What is an experience-based approach?
My daughter Sarah and I are Cognitive Functioning Brain Injury (CFBI) survivors with over 60 years combined experience, including traumatic brain injury (TBI), acquired brain injury (ABI), and multiple brain injuries. This experience also includes providing support for my daughter Sarah’s brain injury, helping her through the devastating symptoms, and persevering through personal and professional life challenges. Interestingly, after Sarah’s brain injury, experts have advised her to reconsider her dream goal of higher education, but she did not give up and we stayed the course, plowing through 23 years of mind-boggling challenges during formative years at school and college, until completing her Master’s and PhD in Neuropsychology.
Sarah told me recently that my help and support have been instrumental during her years of struggle and recovery. She thinks that my own brain injury experience gave me the insight and understanding to help her. So, basically, this webspace is all about experience-based mentoring and support for brain injury survivors and their caregivers, with a cognitive functioning focus.
There is much knowledge and experience to share, especially about the many devastating brain injury symptoms. There is much to share about seizures, the functional shifts in the brain, and the impact of hormonal, chemical, and biological changes. There is also much to share about those devastating seizures. Sarah had many episodes of grand mal seizures and a variety of a-typical seizures. All this was the result of her hemorrhagic stroke at age 12 and 5 Gamma-Knife surgeries over the following 20 years. Those Gamma-Knife radiation sessions created additional injuries to her brain, but were necessary to treat her birth defect of Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM), in order to prevent additional hemorrhagic strokes. She recently had a Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) implant in order to manage those various types of seizures, and while it helped, her seizures days are not completely over.