Another TBI Perspective and Catch Up on a Year Gone By!

I haven't written anything for quite some time as I thought I had gotten everything out of system.  Writing about my husband's journey felt good and got a lot out of my system.  I have told the story a hundred or more times, but writing it really did the trick.  However, I recently read a book that was recommended to me by my daughter.  She read it for one of classes.  She is a grad student studying speech and language pathology.  It was about a man's TBI journey.  I can say, so what, I have been there.  But it was a very interesting book.  It really gave me some insight into another's person's trial and tribulations on the road to recovery.  There are many people out there who are victims of Traumatic Brain Injury.  But everyone's recovery process is different.  There are the same scales that they use to measure levels of consciousness or levels of coma and similar areas of functionality and cognitive abilities.  But how a person moves through theses areas is really unique to the person.  When I read the book, I was fascinated by this particular man's progress.  It was much quicker than my husband's but a bit more intense and worthy textbook material.  The book came out a while back, was well received, the critics loved it, as well as people who read the book and left their personal review.   But what intrigued and bothered me most was the point of view of the person writing the book.  As someone who lived through this similar scenario, it was truly interesting and disappointing at the same time.  So much so that I had to reopen this blog and re-read everything that I wrote.  The life of a caregiver is not all cupcakes and roses.  But the life of the person recovering from a brain injury is much worse.  I believe that a caregiver should be a strong person yet possess equal levels of empathy and sympathy.  It is not something that most of sign up for, it just falls into our laps.  But thanks to such a wide network of family and friends who truly understand the magnitude of what has happened to Tim, we have been so much more blessed than most.

So, after reading this book and re-reading my blogs, I felt that perhaps, my husband's story and our family's journey was just not finished yet and perhaps I still had a few more things to write about.  

The last thing I wrote about was the sixth anniversary of my husband's accident and since time does not stop, we are actually now getting close to seven years since his crash.  I would like to say that Tim, has seen so many more improvements.  But at this point in his recovery, the milestones he makes are very small, yet significant in our eyes. So to catch up a bit, Tim continues working with his personal trainer on a weekly basis.  Because of this, his need for Botox in his arm to aide in its mobility has decreased significantly.  I think that when Tim's trainer goes to sleep at night, he dreams up new ideas of ways to torture him.  But, when I come to pick him up at the end of his session, Tim, dripping from sweat, always has a smile on his face and tells me what a great workout it has been.  Next up...more mini milestones!