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After being notified about their daughter’s severe brain injury, John and Nancy Harris drove from their local hospital to the University Hospital. As they made that drive, there was an absolute overload of shock, of denial – an assault on the ability to absorb all that was happening, all that would need to happen, what to do next.
In the case of Kathy Harris this was a surgical brain injury, so by the time they got to University Hospital, they were prepping her for surgery. Thus came the clear and unwavering recommendation of the neurosurgeon for surgery – then signing the release and the prayers for the life saving procedure. After 8 hours of waiting, the first news was good. She was alive; she was stable.
Waiting for Coma Emergence
Then began the nothingness days of watching and hoping with the previously confident neurosurgeon offering no more advice than “We will just have to wait and see.” In the first few days, the waiting room, the ICU became almost a family reunion with everyone rallying to John and Nancy, praying for Kathy. But lives go on, school is still in session, the University Hospital a 90 minute drive from the small town. By the end of the week, it was often only Nancy who would wait, with John arriving after 7 p.m., returning home before midnight.
Thus, for mother Nancy it became a lonely vigil, with little to do, only the ICU staff around; little to do but to monitor the monitors, struggling with the mystery of what numbers were scary, what numbers were OK. In 1995 the hospital had only a 30 page brochure and a loose-leaf notebook for information. Nancy had devoured that information by day two and became increasingly frustrated as to how many questions she had, how little answers. Nancy took to wandering between the medical library and the chapel in her hours alone. Her nights were spent at a hotel a mile from the hospital. She found a few books on severe brain injury in the library, but most were written over her head. Among the materials given her were information about support groups, groups which met once a month through the local brain injury association, Nancy would have loved such a meeting, but she was required at the hospital and the next one was weeks away anyway.
Were Kathy’s accident to have happened today, Nancy would be awash in information. Since this motor vehicle wreck in 1997, the internet came to the waiting room. At the forefront of that change was a web page, http://waiting.com, a project of the Brain Injury Law Group http://gordonjohnson.com. When http://waiting.com, went online in 1997, it was the first to provide significant information about severe brain injury, in a format that was accessible and understandable. It is likely still the most visited such webpage, connecting those who have waited with those who wait.
The goal of this webpage is not to regurgitate what is on waiting.com The goal of this webpage is to share more of what I have learned, in my 20 years of advocacy, including as the primary investigator of the TBI Voices project, http://tbivoices.com
Click a link below to learn more information.
Coma, What Now? Next – Primer on Severe Brain Injury Next – Why a Brain Injury Attorney in a Severe Brain Injury Case