If so, you have gained valuable information that could help people living with a brain injury and their families and friends. Please take this opportunity to share your knowledge and experience.
We are nine-year survivors of a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Jessica is the survivor; Garry is the caregiver.
We believe we are working toward a successful recovery from Jessica's brain injury. But what is a “successful" recovery from a brain injury? How do survivors and caregivers survive successfully? We are examining these questions for a forthcoming book, We Changed Our Minds: Successfully Surviving a Brain Injury.
Of course, by “successful” we do not mean a complete recovery—a return to the person you were before the injury. The most important element to a successful recovery, we believe, is acknowledging and learning to live with the permanent impairments caused by the brain injury. Without this understanding by both survivor and caregiver, the recovery is doomed to failure!
In the early stages of Jessica's recovery, we felt that we were barely hanging in there, certainly not "succeeding." As we look back over what we've learned during the past nine years, all too often we say to each other:
Our accomplishments and failures over the past nine years have taught us much that can be useful to others. We want to share this information through our book, so that others facing brain injury will have the resources we lacked.
We also recognize that there is a wealth of information on recovering successfully from a brain injury that we still have to learn.
Please Share Your Thoughts with Us
We continue to recruit new participants to the project. If you would like to participate, please complete a Survivor Questionnaire or a Caregiver Questionnaire. Or Contact Us.