Living with a brain injury is so hard sometimes it breaks my heart. I wrote those words to a friend of mine recently and as soon as I wrote them I knew this essay had finally begun. I’ve tried and failed to write it many times before. Writing about life with a brain injury is like trying to paint something in constant motion. It is nearly impossible. The brain injury never, and I mean never, stays still. Living with a brain injury is like living with a ghost.
I suffered my brain injury in 1984 when I was held-up on the streets of Brooklyn and shot in the head at point blank range. While doctors left the bullet in my brain because removing it would have resulted in more brain damage, no one told me I had a brain injury. I never heard the words traumatic brain injury, or TBI, the injury considered the signature injury of the current wars. The basic gist was this: No, Peter, you can’t play contact sports anymore and we are going to put you on anti-seizure medication for at least one year as a precautionary measure.
It would be 10 years before I learned I was living with brain damage, that the brain damage was impacting and damaging my life and, as a result, some of the people in my life.
If you think my story is unique, think again. Tragically, I am not alone. The brain injury epidemic in this country has been going on for a long time. More than 50,000 Americans die from them every year, including 7,000 children. More than five million Americans live with disabilities as a result of them and nearly 1.5 million Americans sustain brain injuries annually. Every 23 seconds an American suffers a brain injury. The Brain Injury Association of America reports that “(d)irect medical costs and indirect costs such as lost productivity of TBI totaled an estimated $56.3 billion in the United States in 1995.”
The brain injury ghost lurks everywhere and, as I imagine ghosts to be as rule, it can be highly unpredictable. It can be influencing your life experience and you don’t even know it. It can permeate light, sound, fatigue, anger, sadness, pressure, hunger, thought, perception, darkness, touch, balance, speech, memory, movement, coordination – in other words – everything and anything that you are.
Why is this so? Because your brain is your life manager. It is the filter through which you and I experience life. No doubt some will read this and say I am leaving God and spirituality out of the mix. Not so. It is through this miraculous life manager that we are able to experience God and spirituality in the first place.
But, like poltergeists, brain injuries can be mischievous, controlling, sneaky, dishonest, cruel, misleading and so forth. They can be so insidious at times that it may take you awhile to realize, if, in fact, you ever do realize, that they’ve been running the show and wrecking your daily life and, in many cases, the daily lives of others. Very often the people you like and love most. These ghosts can vandalize our daily life. They can be scary.
Yet despite these harsh realities, far too many who say they want to help and support those of us living with brain injuries have little if any idea of what it is like to live with one. In some instances, they are so predisposed to certain views, beliefs and motivations that they will never have any idea what it is like to live with brain damage.
In some, I would like to think, rare instances, the inability to understand is rooted in the fact they simply don’t care. We brain injury survivors are seen as a way of making money. Some health care providers are more about gutting and manipulating an already pitiful and unforgivable health care system than they are helping survivors ascend to their maximum level of independence.
Some in Washington and across the country squawk about the Canadian and French health care systems. They complain these systems are socialized medicine. They hope we will hear the word socialize, convert it to the word socialism, convert that word into the word communism, think them synonyms, and recoil in horror. Spare me.
Here’s how I see it. Everyone has health care coverage in Canada and like minded countries and no where near everyone has health care coverage in my country. When you are sick or injured you want health care. When you’re bleeding profusely in an emergency room you don’t give a rat’s ass whether your health care is socialized or managed care; you want the health care. In fact, you deserve it.
Peter S. Kahrmann - Est. 1953 