Repost 1

Twenty-two, Now and Forever

(Home, part 1)

Before: athletic, humorous, laid back.
Now: Short term memory loss, various mood swings, sudden fits of rage, depression, poor coordination, vision problems.

What happened in between: A Traumatic Brain Injury caused by an IED in Iraq in summer, 2005.

At the age of 22 he, and what remains of his life, changed forever.He has a plate in his skull. He lost a portion of his brain matter and one side of his face is a mass of scars.
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He's one of my clients. It's my job to work with him to try and rebuild a life...to hopefully function in the world again. And I can already tell it's not going to happen for him. He's a long way gone.We play memory games. Sometimes they help, most times not. He still thinks it's 2005...always.

Dipping into his emotional reservoir by showing him some pictures from Iraq works. He can name every man in his squad still. But it drains him. And me.He's cognizant enough after his injury to recognize his deficiencies...what he's lost...some times. And it sends him into fits of anger and depression.

Those times of complete lucidity are almost a curse. It sounds terrible to say...but sometimes it's for the best when he blanks out for a time. It's hard to look at...a young man so crippled...staring unfocused and drooling onto his own shirt.It's ugly.It's what the people prone to empty sloganeering don't want to look at.Who really wants to see consequences?
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Today...I took him to a seaside town here...to the boardwalk to play ski-ball in an arcade. (I tried to use fun to cover the fact that I was really working on physical coordination)

We had a pretty good day.