemical brain injuries takes some time. Imagine what it’d be like--to be blind for more than 5 years--years during which other people had to organize (in a lot of cases--disorganize) your life! 

One of the first things I had to do when I got my sight back was try on the clothing my sighted assistants had helped me buy. More than 5 years worth of clothing. I’d take an armload and try things on in front of the mirror. Some looked just fine. Others, I’d take a look at myself and say “OMG--they let me wear THIS?”

I went through about a dozen sighted assistants in 5.5 years blind. Some thought their job was just to hang out with me. I had friends to hang out with--I didn’t need to pay companions. I needed people who’d do the jobs they’d agreed to do for the money I could afford to pay them. Some thought it was a piece of cake, telling the blind woman that the job was taken care of. Eventually a friend who’d come to visit would tell me the job was NOT being done and I’d have to find a new assistant again. 

Getting my sight back was an intense experience. It took as much getting used to having sight again as it did to losing it. The sheer input to my brain was overwhelming. Sight is a tremendous amount of input--whether to lose or regain.  When I first lost my sight, I felt like Johnny 5--you know--that escaped robot in the movie Short-Circuit who moaned for “Innnnn-put”. I’d been such a high visual person all my life I felt literally starved of visual input when I lost it. 

Getting my sight back again was wonderful and intense--but life doesn’t stop. Less than a year later, my Mom--who’d been battling cancer’s 1-5 on the opposite coast of the country while I was battling crippling and blinding brain injuries--asked for help. And the next few years of my life became about the last few of hers.  It’s almost two years since she passed and I’m only now finding my way back to an organized life and re-developing a business that went on hold. But that’s radically changed. 

The RAND Corporation says we now have more than 300,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are suffering “some level” of brain injuries. They already lived through the hell of war. Now they’re experiencing a second hell. A hell I know something about.

You can’t SEE brain injuries--but they’re a terrible thing. People thought the blindness was bad--it was. The blindness was obvious to others--dark glasses and a white cane. What was much worse was a brain going haywire and out-of-control. You can’t SEE that happening to someone and people were just not getting why I wasn’t getting it.   And why sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.  

Now I am Well. And I worry about all the very many young ’un’s we have today who are going through the terrible hell of brain injury and being offered little more than disbelief or a life-sentence of disability and drugs--like I was.  Those black-box warnings we tune out when we hear the commercials telling us to “ask your doctor about”  are coming true. Who’s ready to step up and do something about all these military suicides?