An Unrecoverable Error in My Computer’s Brain

Last week I sat down in front of my computer to find the dreaded blue screen of death. My computer’s brain, like mine, had suffered an injury.

(Doctor) Larry worked on it with his diagnostic software, performing what was very much like an MRI scan of my computer’s brain. Message after message jumped up on the screen. 201476539 has an unrecoverable error. 201476542 has an unrecoverable error. 201476543 has an unrecoverable error. Larry tried to set up a new partition and format it for reinstallation of the processing program…to no avail. The computer’s brain had suffered an injury that could not be fixed.

Those of you who have read our book, Brain Injury Survivor’s Guide, know that this was not the first time Larry has dealt with an injured brain. My anoxic brain injury in 1990 changed his life as much as it did mine. Sometimes I forget exactly what my brain injury did to him. Of course, I was in la-la land for quite a while after the injury. Then I entered the period of denial for quite a while longer. All the while, Larry was struggling to take care of me (and I really didn’t want him encroaching on my independence), continue his job and care for our children in a world that was far different from the one he’d lived in a few months earlier.

My brain had suffered some unrecoverable errors. I no longer had any peripheral vision and, like most brain injury survivors, my short term memory was a thing of the past. Since a lot of our cognitive processing depends on short term memory I was really having problems thinking at the right time.

The day of the fatal crash, after all hope was lost, we ordered a new computer. Wow, wouldn’t it be great if we could have done that in 1990 when my brain was injured. The old one isn’t working like it once did, so let’s replace it. But we can’t do that, can we? Even though a lot of the stuff on my laptop is also on Larry’s computer, not all of it is, and quite a bit of valuable information was lost. Does that sound familiar to you? Life changed when each of us suffered a brain injury, but there are still many parts of our brains that function perfectly normal.

Of course, there are parts of the brain that no longer function properly and that means you and I must develop strategies to compensate. Professional team members like speech therapists, occupational therapists, neuropsychologists and others are very helpful up to a point. That cannot teach you to compensate for something they don’t know about. You cannot remember what you don’t know so you can’t tell them.

This is why a loving, helpful family member is so important to moving toward a more successful life after brain injury. They can remember things about you that you can’t. They can remember things you enjoyed. They can help you develop strategies to enjoy those things once again. I will be the last to say it is easy. But a loving family caregiver can be the best thing you can have.

When we were writing our book, there were a few things that I insisted must be included. Knowledge is Power to a Brain Injured Person: you’ll find those words throughout the book. Never Give Up is another phrase that is certainly important, and we insisted it be put on the back cover as well. Every page of our book mentions one of our brain injury sites, braininjuryguide.org. We have put dozens of strategies there in pdf files so visitors to our site can download them for personal use.

In a few days, a new computer will arrive, and it will come with instructions. How much simpler would life have been after my brain injury if there had been an instruction book for my new brain! There was very little material available and most of it was written for doctors. I needed a Brain Injury Survivor’s Guide, yet none was available. That’s why we wrote it. We know there are millions of others in need of instruction, inspiration and hope. Welcome to Our World.