The Road to and Beyond Recovery

Please, by all means, whatever you do click your seat belt. I was in a car accident in 1989. This occurred just as I was making my move into being an adult. I was being given a ride home from a party and BANG, we went off the road and into an electrical tower. Please, by all means, whatever you do click your seat belt. I did not. I was in the back seat, quickly flopped over to the front seat, breaking a leg that got caught under the front seat, possibly saving me from flying through the windshield. Unfortunately, it did not prevent me from hitting the dashboard. Fractured my right orbital to the extent my eye was handing out the side of my head. Broke my skull, the part protecting my frontal lobe. Well, it protected as well as it could. Trips to Brigham and Women’s in Boston, 9 hours of surgery on my head, and adjusting to medications that were given to save me, but almost killed me, and I was back in Lewiston at CMMC. I was released from the hospital shortly before Christmas. In my shortsightedness, I thought I was “all better”. Wow, how far off the mark I was. There really isn’t a way to qualify, or frame TBI recovery as “All Better”. You are different, and you spend the rest of your days trying to learn the different you. It can be uplifting, it can be painful. But it’s you, did I mention please, by all means, whatever you do click your seat belt.