I've played my share of competitive sports over the years. While I thought of myself as being slightly above average in terms of my abilities in sports when I was in middle school, slowly but surely others caught up to me and surpassed me by leaps and bounds. Just like any athlete, I had my share of sprained ankles, broken fingers, and strained shoulders. But with every one of these injuries, I followed the same routine. Stay off the field or court for a couple weeks, apply ice, protect myself with a cast or splint, and bide my time until my injury healed. And, every single time, I was able to get back in the game within a few weeks. The body is very resilient, and these types of injuries are quickly overcome. Sure, some of these impairments might stick around for a few months, but, for the most part, the healing process is fairly quick and the body returns to its prior condition.
A devastating skiing injury. A horrific fall onto concrete. A life-threatening car accident. Nobody wishes any of these occurrences on anyone. And while survivors of these experiences come closer to death than they've ever been, life frequently issues survivors the challenge of a lifetime: the dreaded TBI. Traumatic Brain Injury. Many people have heard or read about them, but few people really know how challenging and horrifying the hopeful road to recovery can be.
Intracranial Injury
A not so common injury is the life threatening, intracranial injury. Also known as a traumatic brain injury (TBI), these injuries can be beyond devastating. While a jammed index finger requires some ice, a splint, and some rest, an injured brain is so much more complex. There is no such thing as a typical recovery, and, given that the brain is arguably the most complex organ in the human body, gaining an understanding of what the recovery process entails can only be fully understood through a first-hand experience.
12/29/01. That day is down in the books as the worst day of my life. And my family's life. At about midnight, I was a passenger in a car and was involved in a horrifying accident. Given that I suffered a severe TBI, I have zero recollection of the details surrounding the planned road trip and the accident itself. I firmly believe that I'm better off not remembering anything. Flashbacks to traumatic events such as an awful car accident can harm people for years. But, in my case, I don't have these flashbacks since my mind has permanently deleted the incident.
The one thought I repeatedly have from 12/29/01 is the idea of my parents in Cleveland, Ohio receiving a phone call from a hospital in northern Michigan informing them that I was involved in a serious car accident and that I'm in the hospital and am unable to communicate. Hello! Talk about earth shattering. In what has to be every parent's worst nightmare, I can only imagine the shock and horror that reverberated through my parents from head to toe. That phone call received in the middle of the night must have nearly ripped the soul out of my parents. To this day, this is the everlasting image in my mind of 12/29/01.
Pain and Suffering
So what does a TBI feel like? How does a person go about recovering and bouncing back to the dream of returning to a "normal life"? That's not an easy question to answer. But I will say that the process entailed an unbelievable combination of tears, hard work, and gut-wrenching, soul draining, excruciately painful and terrifying moments that I never realized were humanly possible or realistic.
I've always lived a life that has been fairly status quo. Some might call it boring and uneventful. But, I am a non-risk taker who has always lived a low-key life while tuning into simple pleasures and hobbies. An exciting night might consist of having dinner at a restaurant that I've always wanted to try or even playing cards with some guy friends that I haven't seen in a few months. That's about as exciting as it gets, right? And a terrible day could entail having to wait on the train platform for three trains before I'm finally able to squeeze into a train that has no business accepting another passenger. That's usually as bad as it gets. Bottom line is that my peaks and valleys typically don't venture too far from my status quo.
But suffering through and recovering from a severe TBI elongated my peaks and valleys to extremes that I never knew were even possible. Learning that I attempted to convince my family a couple weeks after the accident that my mother is actually Jerry Seinfeld's sister, which is absolutely not true, or that I asked my parents in the hospital a couple hundred times per day where we were are absolutely beyond difficult for me to comprehend. The fact that my brain was so twisted inside-out and turned upside-down is almost impossible to believe. And, similarly, the joy I think back to when I would wake my mom, who slept in the hospital with me for the first few weeks, up out of her sound sleep at 3:00 in the morning to take me down to the hospital cafeteria in my wheelchair for some ice ceam is mind boggling.
The Road to Recovery
Many people have asked me or have wondered about the mental anguish associated with recovering with a traumatic brain injury. The fact of the matter is that people will never ever understand the process. Only those who have suffered through a dreaded TBI can understand the seemingly insurmountable road to recovery. The challenge is so immense for so many reasons. As the body is feeling better and healing, the brain is about a few hundred thousand steps behind. The arms and legs are healing, but the brain still has a ways to go. I found myself constantly terrified with the idea that my body is getting much better but that my brain was essentially still broken and not working. Not being able to remember what I did 10 minutes ago, not remembering who my friends were, not being aware of my parents' birthdays, etc. My brain was not working, and it was the scariest feeling I've ever had.
I've told curious people to imagine an enormous room filled with nothing but filing cabinets. Not just 2 or 3 filing cabinets. But hundreds. Maybe thousands. And this room is not just any room. It is a room that never has any person step foot in there. The room doesn't have an ounce of dirt in there. It is an incredibly well-protected room that is never disturbed or disrupted. Simply, the room contains an incredible number of filing cabinets, each with 7 or 8 long, pullout drawers. And each pullout drawer has about 30 or 40 folders stuffed with copious amounts of tightly packed papers containing an inordinate amount of notes, text, and photos. The volume of data and information in this room is staggering, as the filing cabinets have grown over the course of over 25 years.
The room described above is actually a person's brain. My brain. On 12/29/01, I was 27 years old. After growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland for the first 18 years of my life, attending college in Michigan for 4 years, and then having lived in Chicago for 5 years after college, my brain was stuffed and overloaded with knowledge, data, information, and memories. Similar to the filing cabinets. Everything in my brain was arranged and organized. The content of my brain had never been disturbed or disrupted. Part of my brain was wired to store information about my experience in Mrs. Roman's kindergarten class. This folder of memories contained pictures of other people in my class as well as a navy blue short-sleeve shirt I wore to school frequently that had my name embroidered on it. Another folder contained images, sights, and sounds associated with all of my favorite foods. Whether you're talking about ceviche from Fonda del Mar in Chicago as an appetizer, chopped salad from Cowboy Ciao in Scottsdale, pepperoni pizza from Geraci's in Cleveland, or the spicy Mexican hot chocolate from Hot Chocolate in Chicago, my encyclopedia of a brain related to food dishes was a voluninous textbook.
Well, on 12/29/01, this entire room of filing cabinets was absolutely blown up. The room was devastated. Every paper in every folder in every drawer in every filing cabinet came flying out of the drawer. The insanely tidy and organized room had become sheer mayhem and pandemonium within the snap of a finger. Utter chaos had been introduced to what had always been the safest and most off-limits part of my body. Each and every item from the filing cabinets was still in the room, but the contents were now mangled beyond recognition. Piles and piles of twisted and torn metal and ripped and crumpled papers now filled this room from top to bottom after the tumultuous explosion that ravaged through what was once the untouchable brain, my biggest treasure.
Where to go from here. The challenge of a lifetime. Literally, I was required to pick up one piece of paper at a time, dust it off, reacquaint my brain with the image and the associated experience and locate the original folder of the memory and deposit the paper in the folder. My precarious condition forced me to literally re-introduce myself to every ounce of information that was previously neatly stored in my brain. I had to re-learn everything, and I mean everything. All of the contents from before the accident were still in my brain. The problem was that the scene in my brain was so chaotic that there was zero order. I was onsite at an earthquake and had to refresh each and every piece of information.
Looking through my high school yearbook was incredibly helpful to my recovery. As I looked at each picture in the yearbook, I honestly felt my brain picking up all memories associated with the person, dusting them off, and re-inserting them into the appropriate folder in my filing cabinets that were slowly and carefully being rebuilt. The seemingly insurmountable challenge was terrifying. Each and every person that's been part of my life, each and every sports team I've ever played on, each and every subject I studied in school, each and every book I've ever read, etc. The list goes on and on and on.
The idea of piecing my life back together in my mind was incredibly scary. But there was no doubt that I was going to get there. I was going to pick up one piece of paper at a time and restore it in my brain that was rapidly being replenished with information. I was determined to move back to Chicago and return what I had called my "normal life." The return to Chicago was not going to be easy, as I had just begun the MBA program at the University of Chicago. As I was struggling to piece together the content of my brain, how was I possibly going to return to one of the top MBA programs in the world? The challenge was enormous. But so was the opportunity.
Piecing together the contents of my brain was not easy by any means, and so much of what is taken for granted by people was something that I had to re-learn. I will never forget the preparation I went through before going to take a shower in the hospital with one of the nurses. I was not familiar with the order of events in the shower, and I had to rehearse the routine with my parents. If we knew that the nurse was coming to get me at 2:30 to go take a shower, I would start rehearsing the process with my parents at about 2:00. "First I get in the shower and wet my body from head to toe. Then I'll squeeze some shampoo in my hand. Next I'll rub the shampoo into my hair and will scrub for a couple minutes. Then it's time to rinse the shampoo out of my hair. Etc. etc. etc." The routine continued and continued, as I talked through washing my body with soap.
My parents were such an instrumental part of my recovery, and I cannot express this enough. Without them, I wouldn't be where I am today. There is no doubt about that. They simply refused to believe, or let me believe, that anything less than 100% recovery was possible. However, on one occasion prior to going to the showers with one of my nurses, I recall becoming furious with my dad. He was with me in my room, and he was aware that the nurse would soon be coming to the room to escort me to the shower. While I would typically rehearse my shower routine for about 30 minutes, my dad decided to challenge me. He intentionally neglected to tell me that my shower time was approaching. I will never forget the fear that shivered through my body when the nurse walked in and told me it was shower time. Sheer panic reverberated through my body from head to toe. But I cannot go to the shower. I didn't rehearse my shower routine 15 times with my parents. Dad. Dad!! How could he do this to me? While I was beyond furious at that point in time, I soon realized that as I was recovering, these seemingly enormous steps forward were required in order for me to return to my "normal life."
Moving On
And return I did. My doctors initially informed us that I would be able to move back to Chicago in 18 - 24 months. But 9 months after 12/29/01, I signed a lease for an apartment in Chicago. My recovery was in the past. My return to normalcy was in the present. And SRM was in the future.
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