This was in February 1990. Dr. Laws called me a few weeks after my brain scan. His loud, cheery voice exclaimed:  “Good news!”  It was not a tumor in the ear canal as he had originally thought. I had a condition known as hydrocephalus, commonly known as water on the brain. The procedure used to correct this condition, he explained, is routine. All that was required was to insert a tube, a shunt, into the meninges surrounding the brain and drain off the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) that was currently blocked and thus building up inside my head, pushing the sides of my brain against my skull. This, he explained, was what was causing the rushing sound in my ear and the headaches. So, that was that. Simple. Routine. I would be in and out of the hospital in four days, with a recovery period of two weeks. He saw no problem in my going on the internship in London for which I had just been selected, marketing voicemail equipment to Hungarian firms. I was so happy. It was all settled then. The brain surgery was to take place after my last final examination. My parents would fly to Washington from their home in Tulsa for the operation and be by my side during the two-week recovery period. And then I would leave for London.

Unfortunately, life had other plans for me.

At some point during the brain surgery, the doctor nicked a blood vessel, a recognized complication of the surgery. The bleed wasn’t detected at the point it occurred because my blood pressure was kept low during the operation. So, when the doctors closed me up and brought my blood pressure up, blood began to flow from the blood vessel.

After the brain surgery, I was transferred from the recovery room to the Neurological Concentrated Care Unit (NCCU) and it was during my stay there that the results of the hemorrhage began to manifest themselves. As the bleed progressed, it stripped the inner lining of the skull, known as the dura, away from the skull wall. The bleed then began to compress the brain, shifting the brain to the left as it enlarged. My brain began to buckle. The cortex of my brain began to cut off the flow of oxygen to my brain. By the time the nurse in charge of the NCCU noticed the signs of increased intracranial pressure (ICP) and notified the resident on call, the bleed had filled about one-quarter of the total volume of my skull, the equivalent of eighteen ounces of blood. In other words, I had just suffered a traumatic brain injury. 

As a result of this massive bleed, my brain nearly collapsed in on itself and I started to go into respiratory failure. I was twenty minutes away from death before the nurse called the resident on duty. Upon taking one look at me, the resident called a code blue. I was rushed back into surgery, where one of the surgeons performed a procedure in which he cut away part of my skull to evacuate the blood. During that operation, I somehow contracted e coli meningitis, bacteria that is almost always fatal and, if not fatal, usually results in severe brain damage, i.e. a traumatic brain injury. How I became infected with this bacterium remains a mystery, since e coli is only found in the anal region. How in the world did a bacterium found only in the anal region end up inside my brain?  How indeed?

         After five more brain surgeries, in which surgeons removed a portion of my skull to evacuate the blood clot (craniotomy), inserted a tube into my ventricles to drain the spinal fluid, thereby replacing the work of the non-functioning shunt (ventriculostomy),  reopened the shunt and clamped off the ventriculostomy, removed the shunt because I had developed signs that my ventricles were infected (ventriculitis), inserted another ventriculostomy tube in place of the shunt, and finally replaced the original tube that ran from inside my ventricles and emptied into my abdominal cavity (ventricular-peritoneal (VP) shunt), all within a one-month period, my brain finally decided enough was enough. I slid into a coma, moving in and out of a semi-vegetative state for approximately three months. I finally became fully cognizant three months later to find myself paralyzed on the left side of my body, with the IQ of a vegetable, in diapers, being fed through a tube, able to remember very little and facing the prospect of having to relearn things a baby learns in the first years of life, such as standing, walking, and toilet training.  This is, unfortunately, the long and short of the rehabilitation needed after suffering a traumatic brain injury. 

The preceding is an excerpt from my first book, Searching for the Open Door:  A Woman's Struggle for Survival after a Traumatic Brain Injury.

To read about my traumatic brain injury survival,
click here.

To purchase Searching for the Open Door: A Woman's Struggle for Survival after a Traumatic Brain Injury, click here.

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