A medical, legal, and
informational resource
for persons dealing with
traumatic brain injury.

STORIES OF AMAZING RECOVERIES

Submitted by: Marilyn Stoltzfus
Contact Via: (717) 664-3219
Submitted on: February 12, 2005

I am writing about my husband's Traumatic Brain Injury. It was June 30th 2004, three days before his 61st birthday. I am a full time paramedic and was on duty working when I heard the dispatch center send a call out for our home address. It was for a man down on the road bleeding from the head. Now remember I am a full time paramedic, I deal with and treat people with traumatic brain injuries all the time. But this was someone close to me, my husband. Thank God I do not work in the area we live or I would have my husband as a patient that day. I left my station and drove to Lancaster General Hospital, our Trauma Center. I had no idea what I was going to find. When I arrived my husband was already on the ventilator. He was in the hospital for 26 days on that breathing machine. He suffered a fractured skull, he had damage to the occipital, parietal, and mastoid. He had multiple hemorrhagic contusions, a subdural hematoma, as well as some subacracnoid bleeding. The most frustrating part of it all this was we didn't know how it happened. He was found lying on the road in front of our mail box by our neighbor, he was unresponsive. They ruled out that he did not have a heart attack or stroke which would have caused him to fall. But I know it takes a lot of force to fracture a skull. I will never be convinced that he fell. I believe my husband was either assaulted, or maybe hit by the mirror of a truck. But we will probably never know, he does not remember. That was seven months ago and since he has learned how to walk, talk, feed himself and shave himself. He is still in brain injury rehab, and in a nursing home because he requires 24-7 supervision. But here is the thing, he had an early frontal lobe dementia starting before the injury and they say he will probably never get better. But I am not giving up, because he is now doing things they said he would never do. And I also know that God is bigger than any brain injury, and all things are possible to those who believe. I have learned a lot through all this, I deal with acute stages of head injury on my job as a paramedic, meaning I intubate patients, manage their airways, try to keep them alive, but I only now see the long term effects and recovery of these very serious injuries.

Don't ever give up on your loved one after a TBI.....and remember...there is a lesson in all of this for us!!

Marilyn Stoltzfuz (wife of a brain injured husband)