BRAIN INJURY WEEK . . .
For three months after the car
crash I was unable to get out of bed. After that came another four months in a
wheelchair; then, finally, a frame. Sometimes ‘getting better’ seemed to be happening
at an infinitesimal rate yet, still, it happened. Everyone could see I was
improving. In some ways (such as the increasing distance between my footfalls) it
was possible to actually measure progress and give it a number.
Eventually I moved onto crutches
and, ultimately, a walking stick. That was when I finally went back to see the
orthopaedic surgeon who’d patched up the battered body that was brought to him
after the car smash nearly a year earlier.
The accident had occurred in
Bangkok where I’d been working as the ABC’s Indochina Correspondent. A drunk
Thai driver had crashed into the rear of my car. I was flung forward into the
steering wheel, which engaged in a brief contest with my hip. Neither won. The
wheel broke, but my hip was shattered. Fortunately a tuk-tuk driver rescued me,
pulling me from the car and taking me to the nearest hospital before I was
flown back to Sydney.
The Royal North Shore Hospital
hadn’t seen bones as badly smashed around as mine for years and I was
incredibly lucky to get the orthopod who spent eight hours patching and fitting
together the jigsaw puzzle that my hip had become. But it was only when I saw
the surprise on his face that I really understood how bad the injury had been.
“Goodness! I thought you’d never walk
again”, he said as I hobbled slowly in on my walking stick. He shook his head.
“It’s amazing.” He walked around me and watched my shuffling gait. “Well,
that’s that then.” He was aware he’d accomplished something like a miracle.
Thanks largely to his skill the bones were knitting well and I’d continue to
progress. It seemed as if the operation had been a complete success story.
And, physically, it had been. Journalists
like to use shorthand to tell stories like this. ‘INJURED MAN
WALKS!’ scream the banner headlines. It’s a simple tale with a happy
ending. The only problem is that in the real world nothing’s ever quite so
simple or as neatly stitched-up as that glib phrase suggests.
The problem was it wasn’t just my
hip that had a traumatic impact. My brain had been travelling at the same speed
as the rest of the body when it was arrested by the steering wheel. The
seatbelt wasn’t an inertia one so the bones of my skull were also brought to a
sudden halt. The brain – always pretty squishy – kept moving. It smashed into
the front of the bony skull like a jelly thrown onto cement. This time the
score was very one sided and the brain, that most delicate part of the body,
came off second best. Very much so.
There’s no need to go into detail
about how this affected me – after all, this is a family newspaper. But the
point is the accident resulted in a far more significant legacy than my slight
limp. We don’t, however, normally cart our brains around in wheelchairs or use
crutches that can demonstrate someone’s suffered a sudden impact to the brain.
It’s also far more difficult to measure or understand exactly what’s happened
to the delicate flower that blooms inside our cranium. That’s why brain
injury’s called the hidden disease – but it’s no less real just because it
can’t be seen.
Every now and then I still make mistakes
that I attribute to the injury. A couple of columns ago, for example, I mixed
up two very different Athenians: Cleon and Solon. This was, I’m absolutely certain,
a dysphasic mistake attributable to the injury. After all, who could possibly
get the great lawgiver mixed up with the general? Unfortunately, I can’t use that
as an excuse all the time. Earlier this year a Professor correctly ‘pinged’ a error
of Latin. My former teachers would gleefully insist I never mastered the
rudiments of the language!
Nevertheless, given the chance,
most of us would prefer to end the day closer to perfection than we began it.
We don’t deliberately go out to be aggressive or negative (unless, of course,
you are a newspaper columnist, in which case all of these attributes, along
with a general obstreperousness, are part of the job description).
Unfortunately, many people with an acquired brain injury don’t possess full
control of their emotions. This can leads to a spiral of problematic behaviour
that can, in turn, cause other problems to erupt. It impacts on everyone. Yet
because the brain injured don’t use crutches it can be difficult to understand exactly
what’s happening in their mind.
That’s particularly so in the
case of those people who aren’t so obviously badly damaged. Those injured
playing sport, for example. Anyone who hangs around with boxers very quickly
becomes aware of the lasting damage a sport that encourages blows to the body
can confer. It seems odd that we don’t immediately recognise that people
playing rugby or AFL might suffer similarly as a result of being concussed
repeatedly. Or, indeed, any activity where the soft tissue of the brain
suddenly crashes against the immovable cranium (jelly and cement again).
Imagine the brain’s like a city.
The neurones develop particular paths (roads, expressways) to connect the
synapses that light up the different sections that allow us to think. A brain
injury is like a bomb, destroying not only buildings but also the critical road
network along which signals pass. Rebuilding takes time. Sometimes there’s too
much damage to rebuild. You may as well just start again.
Recovering from the most obvious
physical effects of my injury still took years. Recovering from the traumatic
injury to the brain has taken more than a decade. Indeed, judging from the
letters page, many readers still believe there is more recovery to come . . .
The (Canberra based) National Brain Injury
Foundation can be contacted on 6282 2880. Brain Injury Australia’s web page is braininjuryaustralia.org.au, or 800 272 461 (that's 1800 brain 1).
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