The Woodruff effect
Shortly after my stroke (October 26, 1993), my wife Linda got on a Traumatic-Brain-Injury (TBI) e-mail list, to have some idea what to expect.
Traumatic in that the part of the brain denied blood by the clot/aneurysm/whatever dies and can never be regenerated, since brain and nerve tissue can’t regenerate.
As in my case, quite a bit of living brain tissue may still be left, so what’s left takes over for what was lost, and that is recovery.
If what was lost was extensive, recovery may not be possible.
And what takes over may not be what was designed for that function. E.g. my speech is controlled by an area of brain tissue that ain’t the original speech-center, which was apparently destroyed.
As such my speech is somewhat compromised.
TBI e-mails became somewhat irrelevant as time passed, but Linda still gets them.
Lately all the talk is of the so-called miraculous recovery of ABC-News reporter Bob Woodruff, who suffered a severe brain-injury when his military-vehicle was struck by a roadside-bomb in Iraq.
Some of Woodruff’s brain was lost, such that he had to recover from a traumatic brain injury.
So now Woodruff is back, having recovered perhaps 90-95% of his brain-function — i.e. what remained has taken over for what was lost.
So the non-brain-injured people look at Woodruff and decide TBI is insignificant.
This is the same misconception that followed J-Mac. Autism is insignificant — look at J-Mac.
Ex-KYOOZE me, but in the years following my stroke, I came across many TBIs.
Some guy had been hit over the head with a cast-iron pipe; and another guy had crashed his Kawasaki 1000 into a concrete bridge-abutment.
A church pastor tipping over a cherry-picker changing light-bulbs in his sanctuary and crashing into the pews below suffers a traumatic brain injury.
There was a kid in my brain-injury group at Rochester-Rehab with one complete hemisphere of his brain removed to counteract seizures — and it didn’t work.
Another guy had had four strokes.
Another kid was so messed up I had to rebutton his shirt — he had buttons in the wrong holes.
Once my TBI-group decided to hold a pizza-party. The guy who ordered was me — still royally messed-up speech wise, but no one else could do it. (The counselors perceived my success as a triumph — and it was.)
The universal outcome of TBI is brain-fatigue — what’s perceived as slackerdom by the non-brain-injured.
“He has an IQ of 137. He’s just being lazy.”
I get a similar assessment from West Bridgewater, on top of a fevered-agenda to badmouth everything I do or say (ever since I had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to dispute his erroneous recollection of where we got off I-80).
I had an up-close-and-personal education in TBI-induced brain-fatigue about two years after my stroke. A guy named Mike was to photograph people marching in a Rochester-Rehab sponsored fund-raiser inside a shopping-mall. Linda and I decided to participate.
Mike made it about one-fifth of the way. He had Multiple-Sclerosis.
My first reaction was to think he was just being lazy. But then I realized he was hitting the same wall I often encountered; that of puking out mentally.
Like me, he had fagged out. —Only sooner. (Multiple-Sclerosis is a brain-disease that can turn you into a vegetable; Mike was not that far along.)
My brother also apparently thinks anyone not as currently-abled as him deserves the ice-flow; that the “brain-injured” and “disabled” are freeloaders. Compassion and understanding don’t seem to be among his virtues.
So I could do the whole bit: dump my MAC for a PC, change to an Ariens snowblower, trade my LHMB for a GeezerGlide, start using Scope mouthwash, toss my Asics running-shoes for New Balance, switch toothpastes, trade my so-called soccer-mom minivan for a Chevrolet cheeruck with a 5mpg SmallBlock — maybe even become a tub-thumping Baptist and a REPUBLICAN (although I think a frontal lobotomy for the last two would be required) — but I still would be brain-injured; i.e. still a lazy slacker.
Plus I don’t think no matter what I did would make much difference. The zealots need somebody to badmouth; so there would probably be continuing bellyaching about something — like the church I was going to wasn’t right, or my politics were suspect. Or, for example, I hadn’t bought the right brand PC, my Ariens snowblower wasn’t the kerreck model, it wasn’t the right kind of toothpaste, my New Balance swim-fins weren’t the right model, and my GeezerGlide wasn’t a Road King.
I hate to be a pest, but so many times I’ve seen zealots badmouthing someone only to elevate themselves.
Traumatic in that the part of the brain denied blood by the clot/aneurysm/whatever dies and can never be regenerated, since brain and nerve tissue can’t regenerate.
As in my case, quite a bit of living brain tissue may still be left, so what’s left takes over for what was lost, and that is recovery.
If what was lost was extensive, recovery may not be possible.
And what takes over may not be what was designed for that function. E.g. my speech is controlled by an area of brain tissue that ain’t the original speech-center, which was apparently destroyed.
As such my speech is somewhat compromised.
TBI e-mails became somewhat irrelevant as time passed, but Linda still gets them.
Lately all the talk is of the so-called miraculous recovery of ABC-News reporter Bob Woodruff, who suffered a severe brain-injury when his military-vehicle was struck by a roadside-bomb in Iraq.
Some of Woodruff’s brain was lost, such that he had to recover from a traumatic brain injury.
So now Woodruff is back, having recovered perhaps 90-95% of his brain-function — i.e. what remained has taken over for what was lost.
So the non-brain-injured people look at Woodruff and decide TBI is insignificant.
This is the same misconception that followed J-Mac. Autism is insignificant — look at J-Mac.
Ex-KYOOZE me, but in the years following my stroke, I came across many TBIs.
Some guy had been hit over the head with a cast-iron pipe; and another guy had crashed his Kawasaki 1000 into a concrete bridge-abutment.
A church pastor tipping over a cherry-picker changing light-bulbs in his sanctuary and crashing into the pews below suffers a traumatic brain injury.
There was a kid in my brain-injury group at Rochester-Rehab with one complete hemisphere of his brain removed to counteract seizures — and it didn’t work.
Another guy had had four strokes.
Another kid was so messed up I had to rebutton his shirt — he had buttons in the wrong holes.
Once my TBI-group decided to hold a pizza-party. The guy who ordered was me — still royally messed-up speech wise, but no one else could do it. (The counselors perceived my success as a triumph — and it was.)
The universal outcome of TBI is brain-fatigue — what’s perceived as slackerdom by the non-brain-injured.
“He has an IQ of 137. He’s just being lazy.”
I get a similar assessment from West Bridgewater, on top of a fevered-agenda to badmouth everything I do or say (ever since I had the awful temerity and unmitigated gall and horrific audacity to dispute his erroneous recollection of where we got off I-80).
I had an up-close-and-personal education in TBI-induced brain-fatigue about two years after my stroke. A guy named Mike was to photograph people marching in a Rochester-Rehab sponsored fund-raiser inside a shopping-mall. Linda and I decided to participate.
Mike made it about one-fifth of the way. He had Multiple-Sclerosis.
My first reaction was to think he was just being lazy. But then I realized he was hitting the same wall I often encountered; that of puking out mentally.
Like me, he had fagged out. —Only sooner. (Multiple-Sclerosis is a brain-disease that can turn you into a vegetable; Mike was not that far along.)
My brother also apparently thinks anyone not as currently-abled as him deserves the ice-flow; that the “brain-injured” and “disabled” are freeloaders. Compassion and understanding don’t seem to be among his virtues.
So I could do the whole bit: dump my MAC for a PC, change to an Ariens snowblower, trade my LHMB for a GeezerGlide, start using Scope mouthwash, toss my Asics running-shoes for New Balance, switch toothpastes, trade my so-called soccer-mom minivan for a Chevrolet cheeruck with a 5mpg SmallBlock — maybe even become a tub-thumping Baptist and a REPUBLICAN (although I think a frontal lobotomy for the last two would be required) — but I still would be brain-injured; i.e. still a lazy slacker.
Plus I don’t think no matter what I did would make much difference. The zealots need somebody to badmouth; so there would probably be continuing bellyaching about something — like the church I was going to wasn’t right, or my politics were suspect. Or, for example, I hadn’t bought the right brand PC, my Ariens snowblower wasn’t the kerreck model, it wasn’t the right kind of toothpaste, my New Balance swim-fins weren’t the right model, and my GeezerGlide wasn’t a Road King.
I hate to be a pest, but so many times I’ve seen zealots badmouthing someone only to elevate themselves.
posted by BobbaLew at 3:28 PM
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