Head injuries: what’s next?

I deal with a lot of head and brain injuries at work. They are many-faceted creatures. They intrigue and terrify mt all at once. The intrigue lies in the fact that one never knows exactly what to expect of a head injury; the terror lies in the fact that I see myself as one firm whack to the noggin away from being the drooling vegetative empty shell of a human being in the bed.

Lately I have been wondering, what do people do after a severe head injury? I mean, the patient usually go to rehab and sort of try to work back into reality, but what do the families do?

Recently we had a case involving a newlywed couple. They had been married for all of three months when they went out one evening to a club. On returning home the wife realized she had forgotten something at the club and the husband gallantly dashed off up the road to get it on his motorbike.

When he pulled out of the club, he lost control and was thrown from his bike. He whacked his noggin pretty good and got some severe lung damage in the process. He was in the ICU in a drug-induced coma for almost eight weeks before he was well enough for us to wake him.

When he awoke he was…different. The anoxia, the drugs, the trauma to his brain; all of them had combined to alter him in significant ways. He lost a lot of emotional control and a fair bit of cognitive function. He became a frightened child in a thirty-year-old body. In short, he was no longer the same man he had been. He could no longer joke around with people, understand complex things, solve complex problems. He could no longer control or damp his emotions when he needed to.

He was a very different man from the man that his wife married. How far does “better or worse” go? How do you react when someone you love is no longer the same in such significant ways?

Eventually the patient moved back to his homestate with his parents. I don’t know and I probably never will know what became of his wife. But I wonder…what do youdo?If my wife was involved in a serious head trauma and was totally different when she awoke, what would I do? Would I be strong enough to stick it out through the rehab and the misery and the change?

Somehow I doubt it.