Question:
Maybe it is the area we live in or where the physicians were trained; I don't know. In my 7 months in rehab I never heard any of us referred to as "moderate"; you were either mild or severe !@#@ I was classified as mild, but at 3 months post-injury I couldn't tell you who the president was, how to cook, type, turn my computer on let alone use a program, where to put my dishes and (my favorite!) how to do the laundry without turning the jockey shorts ppink!!! My understanding is that these terms do not describe the effects or disabilities of the TBI, but whether it was a closed or open head trauma. Help???

Answer: I am the husband of a brain injury survivor. In February she suffered an open-head injury in an auto accident. She had leaves, twigs, dirt and other debris imbeded in her brain which was severely lacerated. The paramedics who came to take her to the hospital said they had never seen a more severely injured brain other than from a gunshot. No one thought she would live, but she did. She spent three and a half weeks in intensive care in what I assumed was a coma, but the doctors kept saying she wasn't in coma she was just unconscious. After three and a half weeks she revived and began talking immediately, even though the injury was supposedly right in the area that controls speech. She was moved to a private room and after a week sent to a nursing home for PT, ST and OT. She was released after a month and returned home. Therapy continued for about another month then she was pronounced 'cured'. After twelve years she has to let people know that she has had a brain injury (to explain why her speech is a little slow and sometimes slightly confused and why her right eye doesn't really work with her left at times and why she has some slight balance problems), because you can't look at her and tell. That is a long way around what I am trying to say, which is, she was classified as severe, I think correctly. But I know many survivors of "mild" injuries who have many more difficulties, seizures, speech, physical and others. As a result I have come to the conclusion that a mild brain injury is one that happens to someone else (sort of like "minor surgery"). I am not familiar with the 'GCS' scale, But I am sure it is very valuable in determining a patient's needs at any particular time. I have a sense from what some of the survivors have said in this list that the numbers change over time. That sure squares with my observations after working with hundreds of people with brain injury through support groups and the Brain Injury Assn of Georgia. It would appear that, while there is no such thing as a cure for brain injury but there is always healing and that healing starts from the moment the injury occurs and lasts the rest of the person's life. It is not always as evident to the person with the injury as it is to others, but I believe that it is always there. Good news!! You folks with injury, in the words of Yogi Berra, "It ain't over 'til its over."