A head injury is a life altering experience. When a person sustains a traumatic brain injury (TBI), it is not the same as other wounds where the cells heal and people continue with their lives as they did before the injury. Life does continue after TBI and recovery is possible, but things are never precisely the same as they were before since brain cells don't regenerate like other body cells do. Depending on the nature of the injury, recovery from a TBI can be arduous and slow, and the impact of a TBI affects everyone in the family.

I recall both vividly and somewhat blurry the days surrounding the accident my daughter was in. Those first hours when we didn't know whether she'd live or die were anguishing and for the first few days the doctors were unable to give us any kind of certain information. Waiting . . . the waiting is one of the more vivid memories. After her brain pressure went down and all the diagnostic tests were run, my daughter was stabilized and we were told she would live. The doctors tried to talk to us about TBI, but it was just too difficult of a concept to grasp and at first we weren't accepting or even understanding the news we were being given by multitudes of neurosurgeons, neurologists and the attending trauma physicians.

During this timeframe we had to sign all sorts of authorizations to allow our daughter to receive procedures and tests that would ultimately save her life. One of the more serious procedures was when they had to insert an ICP monitor into her head to constantly monitor the brain pressure which was getting dangerously high. Most of this is a blur now, but it's amazing how adrenaline kicks in when you need it the most to enable you to respond to do what needs to be done.

Traumatic brain injury is extremely hard and bewildering for the person who has been injured, but it also is a difficult adjustment for the family. It's common for the person who is injured to emerge from the injury with a new personality and acts like a "different" person. This is often hard for family and friends to understand and accept this and if memory is intact, it's hard for your loved one to understand what is happening to them. Getting through the initial healing is only the beginning of the TBI journey and some may not be able to regain use of some of their physical movements. The other significant impacts are the behavioral, organizational, memory and other unseen deficiencies which are often the most difficult to cope with.

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