Brain-injury effects are hotline focus

In a life divided by "before" and "after," the contrasts are striking.

Before, she would sit at her computer and type the assignment for law school, then read through it a couple of times, making small changes, before printing it out to turn in. After, she labors and labors, each revision making it worse, unless she makes the effort — and it's hard! — to outline everything.

Before, getting ready to go somewhere was automatic. After, she uses a checklist so she remembers to shower before she brushes her hair.

She looks the same as before, and she's just as smart, but after a car crash, she has subtle, nonetheless life-altering, brain trauma that has destroyed some of her short-term memory, wreaked havoc on her organizational skills and annihilated the ability to organize and automatically break tasks into logical, doable parts.

She needs help moving on, and that's the topic of Saturday's Deseret Morning News/Intermountain Health Hotline — rehabilitation after a brain injury. From 10 a.m. to noon, speech-language pathologist Mark Fox and Barbara M. Bills, certified employment specialist, both of Intermountain Outpatient Neuro Rehabilitation, will take phoned-in questions on recovering from brain injuries.

It can happen to anyone, and people wrestle daily with the aftermath of stroke, traumatic brain injury and related conditions. Some had auto or pedestrian crashes. There are folks with football and soccer injuries, concussions, falls. Alcohol and drug abuse can create significant cognitive disorders, as can carbon monoxide poisoning, near drownings and other assaults on the brain.

Increasingly, experts also are learning to deal with the result of injuries from shockwaves, such as blasts suffered by soldiers and civilians in war zones. And for some, there was nothing dramatic, just a long line of little knocks that were cumulative in their damage to the brain, says Fox.

People who talk casually about concussions, he adds, miss that cumulative component. "It's only a concussion" actually means "it's only a brain injury, because that's what a concussion is. It may be temporary or permanent, but it's a brain injury."