Graham Lawson: TBI in 1975
December 20, 2011
On Veteran Day 1975, I was eleven years old, home from sixth grade for the holiday. My friend Richard and I were playing and getting bored, so we crawled out of my second floor window out onto the porch roof just outside. We had decided that if we grabbed onto the branches of a tree that grew close to the porch, we could climb down and come in the front door and scare my mom.
Richard went first, made it to the bottom, looked up and waited for me to follow. I reached out a little and grabbed a branch to swing out onto the tree. With my feet on the roof and me reaching out to the tree, the branch snapped off. I pivoted, fell and, landed at Richard’s feet face first on the frozen ground.
My friend ran to the house to get help. I stood up. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear, and had no idea what was happening. I wandered the back yard in circles for a few moments until my parents reached me.I remember the local emergency room. I recall being told to move my arms around, not to go back to sleep. The sting of three stitches to close a cut over my eye and an ace bandage being wrapped around one of my wrists. The ER doctor told my mom that I had a concussion and a sprained wrist. She decided to have me moved to another hospital for another diagnosis.
I have no memory of the ride in the ambulance to the other hospital, but I remember being wheeled in. The next thing I recall was a wheelchair ride to the X-Ray lab and being asked to stand forward and sideways for head x-rays, I sat for the pictures of my arms. Then back to an examination room, where I started to vomit blood.
My next recollection was of waking in the intensive care unit. I had two broken wrists and a star shaped depressed skull fracture over my left eye. My left forehead had shattered into ten pieces with a shard penetrating between the two lobes of my brain. For three days, I lay there until I was stable enough to operate on.
I was lucky that the hospital had a fantastic neurosurgeon. With me being so young, he reconstructed my skull using the broken bone wired back together. My following treatment was only rest. There were no MRI or CT scans then. No physical therapy. I walked out of the hospital several weeks later and spent the better part of the next year recovering. My life started out slow. I went back to school after a month at home. I got to be the strange kid who wore a knit cap all day (to hide my shaved head and a scar that ran from ear to ear). By spring, I was playing kick ball and had the courage to take off the cap.
Over the years I have dealt with an inability to remember things and names at times, but, considering what could have been, I know I am a very lucky man. Thirty-three years later I have a great wife, two daughters and a career as a carpenter.