An issue that besets and bedevils personal injury litigators representing the harms and losses suffered by a client with traumatic brain injury (TBI) is how to tell the story of those harms and losses. TBI damages are often "hidden in plain view" leaving the decision-maker less inclined to comprehend and believe the depth and breadth of the injuries. Far easier to see third degree burns. It's a real work of art and science to expose the damages for what they are.
Jane Rosett eloquently writing her own story for the NYTimes, "Starting Again After a Brain Injury," relates the remarkable fight for her life beginning with what goes wrong with the brain when it is slammed in a traumatic event - and what can happen to rebuild, albeit not replace, what was lost. Excerpt.
“WANT a piece of gum, Jane?” asked my friend Andrée.
“What?” I asked her.
“Gum!”
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“It’s Trident.”
It was delicious.
That evening, I told my friend David about my day’s big discovery. “It’s called gum and you chew it and it’s fun and there’s this one kind that will let me blow bubbles!”
“Yes, it’s called bubble gum, Jane,” he told me, patiently."
Here I am struggling to function with a newly acquired Logitech WAVE keyboard after decades of using the Microsoft ergonomic one in the misplaced hope that it would stave off carpal tunnel. I remind myself that it's a simple matter of relearning where to place my fingers with confidence and dexterity. And it frustrates me.
With TBI how does one "rethread" the lines of one's life? What does it take? 59 months ago Rosett was jolted at the age of 45 into a new existence. 26 months of rigorous work allowed her back into the home where she had lived independently for 17 years.
Ironically, who she was, her activism for AIDS organizations, and the diverse interests she had engaged in previously created a perverse dress rehearsal for dealing with the challenges of her life today. How does the past reassert itself? One vehicle is neuroplasticity. Excerpt.
"I once believed that I could not grieve for what I do not remember. I no longer believe that. I do grieve for what I can no longer connect with. Phantom memories. “Your pies!” “Your bread!” Friends tell me they miss my baking. One woman whom I still don’t recognize told me I used to shred beets into my chocolate cake batter. Her comment reintroduced me to an evaporated passion I no longer remembered and had not missed until then.
More than four and a half years post brain damage, memories still do not serenely knit back together as in those nifty “How the Brain Heals” neurology cartoons. Shards of memories pierce my consciousness before fragmenting and melting into fresh half-syllables. Some memories hover in shadows. Others gouge and flee.
Initially, memories came back in my dreams and later through my writing and photography. It’s the images, not the words, that come back to me.
My friend Andrée, a physician who treats patients with traumatic brain injuries (though she isn’t one of my doctors), offers me the clinical word for what I am describing: diaschisis, sometimes said to be Greek for “shocked throughout.” She explains that neuroplasticity lets me bypass damaged parts of my brain and forge new neuronal communication routes so I can access, or remember, sensory information that I received as a word, from another place from within my brain and in an entirely different format. Like an image. “So for example, if your brain receives the word ‘love,’ it can recall the word ‘love’ as an image of a heart,” Andrée explains.
Thank you, neuroplasticity!"
Rosett closes with a plea for all of us temporarily able-bodied folks to heed:
"If you want to connect with someone who has a traumatic brain injury, hire us, include us in conversations that regard us instead of speaking about us in the third person in front of our faces. And instead of pressing us about what we “must” remember from our past, simply be present with us. People with traumatic brain injuries are often scolded for having “no sense of time,” but the present is, for many of us, our only authentic time.
So when you see us, please don’t be offended if we don’t remember weathering earthquakes with you, baking your birthday cakes or bouncing your babies on our knees. We’re struggling to make sense of a world that seems brand-new — sometimes wonderful, often overwhelming — with all the courage we can muster."
Recent Comments