Hello everyone. My name is Brian and I am from Dallas Tx. Three years ago(2021) I was in a terrible car accident while heading to a charity gala. A commercial van pulled out in front of me and my life changed forever! The impact forced my head forward and backward damaging the frontal lobe and back of my brain. Witnesses pulled over and helped get me out of the car. One lady with a Tesla caught the whole thing on her dash cam. Even after reviewing the video thousands of times, I still can’t recall what all took place. I suffered what I would later come to know as Diffuse Axonal Injury. A Traumatic Brain Injury in which 90% of people who suffer this injury go into a comma and don’t wake up.
After an emergency room visit and many test, I was diagnosed with the TBI. I embarked on a journey of extensive rehab, seeing doctors up to nine times a week for months. Lost of coordination, cognitive skills, comprehension and memory loss combined with migraines, seeing spots and much more, still to this day affect my daily life. I couldn’t remember conversations and visits from friends even the day prior. Many of them would later tell me I often seemed incoherent, unable to complete thought processes, sentences conversations and more.
Walking was unstable to say the least and coordination was virtually non- existent. A few instances in particular from my medial records are the inability to walk and bounce a ball, the inability to do simple math like 8+7, and memory and speech impairments. Life was truly a struggle daily just to exist, not to mention manage.
I still am hindered by coordination, balance, memory issues, suffer migraines and struggle with processing in real-time conversations. Though I look fine on the outside, many times my head and brain feel like it’s in a nuclear melt down. It’s truly an adventure each day to see how my TBI will manifest throughout the day. It makes it hard to plan future events, enjoy my family and friends, maintain work, and many other things people taken for granted. All while others look at you and say, “You should be better by now...”, or one of my favorites, “well I suffer from memory loss...”. Until you’ve experienced the shear fear of going somewhere and once arriving, having no idea why you’re there, no clue of how to get home, and having to rely on a post-it note to give you an address and phone number to call incase of emergency, you’ll never understand the complete fullness of brain injuries.
Daily migraines, inconsistent sleep, speech, coordination, and memory loss greatly affect my day to day life, and continue to diminish the trajectory of my goals. Even though I still struggle, often in silence and alone, you want to know why I keep going? What the auto accident didn’t take from me was the faith in Christ instilled by my Mother at an early age. No matter what I go through, no matter how I struggle, His Word reminds me He will always be with me, never leaving nor forsaking me and to work all things out to my good. That is my driving catalyst, in this and in all I do!
