Hello, my name is Robert.
When I was 7 I was almost killed in a mass murder - suicide
bombing. My two best friends and another boy, all 7 also, and two magnificent adults who tried desperately to save us were killed. Two ten-year-old girls were critically injured. Many lives were ruined.
I received the kind of shearing injury to the brain which blasts commonly cause. Additionally, I had several other serious injuries. I was in shock. Yet a month later I left the hospital. I wasn't allowed to go back to school for five months but I wouldn't have been allowed to go back to school if the doctors hadn't been confident I was well. I received no treatment for the TBI or the "traumatic neurosis" because there was none for the former and it was thought wise to ignore the latter.
I deteriorated throughout my teens. By the time I got to college I was functionally illiterate. For the next thirty years I was able just to hold on. I've never been able to work or get married. It isn't a happy story but the doctors' sanguineness in the year after I was injured didn't undermine me. I had the misfortune to have been injured in the wrong era. Doctors have told me that thirty years later I'd have been a relatively easy case to manage.
