A new book highlights the experiences of 12 people whose lives were uprooted by traumatic brain injuries.
Filmmakers often treat knocks on the brain as slapstick comedy, from Buster Keaton's pratfalls to the Three Stooges' choreographed head blows and, more recently, Ben Stiller's parody of Simple Jack, the "retard," in "Tropic Thunder." Even kindly Charles Dodgson treats the Hatter at the Mad Tea Party of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," shifted in his consciousness because of mercury-induced lunacy, as a figure of fun. But one of that book's disturbing insights is that, for a Hatter with dementia, time itself stands still.
In the real world, there's no humor in insults to the brain. Chronic pain is a common complication, and tragedy often results from the suspension of time and consciousness in our skulls. Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, knows no rules, follows no timetable, recognizes no age or cultural boundaries, whether the victim is Muhammad Ali, Stephen King or someone you've never heard of. A brain injury strikes someone in America every 20 seconds, some million and a half times a year, from falls, car crashes or assaults, and at least 25,000 U.S. military members in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered such injuries from explosions, shrapnel and other causes.
Whether a brain injury happens in a moment that goes unnoticed -- perhaps an unfelt mosquito that vectors a neuropathogen into someone's bloodstream -- or is part of a catastrophic loss of consciousness, it challenges a soul from that moment forward, a life changed, perhaps into decades of psychosis and suffering that prove Gerard Manley Hopkins' insight, "No worst, there is none."
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