Sara E. Lewis is a traumatic brain injury survivor, author, blogger, and speech-language pathologist. The defining event of her life was a motor vehicle crash on April 28, 1977, the last day of classes during her senior year at The College of William and Mary. After spending five weeks in the hospital, she left with the physical and emotional scars of brain injury, symptoms that went undiagnosed at the time.

In spite of – and also because of – them, she skipped from a career as a museum curator to museum marketing and then left museums for the world of for-profit marketing before landing a job in government marketing communications, all in the course of 27 years while frustrated by a brain injury she didn’t know she had. After a breakdown in 2004, which resulted in recognition of her TBI, Sara wrote five books and then went back to school to earn a master’s degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Although she studied communication science in order to help others with cognitive-communication difficulties, the graduate school experience helped her more because it provided the therapy she hadn’t received earlier. She finally understood the science behind her symptoms and came to grips with what it meant to live with brain injury.

Immediately after graduation, she wrote non-stop about her nearly four decades with brain injury and – at last – her aha moment. The book, Not What I Expected: My Life with a Brain Injury (I Didn’t Know I Had), was published in May 2015. She continues to write about brain-injury symptom management on her blog while also practicing speech therapy part time and leading a brain injury survivors support group.