TBI Voices

Traumatic Brain Injury Coma Results from DUI: Chris Part One For Chris that year is a blur, much of her childhood a blur. For her Mom, that year is a terrible ordeal that turned around a simple decision to walk to a party versus accept a ride. A simple decision..
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 Brain Injury Severity: Chris Part Two Chris’s Mom struggled with understanding the brain injury severity because of the enormous amount of physical damage that had been caused by the accident. Before her accident, Chris was a normal girl. Says her Mom: She was a Sophomore in high school, typical, loved..
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Emerging from a Coma: Chris Part Three Chris’s Mom says that emerging from a coma is nothing like you see in a soap opera. They don’t wake up and everything is great. It’s not one day they just wake up and their life continues. It’s a slow process. There are..
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End Stages of Coma: Chris Part Four Chris was at the end stages of coma when it was “decided” that she needed to be transferred again. (For a classification of the end stages of coma “stages of coma” see the Rancho Los Amigos coma scale at http://www.waiting.com/rancholosamigos.html). Chris’s Mom: She..
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Return Home after TBI: Chris Part Five Chris’s face brightens when she talks of her return home after TBI, even if some of her memories are flawed and it was also a hard time for her. I know it was in the summertime because my mom had all my friends..
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School After TBI: Chris Part Six The return home wasn’t the end of the process of rehabilitation from the coma, just another step. Chris’s Mom also talks about her return to school after TBI : Nothing really changed as far as her coming home and her routine. She got up..
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Time Management with TBI: Chris Part Seven Quite remarkably, Chris went back to a part time job she had at the time of the accident, even before she finished high school. She did work there for four years after her accident, but aspects of her disability, time management with TBI,..
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Brain Injury Deficits: Part Eight Many of Chris’s ongoing brain injury deficits are the classical cognitive issues one would expect to find after a TBI – memory, language, speed of information processing. Others are classic frontal lobe problems, such as the executive functioning problems all brain injury deficits, that made..
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Brain Injury Balance Issues: Chris Part Nine Chris continues to have ongoing brain injury balance issues and serious difficulty with her left hand. It has been more than a decade since her injury and in today’s climate of cutting costs, her arm – her brain injury balance issues , couldn’t..
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