City:  Waynesville

Brain Injury: A car wreck due to hydroplaning

Explanation of Mask: My story is crazy; not by being deranged or somehow psychotic but by being absurdly unlikely.  My life should have ended at 17; in may way, that life did. Late one-night driving home in a persistent rain, I hydroplaned into oncoming traffic.  The only other car on the road at 1:30 in the morning slammed into my passenger side.  I nearly bit my tongue off, broke the rocker bones off two of my vertebrae, collapsed a lung, broke the roof of my mouth, crushed the upper left portion  of my skull, and sustained a traumatic brain injury.

I damaged the frontal and temporal lobes of my brain.  The frontal lobe deals with you conscience and your forward planning; the temporal lobe deals with you base personality.  As a result, I regressed to the mental age of a toddler, had no sense of right and wrong, an inability to forward plan, and, on top of everything else, I had an altered personality.  I relearned to walk, was re-potty trained, relearned to talk, the whole nine yards.  I was in a comma about 3 weeks and rehab another 3 weeks.  I was largely functional by the time I came out of the comatose-ed state about 1.5 months after my accident.  When I came to, I was an 18-year old with temporary amnesia who had the mentality of a 5 or 6 year old and was a completely different person; only I didn’t know any of that. 

My mom had been told that if I came out of the coma, I would be severely mentally handicapped and in assisted living for the rest of my life.  By some miracle, that was not at all the case.  Still everything seemed grey; my world was not what it should have been, and I was not the person I knew myself to be.  I knew who I had been, and I tried to be that person as best any 5-year old could be, but it was like living in the confines of a stranger.  My taste in food, entertainment, people, everything was different; I was a new person and had to learn how to be that person. 

The written process will sound straightforward enough but it took 5 to 7 years of questions and struggles for me to really level out.  My healing as a person really began probably a year later after a discussion with my sister.  I was talking about how I had use to be, comparing myself to that now unreal standard and blaming my new personality on the injury.  My sister stopped me, looked me in the eyes and said “No.  This is you now, you are not your brain injury.  We all change, you just did it quickly.  This, who you are now, is who you are and there is nothing wrong with that.”

At 18 I was a new person. As my mother put it “you are still the same core person, but the details are different.” There were many struggles but over time I opened up to learning the new me and life didn’t stop.  I knew if I hadn’t tried or done something since my wreck, I didn’t know if I like it or not; as a result, I became open to new things and experiences.  Since my wreck; I moved to college 9 months later, had many wonderful experiences and friends, graduated summa cum laude with a BS in mechanical engineering, followed my sister to Idaho, got a position working for HP Inc., and recently bought my first house.  I am passionate about travel, adore people and stay surrounded by many friends.  I have gotten into snowboarding, taken up country swing dancing, love to hike, cook and bake every chance I get, am a huge advocate of Dave Ramsey, and recently started trying my hand at painting.

My life is beautiful.  I live near my sister, am close with my family, am a successful engineer, and am a busy body with a large friend group. Technically my life is phenomenally different than it would have been, I can’t even imagine that life; more importantly, I don’t care to.  I still struggle some with the repercussion of the accident but it’s not different than dealing with the long-term effects of any brain injury.  I have learned that my life is no more the result of my brain injury than someone’s life would be the result of the broken leg they had as a child.  The injury is part of my story, its part of who I am just like every other occurrence in my life, but it is no more defining than any part of my story.