On January 2, 2013 I was loaded into a van in my wheelchair and moved from Zale Lipshy at Parkland Memorial Hospital to the Centre for Neuro Skills in Irving. CNS owns and operates a residential care living facility – an apartment complex – in Irving, nearly four miles from their therapy clinic. That is where I lived for the next seven months while I was going to rehab classes at CNS.
There are about nine buildings, each having four apartments, each apartment housing two patients. For each pair of patients there are six Neuro Rehabilitation Specialists taking care of us – mornings from 7:30 am until we leave for class in one of several vans sometime between 8:30 am and 10:30 am, depending on when we start classes for the day. The patients then return to the apartments either at 3:30 pm or 4:30 pm, depending on our schedules, where we have NRS’s who are with us from then until their shifts end at 11:30 pm. There are then additional NRS’s in each apartment from 11:30 pm until 7:30 am the next morning. I was rarely awake and active overnight, except when I went to the bathroom, so I rarely saw the ones who worked that shift.
During those months in the apartments, I lived in four different apartments with five roommates: Charles “Bo” Lewis, Ashton Cerka, Bo again, Charlie Thums, William “Bill” Donaldson, and John Sims. Like all the other patients at CNS, my roommates had brain injuries, but each had unique symptoms from which they were recovering. Before I suffered my brain injury, I did not know anything about that condition, except when I would see a car park in a handicapped spot and appear to be perfectly healthy when they walked from their car. Then I would jokingly say, “It must be brain damage.” I have now learned quite a lot about brain injuries because I lived and learned with people who suffered from many different types of neural damage, caused from both physical trauma – car and motorcycle accidents, strokes, aneurysms, seizures, surgery, etc. – and poisons, like mercury and lead.
My first roommate, in my first apartment, was Bo. He was a fireman from Mineral Wells, in his fifty’s, maybe ten years younger than me, who was married and had two or three grown children. I think his injury was from an accident suffered on-the-job. He had severe memory problems, especially difficulty remember words, places and events. In fact, shortly after I shared an apartment with him, he left for about a month for surgery. And since I had my own mental problems at that time, I don’t remember much about him then, except that he did not talk much at all.
My second roommate was Ashton, and I really don’t know why he was there, except that he had problems using his arms. What I do remember is that, whenever he showered each morning, he would always have music playing. I don’t know if it was a radio or records or his cell phone, but I loved the music pouring out of the washroom. In fact, I did not like the way, whenever anyone entered the apartment – my roommates, the NRS, or anyone else – the first thing they did was turn on the television, whether they intended to actually watch it or not. They just wanted some noise. I did not. From Ashton I learned that having good music was much more pleasant than mindless noise from the television.
I hadn’t relearned to use my cell phone at that time, but I did have a lot of recordings at home on my desktop computer. So I had my son Evan copy all my songs – over a thousand of them – to my HP/Palm tablet, which I had purchased about a year before I was hospitalized, and asked him to teach me how to use it. I did not know how to find a specific song, so I just set the app to play them all, randomly. From then on, if no one was watching the television, I would turn it off and start my music on my tablet from wherever it had stopped when I last turned if off. In August 2013, about the time I moved out of the CNS apartments, I got a new cell phone onto which I had Evan load all my songs from the tablet, and which I have sense learned to use much more extensively. I still play it every day, and still set it to randomly play everything, mainly because all of the songs I play are my personal favorites!
After I’d been in the apartments for about a month, Ashton and I were moved to different apartments, him to live by himself and me next door to my first apartment. I do not know why these changes occurred, or maybe I did but cannot remember, but I was in an apartment alone for a couple of weeks, and then Bo released from the hospital and moved in with me again. He was talking a little bit now, but it was mostly just “God dammit” and “oh, shit” and very little else. They told me this was a function of his brain injury and to just ignore it. But it was funny.
One thing that occurred with Bo was related to the fact that I was getting all my nutrition from a feeding tube, because of my dysphagia (swallowing difficulty). One evening after Bo had finished his supper – he was not on a feeding tube – he had a small cup of chocolate pudding. Since he was still in a wheelchair and I was not, when I saw him trying to find a place to throw away the empty cup, I go up and threw the cup away for him. However, before I placed it in the garbage can, I took my finger, wiped off a little bit of pudding that was at the bottom of the container, and ate it. Nicole, our NRS, as she was required to do, wrote about what I had done in the record book she was required to maintain about everything that Bo and I did in the apartment. Apparently we all got in trouble when the people at CNS found out that I had eaten something besides the meals I received through the g-tube.
After two or three weeks with Bo, he was moved to another apartment and so was I, but not to the same place. I was moved in with Charlie, a patient with a very different set of problems. He was about 25 and had received damage to his skull from a motorcycle accident. His parents, Sue and Roger, who were divorced and lived in Wisconsin where Charlie had grown up, took turns living in Dallas in an apartment they had rented just to take turns staying near Charlie during his TBI recovery. Charlie did not have any physical problems, but suffered from severe loss of memory. In fact, he did not know that he even had any memory damage. He thought he still lived with his mother in her Wisconsin apartment, and would often try to find his room upstairs, not understanding that he was not in Wisconsin and that this apartment had only one floor. He also could not remember when he had eaten and would look for food over and over again. During the month I lived with him, Charlie gained 15 or 20 pounds. When I last saw him, about six months later, he had put on at least another 20 pounds. He would also want to look for the stuff he needed to take to school, things like his wallet, cell phone, keys and notebooks, all of which he neither needed nor had. Every morning and afternoon, when it was time to go to class or return home, he would delay the vans wanting to find one or more of these items.
One thing I remember from my time at those apartments was that about once each week we would have a fire drill. Everyone had to get out of their apartment and stand outside the fence until the NRS supervisors had checked each room to insure that everyone had left the buildings. After one “all clear” signal, when we all headed back to our apartments, Charlie went into the wrong one. They pretty much all looked alike, but when he got inside, he insisted that was his apartment and refused to leave. After that incident, I made a point after each fire drill to escort him back to our room so that would not happen again.
Because Charlie would often come into my room and take some of my things, I asked to be moved to another apartment. My next roommate was Bill, who was almost well enough to move back home. He would spend hours asking Nicole what he had to do at the apartments to “graduate” and move home. He was my roommate for only two or three weeks before he was able to go home, but one evening, as we were getting to know each other, I told him that I was 93 years old – I was only 63, but had difficulty with numbers and memory because of my injury. He was astonished, of course, and repeatedly insisted that I could not be that old, but I kept insisting, until I mentioned this to someone else, who know how old I was, and who set me straight. I was so embarrassed and I had to tell Bill that I was not really lying, I was just confused.
My last roommate, after Bill moved out, was John Sims, an engineer at Bell Helicopters. He was severely restricted to a wheelchair and had to be bodily moved from that to his bed or anywhere else. He also had limited speech, so we were not able to get to know each other much. He did have frequent visitors – his mother and children – with whom I was able to learn a bit about him, and I often saw him at the clinic as they work on his mental and physical difficulties.
In late July I was happy that I could move back home, but I will never forget the roommates I had there and all of the NRS’s, drivers and other friends I made at CNS, all of whom helped me in my TBI recovery.
Memoirs of the Brain Damaged 