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 [...]

I first heard about alpha waves during a sleep study I underwent many, many years ago. Back then, I didn’t know much about them other than they were intruding into my sleep. That sleep problem eventually resolved itself, and I thought no more of alpha waves until the day of my closed head injury. As [...]

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 [...]

You’re an adult, you’re tripping along, living life, working hard, and then the universe sends you splat, and suddenly you’re seeing doctors, suffering, in pain, not working, and watching your bank account slide into the red. While you may be receiving good help for what ails you, you’re probably not getting good help for what [...]

You know, it’s a good thing I grew up in a medical family, learnt how to do research and search through libraries from a young age on, studied hormones from age 11 until, I think, 22 (through sex ed, biology, sciences), and took a one-year physiology course at the University of Toronto, else I may [...]

When I was studying psychology, back in the last century, in the less-enlightened-than-now era, we talked about not labelling patients and not calling patients patients but clients. The idea was that because of assumptions over the ages, we didn’t want to further marginalize people through diagnostic labels, didn’t want to give people a reason to [...]

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 [...]