Good Monday.
Many times I asked myself, how I didn't know anything about brain injuries before this happened to me? By knowing I could have been more prepared on what to expect or how to cope with it. I did not know what a Traumatic Brain Injury was. I had to be self educated with the help of my wife.
So, who's fault is it, that there is lack of awareness, education, and understanding? Based on what I have seen through my new journey, I can say that a lot of this failure falls on us, the brain injury survivors. Why? Because we don't want to share our story. We just don't want to talk about it. As science is trying to do research to understand how brain injuries behave or how can it be healed, we can provide input based on our experience. I see that many things are done as trial and error. But are we really trying to speak up and inform about what work for us.
Brain injuries are chronic. Even though they don't manifest like cancer, heart problems or diabetes. We know that as survivors. But why is science now trying to classify as such. With more input from survivors this should have been done a long time ago.
I have approach brain injury survivors to ask them to share their story and I have faced the lack of desire from other in doing so. Many things will go unchanged until we speak up. We find ourselves find ourselves thinking how bad we got it but we don't do much to make a change for those coming behind us.
We have to tell our story, share our successes, failures, frustrations, happiness and how good or bad our rehab treatment is. By us raising our voice is when we will be heard. The more of us that do this the louder we are going to be, and believe me, the more changes we will bring.
My message is: it's not about us. It's about those coming behind us. We can be agents of change, to achieve it we need to speak up!!!
See you tomorrow.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®
Hi Victor,
ReplyDeleteI know a lot of Head Trauma people and it takes a few years for most of them to think about anything but POOR ME. and then the light might go on and they want to GIVE BACK.
We are all hurt on different parts of the brain and that effects different things in your life that you are able to do. Thank God that you and I didn't mess up the part that lets us express yourselves. Motivation is a BIG thing for most of us. If we could MAKE them be motivated, things would be different. But in the mean time, you and I need to do all we can.