Return to College After Brain Injury as a TBI Survivor

Return to College After Brain Injury: Michael Part Fourteen

Michael talks about his experience with his return to college after brain injury and the difficulties he had with it. He required a lot more help than before his TBI.

Ultimately you left Louisville and went back to college.  So what’s it like your return to college after brain injury?  

It was hard for me I know at least for the first two or three years, because I actually studied a lot.  I had to get a lot of help from Project Success.  They work with people who have learning disabilities. They were helping me a lot.  But they could only help me so far, usually with the undergraduate credits.  The graduate credits I had to find somebody that was in the major, a little further than I was.

So Project Success would have been more routine disabilities and learning disabilities than  traumatic brain injury. 

Right.   They were more working with people with dyslexia.

Was there anybody there who did seem to have an appreciation as to the nature of the disability that might be involved with a return to college after brain injury?

The best one I got along with was Dr. Nash. I don’t know if he’s there anymore, I don’t know if he passed away or, but he could really understand.  Think of the worst dyslexic, and he has a Ph.D., talk about, because being dyslexic you also have anger issues to some degree.

From the frustration?

From the frustration. He definitely had cognitive and understanding problems.  He had a hard time having other people understand what he was trying to get across and so when, when it was just me and him working and him going at his regular pace and me going at my regular pace we did very well.

Tell us what you interpret dyslexia to mean. 

Well, my dyslexia is not the kind, it’s not what you, I mean I did have problems with mixing up numbers and letters and that’s usually the traditional thought.  But I look as being dyslexic as an umbrella word for a lot of learning disabilities.  And my learning disability has to do with cognition, understanding, memory and I believe there’s one more in there.

Next in Part Fifteen – Severe Brain Injury Magnified Learning Disability

By Attorney Gordon Johnson

800-992-9447