For John and Nancy Harris (our exemplar case) it was a phone call telling them that their daughter had been in an accident, a car wreck only a quarter of a mile away from their home, a wreck in which another teenaged girl was severely injured. When they arrived at the hospital and were taken into the hospital room, the girl was waking up, but this girl wasn’t their daughter. Their daughter was being put in a helicopter, air-flighted to the University Hospital. She was more severely injured, totally non-responsive, comatose.
Thus begins one of the worst ordeals known to humanity, the absolute worst kind of waiting. Waiting to learn whether someone you love will live or die. Waiting to know if they will ever be aware. Waiting to learn how dramatically they will be changed. This webpage is written for those loved ones who wait and for the medical professionals who need to learn as much about waiting as the families are now forced to learn about brain injury.
A Connection to Others who have Waited for Coma Emergence
If your loved one is in a coma as you read this, you are likely here for two things:
- Support from those who have been where you are now. Click here to follow that path.
- Information about severe brain injury and coma. Click here to follow that path.
Our lesson plan for severe brain injury is to cover brain surgery, brain pathology, including brain lesions, contusions, hematoma, hemorrhage and subdural as opposed to epidural injuries.
This page is not the Brain Injury Law Groups first webpage on brain injury or even severe brain injury. Our web advocacy began in 1996 with http://tbilaw.com, a broad based treatment of brain injury and the legal issues and needs of the brain injury community. The next spring, we launched out most read page, http://waiting.com , page devoted to the family of someone in a coma, intended to be read as early as while they waited for the comatose survivor to awake. We called it http://waiting.com because it was intended for the ICU waiting room.
One of our most important contributions is the page Why Brain Injury Attorney – http://whybraininjuryattorney.com is focused on helping the family understand why it is essential to have a brain injury attorney in a case of severe brain injury. A truly qualified brain injury attorney can make a material difference in what is most important – “the recovery”. When I talk about recovery, I am not about what is recovered from a lawsuit or claim, but the recovery from the severe brain injury.
NEXT: The TBI Survivor’s Story Begins with the Brain Injury Family