Anne Forrest: Bringing Up Baby Victoria Tilney McDonough, BrainLine Page 1 of 3

Anne Forrest and baby Daniel

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By the time baby Daniel arrived, Anne Forrest — who sustained a brain injury in 1997 — “had been practicing having a baby for a long time.”

Anne Forrest doesn’t care about being a do-it-all supermom. She sees other mothers in her community rushing, juggling, stressing. “I have had to learn to respect my limitations. Having lower expectations is helpful — and freeing. I think this attitude would certainly help a lot of overwhelmed moms out there,” says Anne. How did she adopt such a laid-back attitude in these times of baby Einsteins and helicopter parents? In 1997, Anne Forrest, an internationally recognized economist with a PhD from Duke, was rear-ended by another car while driving. It was only a fender-bender, but like a switch being flipped, her whole life changed.

How can this be “mild”?

It was a lovely Saturday in June and Anne was running errands, navigating the tangles of Washington, DC traffic. Watching for her chance to merge onto the parkway, Anne craned her neck to the left. As she waited, a woman in an SUV hit her from behind. Both women got out of their cars to inspect the damage. Anne’s Acura had a small dent in the back, nothing monumental. After a police officer took an accident report, Anne drove on. She felt a bit shaken, but she looked fine.

In the next few days, she felt confused. She couldn’t follow what her boss was saying. She’d start dialing a phone number only to forget it halfway through. She felt cold, nauseated, and was experiencing the worst headaches she’d ever had. When she went to see her doctor, he told her she had whiplash. Two weeks after the fender-bender, while driving, Anne lost feeling in her right foot and right arm. That’s when she really started to get scared. She went to a neurologist who diagnosed her with a mild traumatic brain injury. It seemed that when Anne was rear-ended, her head was thrust front to back and side to side, shearing — or tearing — some of the millions of axons in the brain.

Her neurologist assured her that most people with a mild TBI were fine after about six months. But Anne, 39, was not fine. The six-month mark did not bring any reprieve. The once meticulous economist found she could no longer balance her checkbook or make a simple sandwich. Her headaches were worsening, her balance was off, she wore the same clothes day after day because it was too hard to figure out an outfit that matched. She’d sit on her bed and cry. Anne went on short-term disability.

Anne had test after test. All of them came back clean. Doctors kept telling her she looked good and that her issues — like short-term memory loss and her inability to retain anything she read — would pass. She needed to be more positive, to try to move on. Anne was not self-aware enough to notice her own deficits or to explain them more fully to her doctors. She started to think maybe it was psychological.

Life goals

After more than eight years of piecemeal and uncoordinated rehabilitation, Anne was finally at a place of understanding in herself where she could look at the bigger picture of her life and where she wanted it to go. Since rehabilitation after a brain injury is slow and cumulative, those years of mismatched therapies, ironically — plus her tenacity to get better — helped Anne build the necessary foundation for her recovery. But what finally helped her fit together some final, large pieces of the puzzle was the help of a case manager from Brain Injury Services and cognitive therapy at INOVA Fair Oaks. Anne’s case manager and cognitive therapists helped her find strategies and develop skills. She kept lists and records of everything, and she planned scrupulously for each day. She learned how much energy she could expend or stimulation she could bear before she “expired.” One or two errands might be doable, three or four would leave her exhausted and buried under the covers in a dark bedroom for days. But most importantly, for Anne, the rehabilitation focused on life goals. Her goal was to have a family.

“Since my injury, I’d had a lot of time to think about my life and where it was going,” says Anne. “I had to look long and hard at what I really wanted now … now that I am a different person.” Because of the deficits from her TBI, Anne came to accept that she would probably never return to economics. That acceptance was not easy or quick; it was a real loss of self. “I felt so isolated after my TBI,” she says. “I had gone to countless doctors and specialists and no one could tell me what was wrong or how to fix it. I had no job, no profession. I was a wife, but I wasn’t a mom. I wasn’t like other people. Who was I?”

Anne and her longtime boyfriend, Michael, had married in 2001. Thanks to hard work on her balance in physical therapy, she was able to dance on her wedding day. The couple had been trying to adopt a baby for a long time — a little girl from Guatemala with whom they had visited on several occasions during a two-year period — but that effort fell through. In April 2009, Daniel, 4 months at the time of adoption, came into their lives.

The wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round

“I had been practicing having a baby for years, it seemed,” Anne laughs. In cognitive rehab, therapists taught her the skills she would need to be a good mother. She learned to plan ahead — from making lists and reminders for what would need to go in the diaper bag to keeping schedules for a baby’s mealtimes, naps, appointments, and possible medications.

Written by Victoria Tilney McDonough, 2011, BrainLine.

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