Where Did My Brain Go?

“I watched the EMT cut off my blood-soaked pants and wondered why he was treating the wrong leg. I couldn’t feel my other leg.”

In 1986, a pickup truck slammed into me at 50 mph, bending my right leg backward until my toes touched my thigh. I woke from a five-day coma with twelve staples in my chest, a wired jaw, and my mangled leg in a plastic bag.

But the worst injury was invisible. A note on a chart said, “Patient is confused. Somebody should check his head.” Nobody checked my head. Nobody told me my brain was damaged. I was married to a medical doctor whom I trusted for guidance. But she used her medical knowledge to check me out of two hospitals before a neurologist could examine me.

I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was in my house. I found letters I had sent to people I didn’t know. I was hysterical. My wife brought home extra-long straws from her hospital job to help me drink vodka through my wired jaw until I was in a better mood. When I needed more than vodka, medical professionals gave me stupefying drugs while my wife used me as a babysitter.

Nine years later, after my divorce, I met a woman who was worried because I screamed in my sleep. She asked the magic question: “Have you ever hit your head?”

This is the story of how I fought back. One surgeon restored my ability to walk without a limp after another said I needed a cane because my knee could not be fixed.

One social worker helped me escape the disability trap. Others wanted to keep me in a chemical fog, living in supervised housing and dependent on their services.

I threw out the pills, regained my senses, and went on to lead an international web development team.

Where Did My Brain Go? proves that recovery is possible, even when the system fails you.