Bo Holder

My brain injury story began a few days before my wife and I were due to move my stepdaughter into her new college dorm. I had suffered days of off and on fevers and malaise and had decided I must have a virus. Over that weekend, I began having severe headaches which soon became unbearable. Five days after the symptoms began, my wife rushed me to the emergency room. Shortly after arriving I began to experience multiple seizures and entered a coma, which I do not remember.

About a week later, I woke up from a coma. I was intubated and confused in an intensive care unit. I had suffered multiple strokes as a result of somehow contracting streptococcal bacterial meningitis. The infection had progressed into sepsis, and I had also contracted pneumonia as a result of the longer-term intubation.

My awakening surprised most of the critical care team. While I was in a coma, it was very touch and go and the doctors warned my family that I would probably not survive, but if I did, I would be in a wheelchair and living in a nursing home for the rest of my life. I believe at one point a physician told my wife that she “needed to get used to a life of trachs and peg tubes in a nursing home,” which was an assessment she disagreed with. I could not walk or talk and soon the doctors realized I had also lost my hearing.

However, my family felt strongly that rehabilitation was possible.

After about another week, I moved to an acquired brain injury unit in a catastrophic care hospital, and began working to recover. Over the course of the next couple months, while my wife slept in a chair next to my bed, I progressed through physical and cognitive rehabilitation. I was bound and determined to get better, so I kept working on my rehab even after I left the brain injury unit. It was certainly frustrating and I could be hard to handle, but I was fighting to get back to normal, or at least as good as I could be. By the time I left that facility, I was intermittently out of a wheelchair and able to move into OUR home, not a nursing home.

After my physical rehabilitation had continued to progress, I decided I wanted to put more emphasis on cognitive rehabilitation. I applied and was accepted to a Masters program at a major university. While it was challenging at first, I got the hang of it and was able to earn my Masters in Accounting…30+ years after getting my bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.

It’s now been 5 years since I had my brain injury. If I had to give one word about my experience, I would say it has been challenging and rewarding. Yes, that is two words, but I cannot say one without the other. The whole process has been challenging, but it has become very rewarding. While I will always be 100% deaf, I have a cochlear implant that helps me hear partially on one side. While I still have vestibular balance issues, I am not in a wheelchair and can walk without assistance. I have a wonderful wife, children, stepchildren, family, and friends. There is an old saying, “you only live once” but I am grateful to be able to Live Twice.

One of the things that still challenges me is the invisibleness of my challenges. Nobody can see that I am deaf and nobody can see that I have balance issues. When I walk through a grocery store, nobody knows I am deaf and I seem to be walking just fine. Little do they know, my head is on a swivel to see what is going on around me and I try to walk as well as I can so people do not think I have been drinking. I know these challenges may be in my own mind but they are real to me. I wish everyone else knew that a lot of health challenges are invisible to the outside world, and that we can’t always see someone else’s struggles.