Traumatic Brain Injury Video: Michael's Story

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Transcript

My name is Debbie. My son was involved in a really bad car wreck about 4 and a half years ago. It was on a Sunday, it was in the evening in October, about 7 pm. He was in the backseat of a car that was making a left-hand turn and they made a left-hand turn in front of two cars that were street racing at 120 miles per hour. They were street racing with their headlights off. So they didn’t see them and they made the turn right in front of them. My son, Michael, was in the backseat. The car was just demolished. It was a little Geo Storm and they were hit by a Barracuda going 80 miles per hour. The car was almost cut in two. They had to use the Jaws of Life to get my son out of the backseat. 

He was alive, amazingly. It was a miracle that he was alive and he was moving around and attempting to talk. His vital signs were stable the entire time when they got him in the ambulance and they immediately rushed him to the hospital and he always had a good blood pressure and a good oxygenation and a good heart rate so they got him to the hospital in good shape. 

His first 24 hours in the hospital he was immediately taken into surgery. He had a severe brain injury plus both of his legs were broken, the large bones, the femurs in the thighs, both of those big bones were broken. Also his lower leg on the left was broken as well. His pelvis was broken. Luckily, he did not have a spinal cord injury; however, he had a severe brain injury. 

The first few days following the injury he was in surgery, he was brought into surgery that night and he was in surgery until about 3 am and we had a lot of support. The hospital staff at that time was very supportive and it was touch and go. We almost lost him in the first 24 hours. He almost died. That was very hard. 

After the first 24 hours he stabilized out and the first couple of days he became more and more stable. It took him about three days to really get stable and at that point I had not even really addressed to myself the fact that he had a head injury. Once he was stable and we realized he was going to live then at that point I started assessing, okay how bad is this head injury, how bad is it. 

Michael was in the intensive care unit for five weeks. After three weeks we did manage to get all of his sedation turned down to almost nothing. We just kept some pain medication on and turned off the sedation, turned off the medication that was keeping him from moving and he was opening his eyes, but it was a blank stare. He was not focusing on anything. He was not responding to sounds. He was not able to do anything that you asked him to do, like raise his thumbs or wiggle his toes. Not able to follow any kind of commands at all. So at that point we realized that it was going to be a long-term recovery. 

After five weeks in the ICU, Michael was not moving and participating and awake enough to be transferred to rehab, so in the interim he was transferred to a long-term, acute-care facility, which is very similar to a nursing home; however, there was a lot of emphasis on physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, five or six days a week, while he was in the long-term acute-care facility. That was a very difficult time when he was there because we never knew if he was going to get any better. We didn’t know if this was going to be his last stop. It took so long for him to really pull the rest of the way out of his coma to where he was able to actually focus on your face, to where he was actually able to turn his head to a sound, to where he was actually able to make any kind of attempt to do what you asked him to do with his hands or his arms or his legs. It took a very long time. 

When he actually started to speak it just dominoed, he said maybe ten words the first day and by the end of the first week of speaking he was saying more and more words every day and that was when he really started to make a turnaround. When he was actually able to start speaking. 

When Michael was moved to the rehabilitation center he was moved about three weeks after he started talking, he just, everything became improved after that point. He was really able to participate in his own therapy. When he was moved to Sharp Rehab we were just overjoyed. We were so thrilled. 

At the time that he was brought into the hospital he had such spasticity in his hands. His hands were curled up on his chest and his legs were very stiff. He wasn’t moving his legs at all. He had splints that we had on his hands. He had splints on his elbows because his elbows wouldn’t stay straight. We had splints on his legs. What we expected during his rehab stay was that we were going to be able to work his arms back out to straight. That we were going to get movement out of his legs. That we were going to get his fingers uncurled. That he was going to be able to use his hands. I expected that, my big hopes at that time were that he would be able to brush his own teeth, perhaps feed himself, help get himself dressed, learn to sit up by himself without falling over, learn to use the wheelchair himself so that he didn’t always have to be pushed. For us at that time those were big goals, big pie-in-the-sky dream goals that we were hoping with all our heart he would be able to advance that far. 

The staff was great. As soon as we walked in the door the first day of rehab they made us feel like a welcome part of the team. They always included us in all the therapies and we of course insisted on being present for as much of Michael’s day as we could possibly be. We were well aware of what the therapists were trying to do with him so that we could, when we would go back to the room with him, we could carry on whatever they were working on with him and we could carry it on during the rest of the day. Just being with him and talking with him and helping him to learn how to make sounds again. We had no idea what it meant to learn how to talk again. And it is just like a baby when they are learning how to make sounds and we just had a lot of fun with it. When he was having a hard time saying words we would just play with it and have him make animal sounds. And he would get very frustrated because he wanted to talk and he would start to talk and then he would get all frustrated so he would just scream and we would play with that and so when we were making animal sounds one of them was a sheep sound and he would go "baa" and then start screaming and we made a big joke out of it. It was "that’s not a sheep, those are sheep on fire" and he would laugh. 

The rehabilitation process, it has been a long journey. It has been an incredible journey. We had no idea that he would be in the rehab for four and a half months. As an inpatient, that did seem long. That was unexpected. My ex-husband and I, what we learned about caregiving, I already had a lot of experience caregiving because I am a nurse, he learned an incredible amount. We learned how also to ask questions if we didn’t understand something. The staff made us feel very comfortable asking questions. If there was something we didn’t understand we felt very welcome to ask, ask away. If you don’t understand something we will explain it until you do understand. 

Michael’s dad used to always go and look up in the Physicians Desk Reference to see what medications is Michael on, he wanted to understand the medications and ask questions about the medications. And the nurses were always glad to explain, you know, whatever we wanted an explanation for and they were always very pleased to have us helping with Michael’s therapy and at the bedside. 

You know what surprised me at the rehab was how my son and my family were like adopted as members of another family. That surprised me, how we were completely included in everything to do with Michael. We were included as a team member. And that surprised me. 

The changes that Michael went through during his four months at rehab, his speech improved dramatically. He became just from speaking a few words to being completely conversational. Gosh, he got to the rehab in March, within two months he was conversational with his speech and that was amazing. The progress that he made. He was able to start using his hands. He was able to start participating in some of his own self care. He was learning how to get his shirt on and off. It was a very long, awkward procedure for him. It might take him 45 minutes to find his way out of his shirt. He was doing it though. Feeding himself was a big one. Learning how to do some of his own toileting. Learning how to do some of his own bathing. We would give him a wet, soapy washcloth, and he would soap himself up and then give him a rinse washcloth and he would rinse himself off. Give himself his own sponge bath and then we would get the spots that he couldn’t reach. 

When it was time for Michael to go home it was scary. It was scary. Even myself being a health care provider, I was nervous to be responsible for his care and to not have the support of all the staff right down the hall. You know on the call button we could get somebody in the room to help us right away. It was, it was trying. However, we knew that we could call the staff at the hospital 24/7. We had the number at the nurses' station and we would call if we had any questions or any concerns or needed help with something. We would just pick up the phone and call the nurses' station and get a nurse on the phone and have them talk to us. You know, and answer whatever questions we had. So we still felt very connected and very supported. 

Caregiver fatigue definitely happens. Sometimes you are the only one that is taking care of your injured person and it can be overwhelming because it is like having a newborn at home. It is around-the-clock care. It doesn’t stop. He would wake up several times in the middle of the night. With his splints, he would wake up screaming because they were hurting him. It is very fatiguing. Yes, definitely caregiver burnout, caregiver fatigue. I found myself getting frustrated, having low frustration tolerance and getting irritable and with a brain injury, with my son and his brain injury, he would immediately pick up on my tension levels and he would become more tense and more irritable and scream. So it was immediately easy to see how my moods and how I was feeling was affecting him. It was very important to get a break, to get some family member to come in, even if it is only for two or three or four hours and to take a break. Get out of the house, go somewhere, take a walk on the beach, go do something for you. Where you are not on call. 'Cause there is a certain tension to always being on call every minute and you do need to get away from that, even if it is only for a couple of hours. You need to get away from that once in a while, regularly. 

Our relationships with the staff here at Sharp have just become phenomenal. When Michael was brought home several of the staff came home with him for his first homecoming. That was just incredible. His primary nurse got to cut his hospital identification bracelet off, like cutting the umbilical cord. It was just great. We felt very much like family. For when Michael was home and he had a birthday we had several staff members come over to the house for his birthday party, it was wonderful. And, of course, Michael knows everyone’s name when he comes into the hospital, because he is still coming in for outpatient rehab therapy. He knows everybody and everybody knows Michael. And we just feel like this is our second home, our home away from home. 

Michael now is, he is a phenomenal inspiration to anyone that knows his story and how far he has come. Michael now is, he is out of his wheelchair, he is using a walker. He has been using a walker for a year now and his goal this year is to get rid of the walker and advance onto canes. One cane. So by Christmas this year, that’s 10 months away, he wants to be walking with one cane. He is now in school. His high school has a program for handicapped that will help him with his education and transition into the community until he is 22. So he has another two semesters and he is learning how to use public transportation, the bus and the trolley. He is learning job skills. He is learning independence. We had a friend over last night that hadn’t seen him in about six months and she was amazed at how much he has progressed in six months. That’s the really fun part. When people haven’t seen him for a while. He continues to progress. I had always thought that with a brain injury or a spinal cord injury that progress stops after a couple of years, he is not done. He is not done.