09/22/2024
Well September 21 has come and gone and it was sobering, as it has been since 2005. Nineteen years ago was the car crash on Route 495 in Massachusetts with my middle son Andrew, hit from behind by a maniac out joyriding in his brother’s gold Mercedes. Both cars were totaled. Andrew broke three vertebrae in his back and lives with pain. I sustained a so-called mild TBI (traumatic brain injury) that took a few days to unravel and manifest with some intensity.
I’m not philosophical enough or enlightened enough to thank God for what happened. That might be in the cards for me yet, the way my friend and comrade Pamela Leigh Richards with the titanium plate in her skull refers to “the gift of my fall.” She’s been a real inspiration, and I wonder if I’ll ever get that far along, to be able to say “the gift of the crash.”
Here is SOME good that has come of it, but I’m not ready to stack up the pros next to the cons in comparison and say it was worth it quite yet, the “collateral damage” being what it was:
==> The 2012 book (pictured here), 5 years in the writing, with my co-author Laura Ricard, PhD, featuring the Brain Injury Recovery Team Model
==> TBI Strategies
==> The BISON Foundation (exciting things happening, designing a new hospital with a specialty in Neurotrauma Rehabilitation)
The friends I made and included in my book who helped me immeasurably include:
Elizabeth Thyng Montanaro
Michelle Domey
Marrilee Wilson
Thomas Lavoie (and Arthur Friedman!)
The late Matt Sweeney
Nicole M. Godaire and Marilyn P. Spivack (BIA of Massachusetts)
Diana Meloni (then wife of case study Gregg Meloni)
Ross Zafonte DO at Spaulding Rehabilitation
(Other members of my recovery team are not on FB)
(If I’ve forgotten someone … sorry! The list of friends since the book came out is a lot longer.)
