I spoke at Brain Injury Awareness Day 2011 in Washington DC. I was the first civilian (non-pro athlete) survivor to speak at the Congressional Briefing. I received a standing ovation.
Other briefing panel members included: Brigadier Richard W. Thomas, Army Surgeon General; Colonel Jamie B. Grimes, Director Defense and Veterans Brain injury Center; Kathy Helmick, Deputy Defense Centers Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury; Patty Horan, Wife Of Wounded Warrior Captain Patrick Horan; Dr Lisa McGuire, Research Team Leader, Division of Injury Response, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Dr Allen W. Brown, Mayo Clinic.
Here is my Statement.
I was introduced as Dr. Anne Forrest, TBI Survivor and Advocate, formerly Senior Economist at the Environmental Law Institute.
The Topic for the Briefing was The Value of Rehabilitation and the Road Ahead
I’m a survivor of traumatic brain injury. I’m honored to be here. I’m up here representing 1.7 million people who get TBI each year and are correctly diagnosed in the emergency room with TBI. And I’m also representing more than 1.7 million more people who are either NOT correctly diagnosed in the ER or who never make it to the ER. I’m in the latter category. Combined, that’s more than 3 million, or one out of every hundred, Americans who get TBI each year. Some get rehab, some don’t. Some get better, some don’t.
In representing this population, I know that I have big shoes to fill, but I have worked hard to have the skills to fill them.
I’m going to tell you about my accident and recovery. If there’s anything I want you to know, it’s how much I needed rehab, how astoundingly difficult it was to get it, and how dramatically it changed my life for the better once I got it.
Prior to my injury, I got my B.A. at Yale and my Ph.D. from Duke, and I came to Washington to work as Senior Economist at the Environmental Law Institute. I was a varsity athlete and an Ivy-League champion, still played competitive sports, and had an active social life.
I was rear-ended in a car accident in 1997 by the Lincoln Memorial. I was coming across Memorial Bridge from Virginia and merging into Rock Creek Park. My head swung from side to side and back to forth. Neurons in all areas of my brain were either stretched or broken. I drove away from my accident.
After my accident, unbeknownst to me, I had a second grade math level, third grade language skills, word finding difficulties called aphasia, attention and memory issues, confusion, tremendous fatigue, and irritability. I couldn’t absorb what I was reading, and I had difficulty with social cues.
What troubled me most about my symptoms was that I would get over-stimulated in normal environments. The over-stimulation would lead to sleep problems, and I’d find myself in a downward cycle with worse cognition and a depressed immune system. I was working really hard to keep my life from going from terrible to worse.
My journey to rehabilitation was long, exhausting, and often quite depressing. I was diagnosed within six weeks, which was very lucky, but I had tremendous difficulty getting to rehabilitation. My first rehabilitation was actually with an optometrist who helped me with vision therapy because I couldn’t read. That was tremendous but not enough. It took me three-and-a-half years to get to appropriate rehabilitation. That’s almost the time it took me to get through college. I got attention, memory, speech training, and executive function training. Known as cognitive rehabilitation, these are the building blocks of thinking. Rehab began a slow and steady path to recovery that eventually turned my life around.
Because of rehab, I can read, I can watch fireworks, I can follow the plot of a movie. But most importantly, rehab gave me five gifts for which I’m most grateful.
Because of rehab, I have more independence and am in charge of my own life. I use my cognitive strategies daily. I must use them or else I cannot function, and I function with lots of support from my husband, friends, and community.
Because of rehab, I have my smarts back. Vision and cognitive therapy allowed me to manage my cognitive issues so I could think again, and my economics training came back. I had worked so hard to get my training.
Because of rehab, I learned to take care of myself well enough to be able to take care of someone else. I’m a mom of a two-year-old now, who’s truly the joy of life for my husband and me.
Because of rehab, I have something you are watching right now. Rehabilitation gave me the groundwork for rebuilding my ability to speak publicly. It was in rehab that I learned that public speaking was the only job skill I still had.
When I first spoke, I didn’t know what I was saying unless I was reading it. Now, I can look at my audience.
I was told repeatedly that I would never get better after two years. And yet, except for the vision training, all of my other rehab and all the gifts that came from rehabilitation came after two years. Because of rehab, I’ve witnessed my brain’s ability to change, restructure, and re-wire. This is called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is incredibly powerful.
Without rehabilitation, I don’t know where you’d find me, but possibly I would be in some gutter. The phrase “There by the grace of God go I” means a lot to me.
As a result of rehab, I’m a wife, I’m a mom, my life is meaningful and productive, I’m giving this speech, and I know all about neuroplasticity.
I have a PhD but I’m not a researcher now. Honestly, that’s a little hard for me as I sit here on this panel today with other PhDs and MDs. I will always wonder where I’d be if I had gotten to rehab earlier.
But I can tell you that rehab dramatically improved my life. It changed my life for the better, unequivocally and uncategorically. Notice that I’m able to use the big words now. Rehab has given me a meaningful and productive life back.
