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I Wanted My Brain Back Sherri Dalphonse, Washingtonian Magazine (page 3 of 6) Page 3 of 6

The distortion made reading and tasks like going to a grocery store—with its bright lights and busy shelves—overwhelming. “I’d open the door to Best Buy, and she’d freeze,” says Michael. He would have to lead her out.

The driver who hit Anne had the minimum insurance then required in DC, $25,000. The insurer offered to pay Anne’s bills, but friends suggested she hire a lawyer before agreeing to anything.

Ron Simon, Anne’s attorney, worried that $25,000 wouldn’t be enough if Anne couldn’t work again. He read Anne’s policy and found she’d had coverage for underinsured drivers. But her insurance company refused to pay.

“Their argument was ‘How could you have this much damage if your car wasn’t wrecked?’ ” says Simon. “It’s not apparent she’s injured. They tried to label her a faker.”

Anne lost the case. Even her attorney admits that he didn’t see Anne’s deficits at first, but they became apparent the more time he spent with her.

“You would give her something simple to do—‘Let’s get your medical bills together’— and she couldn’t do it,” he says. “She couldn’t remember what to do from a meeting unless I wrote it out for her.”

Two Years: Some Answers

A friend’s father mentioned hearing a lecture by a New York neuropsychologist, Thomas Kay, an expert on mild brain injury. Anne made an appointment. Kay told her she needed cognitive therapy to teach her her deficits and how to compensate.

Anne called the contact Kay had given her, and in April 1999, she visited a neuropsychologist at National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington.

The neuropsychologist said that Anne was doing too well for rehab. She suggested that maybe Anne wasn’t better because she didn’t want to get well. Anne was confused— it took such effort to process what the doctor was saying—that only later, when telling Kathy about the appointment, did she get upset.

The neuropsychologist did tell Anne that she needed to rest more. Anne’s internist at the time had told her the opposite, to “push through” fatigue.

“If you sprain your brain, one of the key things to do is rest it,” O’Shanick says. “When you have axonal injury, your brain fatigues easily—that’s why you see headache, dizziness, irritability.”

Anne had been trying to resume a normal life but was exhausted. Some days all she had energy for was getting dressed and eating breakfast before she wanted to go back to bed. If she pushed too much, Michael says, she’d hit a wall and become nonresponsive. Once Anne began to take three naps a day, frustrating days were less frequent.

Clues of Hope: Crossword Puzzles and Movies

Anne passed the two-year anniversary of her accident, painfully aware of what doctors believed: Any recovery would occur in the first two years. She fell back on optimism to get through.

Needing something to do every day, something that felt like an accomplishment, she had started doing crossword puzzles.

She canceled delivery of the Washington Post, forcing her out of the house to buy the paper. It became a game: Could she remember her wallet? She often had to turn back for money.

Anne hadn’t done crosswords, so it didn’t frustrate her when, at first, she might get just five words. She and Kathy began to do puzzles together each day over the phone. Crosswords forced Anne to scan her memory—the words were there; she just needed prompts. The puzzles got easier. Without knowing it, Anne was doing cognitive therapy.

“Part of therapy is retraining the brain,” says Melanie Reynolds, Anne’s former speech-language pathologist at Inova Mount Vernon Hospital. Broken connections can regenerate, and the brain can detour around damage and form new paths.

The puzzles proved to Anne that she could get better.

“A brain-injury counselor told me that he thought the reason why people don’t recover after two years was because they get tired of fighting the medical and disability systems and give up,” Anne says. “One of the things I think about is, what if I had given up?”

Anne loved movies. But after her accident, when she and Michael went to see The Horse Whisperer, Anne couldn’t watch—the screen looked like it was moving. She listened to the movie with her face buried in Michael’s shoulder.

If Anne could learn crosswords, could she retrain herself to watch movies?

To start, Michael wrote down the steps for turning on the VCR so she could watch videos at home. Anne would get hung up on a plot if a detail was missing; Michael would explain when the piece eluding her hadn’t been revealed yet. She relearned letting a story unfold.

She didn’t understand Magnolia—but a lot of people didn’t. She realized she couldn’t blame everything on head injury.

One film she understood all too well was Memento, about a man with severe memory damage. She and Michael walked out after 15 minutes: “It was too much of my life.”

A New Brain

Michael had moved to Austin for a job, and the relationship began to strain. He was frustrated that Anne’s recovery was going nowhere.

Anne was just as frustrated. Although the Environmental Law Institute had hired someone to do her job, she felt the door was open if she could return. In Washington, where “what do you do?” comes after “nice to meet you,” she could no longer define herself. When she visited Texas, people didn’t ask what she did for a living.

So with help—Michael got her packed; a friend helped her set up an apartment— Anne decided to move to Austin, at least for a while. There she’d be not only with Michael but with childhood friends.

“That was comforting because they knew it wasn’t me. Part of the problem being in a big city is you have people who don’t know you say, ‘There’s nothing wrong,’ ” Anne says.

In Austin, Anne eventually attended a support group. At meetings, she looked around at the quadriplegics and others with severe head injuries and felt fortunate but not always supported. So she formed her own support group, something she had watched her mother, Roz, do as Roz was dying of cancer.

From the Washingtonian Magazine. Reprinted with permission. Third-party use restricted. www.washingtonian.com.

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