Today on Brainline: Redefining Brain Injury Recovery

Looking for some midweek hope? I encourage you to take a moment to read my newest BrainLine.org article.

Peace,

David

Redefining Brain Injury Recovery

After my brain injury, I asked anyone who would listen: “When will I get back to normal?” The answers were as varied as Pantone colors. Wise brain injury survivors would tell me that recovery was lifelong, which was not what I wanted to hear. Members of the medical community were more concrete in their answers, though they were 100 percent wrong. Early on, one professional told me that I would be completely recovered within 18 months of my injury only to later push the recovery timeline to five … years! 

Five years came and went. Then another five years passed. I have yet to get back to the person who I was. And today that is just fine.

The early years after my injury were numbingly tough. Loss of friends left me befuddled, wondering what was wrong with me. Loss of family blindsided me. Weren’t these the very people who were supposed to stand by you — no matter what? But it was the loss of self that was most devastating. It felt like I was someone else living in a familiar body. 

My challenge, unknown to me at the time, was that I was using the conventional definition of recovery. I wanted to get back to the place where I started. I wanted to be me again. But the passage of time, and lots of fighting my fate, have proven to me that there is no going back. I will never “get over” my brain injury. Like my shadow that follows me on a sunny day, I am forever bound to my brain injury. And today, I am okay with that.

So, how did I get to the point of no longer trying to recover in the traditional sense? Simply, I redefined recovery. I had spent enough years trying to get back to who I was before my crash. It became time to look forward, rather than back, and figure out how to live my best life.

Recovery today begins with acceptance of who I am and what I have. I am a garden-variety human being who lives with lifelong challenges — and even some deficits — that come with a brain injury. I do my best to remove emotions from the equation and simply accept that my challenges are facts. Once I came to this point of acceptance, my life began to change.

Recovery today is now defined by doing the best I can with what I’ve got. I will have good days, and there will be days that are exceedingly difficult. Life events will throw me off balance, more as a brain injury survivor than someone without a brain injury. That’s okay as well. It comes with the territory. I’ve learned and now accept that there is a nature of unpredictability of life with a brain injury. Whether it’s abruptly losing the ability to speak without struggling to find words or wondering why I am battling my brain for no good reason.

My concept of recovery today is something I would have been incapable of understanding early on. And I have no regrets that it took me many, many years to get to this point … the point of not only accepting my life as it is but really loving the life that I live, complete with my flaws and frequent missteps.

If you are new to the brain injury experience, do not expect a warm welcome from me. None of us asked to live lives defined by brain injury. But what I can share with you are the same words shared with me by brain injury old-timers: it will get easier. Up until a few years ago, I would share that things get easier but are never really easy. And there are occasional days where things are indeed easy. But the real miracle is that almost 14 years post-injury, I am still recovering.

Read this article on Brainline>>>