Those who know me know that I am a passionate college football fan. I’ve been cheering my Michigan Wolverines since 1974 and, throughout my whole life, those Autumn Saturdays have been very very dear to me. Having said that, a lot has changed in all these years. Back in the 70s, most of the games were not televised. For most college fans, we were lucky to see our favorite teams play a couple times a year. Over all these decades, the college game has changed a TON! More channels were added, more TV deals were struck, and more bowl games emerged. They went from voting on a National Champion to i ..read more

In a fleeting moment, a day, a season…You hear a particular song, realize an old lyric you had been singing wrong all this time, catch your breath from an incredible line in a movie, or get caught up in a wonderful novel… Someone says something or writes something in a card and, often, they don’t realize what kind of goodness they’ve done. The kind of word magic that pricks an ear, turns a head, shoots straight to the heart. I saw this quote in a series last night and immediately thought of you. Of us: Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack ..read more

For most of us, the healing and recovering from our injuries are something akin to slogs swimming in pools of honey. After those initial weeks when we might enjoy rapid healing of some of our symptoms, we continue to watch and watch and watch for more but, after that first rally, we can barely tell anything is better. Nothing seems to move or change. Sometimes, we don’t realize that, even when the injury didn’t improve, we did. Even when the damage didn’t heal, we could. For many years, I never missed a month in writing a blog entry. Some months there were two but there was always one. Always ..read more

After brain injury, our brains are damaged. That might come across as obvious but it is, surprisingly, an oft-missed ingredient to our fabulous successful recovery cakes! Successful recovery is not so much about healing. Healing comes and it doesn’t. Most of us heal to some extent and we fail to heal fully in other ways. What’s left are the challenging, bothersome, prickly stumbles of our everyday. I did the best recovery work when I started taking the injury apart and attacking smaller parts of the elusive recovery. Brain injury isn’t something that heals as one whole. It is, more often, the ..read more

Most of us, especially early on, think of our brain injuries as one thing. We look at it like it has some kind of answer that will make perfect sense. There’s dirt all over the floor so you buy a vacuum. One of your tires has blown out so you put on the spare. There’s nothing in the fridge so you go to the grocery store or you order carry-out or zip through the drive-through window. Logical, simple, sane solutions. Unfortunately, the longer it takes to recover, the more we realize that brain injuries are more like maddening Christmas lights. One light fails and everything goes. You try to find ..read more

As the anniversary of my brain injury fades and fogs through the years, now 27, I find that the effects of TBI blur and meld and stew together with the effects of age. So many things seem slower, saggier, and breezing away. “Turning back the clock” requires, I’m finding, the realization that the clock is faltering, wobbling, failing. I think it happens to people at different ages and stages but I’m starting to understand yoga classes, Zumba, and all those people walking at the mall. Where, long ago, I was obsessed with deciphering the minutia of my injury and its effects, I find that I am at p ..read more

For most of us with TBI, distractions are so derailing in terms of our efficiency and ability to execute daily to-dos that keep us “in the game” with our people and our lives. For me, spontenaity and last-minute changes and plans that go haywire often throw me into a tailspin and it’s hard to recover. While distractions can derail and topple and zig-zag us off our carefully-planned game, they can also be a blessed gift of relief from all the effort it takes to function in our TBI worlds. Right now, most of us are distracted by Christmas doings and, for most of us in the United States, we are d ..read more

Even for the salty veteran, pulling off the full Thanksgiving Day feast takes planning and patience, good rest and a sense of humor. Over the many decades of Thanksgiving meals, there have been countless funny (and not so funny) stories of people trying to pull off the GREAT THANKSGIVING DAY FEAST for their families and friends. Fire Departments in every city, town and village ready for those of us who think that deep-frying our turkeys or grilling them or “trying something new” with the smoker out back will be such a great idea. On Thanksgiving Day, there will be those who cook the turkey wit ..read more

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