Love Your Brain

With Brain Injury Awareness Month coming fast on the heels of Rare Disease Day, it's hard to stay upbeat. Nevertheless, attention must be paid.

My husband and I moved to Maine five years ago this month to aid in the recovery of his identical twin, who suffered a traumatic brain injury following a bicycle accident. (Yes he was wearing a helmet, which is the first question everyone asks.) Since then, Neil has fought his way back to normalcy, as if that's such a picnic, and today does just about everything he did before, except for tasting his food, hearing what you're saying and remembering what you said last week. This first-hand look at brain injury has made me more aware of all the things we take for granted and which can be gone in an instant.

After Neil fell, he went into a coma that lasted for six weeks. Those were some dark days, with us not knowing when he would wake up and what parts of the old Neil would still be there. (The doctors euphemistically call the missing parts "deficiences.") Finally he decided to come back to us, and within a few days Neil was back at the Scrabble board, a family favorite we had all played for years. He won the first game right out of the gate, which told us his intelligence was still intact, as was his ability to boast and laugh about it.

Oddball with napkin on head next to normal-acting brain injured man.

Today Neil looks and sounds just like anyone else--actually he looks more like Mitch than anyone else, except for an uncanny resemblance to Hamid Karzai--because brain injury doesn't show. (See photo above.) Many people who have obvious "deficiencies" may actually deserve our patience rather than our ire. In fact, 2.4 million Americans sustain a brain injury each year.

With that in mind, I try not to honk at someone slow to merge onto the highway, or silence someone talking too loud at the movies, as response times and hearing are often impacted due to a brain injury. Basically, it never hurts to be kind to strangers, since you have no idea what the heck is really going on in their lives.