by Joy Johnson

Created on: July 16, 2009   Last Updated: July 17, 2009

As a Rehabilitation Counselor I have had many clients with traumatic brain injuries (TBI). As with many disabilities, each person having a traumatic brain injury has similar challenges and symptoms and yet no one person is exactly alike. Some people are naturally more resilient than others, some have better support networks, others handle pain better. But I was never so intensely interested in all aspects of the rehabilitation of brain injuries until my two sons had brain injuries and both almost died.

As a young single mother, I was attending graduate school when I got a phone call that my seventeen year old son was in the ER and that he was very disoriented. When I got to the hospital he was hardly able to talk to me and his head was badly swollen. His face was disfigured and I struggled to understand what had happened.

His friend who accompanied him to the hospital explained that he was riding his BMX bike in the dark and tried to do a "trick" when his bike went over a cement ledge near a stairwell and he fell on his face, breaking his nose, and crushing the bones in the left side of his face. His friend said that he got up and rode his bike to his house and became disoriented. He then rode several miles to the hospital after debating what to do with his friend. By the time I saw him he was in so much pain it was hard to comprehend how he could ride that far when he had so much damage to his skull.

My son's sinuses were punctured and an infection leaked into his brain. The infection was so serious that part of his frontal lobe had to be removed and the hole sealed. He lost most of his eyelid and we weren't sure we could save his eye. It was a long and painful recovery for the bones to heal. Then there were a number of surgeries to save his eye. But that being said, he still continues to build his life around his disability because a brain injury is something you must negotiate and plan around, not something that goes away, unfortunately.

Just a few years before the older son's injury, my thirteen year old also had a fall from a BMX biking "trick" gone bad at a skate park. In his case he had an epidural bleed, which in a nutshell is blood leaking inside the skull and causing a lot of pressure. He had an intense headache, was disoriented, was throwing up and his pupils were not the same size. By the time we got to the hospital I was told he needed surgery or he would die. It was a very surreal moment and it was hard to comprehend what the doctor

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