“I’m going to get off the atenolol,” I told my GP, who promptly laughed at me. Well, I might, just might, have the last laugh. I was put on atenolol (a beta blocker) 7 years after I suffered from a closed head injury and began 7 years of 120+ heart rate, of yo-yoing blood pressure, [...]

Reading. Once you learn how to do it, the only thing you need worry about is what to read and when to find the time. Until a traumatic brain injury f* it up. As I have discovered over the past few years, reading is a complicated process, mediated by several parts of the brain. It [...]

As I wrote previously, I bought the Apple iPad for two reasons: to compensate for brain injury-related issues and for my work as a writer. Today’s post is about the former. A huge problem people with brain injuries face is, IMHO, the inability to organize, initiate, and to get things done from start to finish. [...]

In the early days of my closed head injury (traumatic or acquired brain injury), I heard many times the mantra that you only heal or heal the most in the first two years — whatever healing happens in those years is it for the rest of your life. In the June 2010 issue of the [...]

E-Rehab. I’d never heard of it before this week, yet it makes so much sense. At last, I thought, two people in the health care community are acting on the fact that those with brain injuries need lifelong support around things like scheduling and organizing, long after they’ve left rehab and active treatment. Although I [...]

OK folks, pay attention, it’s attention lesson time. I know, I know you go through life not having to worry about such a thing, unless you have ADD or a screaming baby. But when life smacks you across the head, ringing your brain, it becomes über important to you and those around you because it’s [...]

Last week, I met my case manager, about nine years late. It’s taken me since then to see if I can figure out what happened. Nope. It’s not that I’m new to case management and slow on the pickup, it’s that it was so, well, limp. Back in mid-1991 I was in a rear-ender that [...]

You often hear at the end of a standard news story on the umpteenth car collision of the week, “no life-threatening injuries.” Well, those “no life-threatening injuries” in me are causing me to still be seeking medical help 10 years later, partly because traumatic brain injury (TBI) health care is so fragmented, so little understood, [...]

I find it difficult to believe that it’s exactly ten years (18:30 15 Jan 2000 to 18:30 15 Jan 2010) since I was injured in a multiple car crash on Highway 7 in Woodbridge, an injury I thought at the time was like the one I sustained in another car crash back on 10 June [...]