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Hello, my name is Gordon Johnson. You are now on tbilaw.com, which is a webpage that
I have had on the Internet since 1996. This video is now being shot at a time that I have
changed the title of tbilaw.com from the Brain Injury Information page to Crashing Minds.
Why the title Crashing Minds? Well Crashing Minds is a book that I have been writing for
the last couple years and it seemed like it was time to incorporate some of the themes
of that book in TBILaw.com which has hundreds and hundreds of pages of information on it
since I put it up in the mid 1990s. I use the term crashing minds because the brain
in a brain injury does crash in similar ways to what your computer might do if you in fact
overload it and/or did something to make it crash. Now there's no comparison to the devastation
of a brain injury to a computer crash, but as we begin to understand the way in which
computers work, the average person now knows what RAM is and a hard drive is, it becomes
easier for me to explain similar processes that happen inside the brain when there's
a brain injury.
I'm not a doctor, I'm a lawyer. I've been writing about brain injury virtually my entire
career as a personal injury lawyer. These pages have information I've learned on them
, both when undertook the massive undertaking to really understand brain injury when I became
a brain injury specialist, but also what I've learned from listening to you, the people
with brain injury, my clients, loved ones, family members of my clients, and the things
that I've learned in the years of doing battle with doctors who were hired by defense and
insurance companies to basically deny that anything we know to be true could be true.
Tbilaw.com is really not like anything you're going to read in a medical book. It does have
medical science as its primary basis, but it's not written like a doctor would write
for another doctor, and it's not written like a brain injury survivor would write for another
brain injury survivor. The goal is to combine a technical understanding of brain injury
with the communication skills both written and verbal that I have developed in my career
as both a journalist and a writer and also as a lawyer, but to combine those things in
a way where I can teach, I can inform, and I can advocate.
We hope that these pages are self-accrediting to you that you will see yourselves, you will
see your loved ones in these pages and through them you will in fact get a better sense of
what is ahead and what it is that you need to learn, you need to do, to ensure the best
recovery for you or your loved one.
Throughout our web advocacy we have seen three basic themes that come up. The questions come
up over and over again. The first is someone is in a coma, their loved one is in a coma,
and the doctors are all saying, the only information the doctors are giving is that you will just
have to wait and see. Well predicting the outcome of a coma while someone is still in
a coma is a very very difficult thing to do, there is legitimate information, and it's
a very important time for the family member to learn as much as possible about brain injury.
The second theme is that you suffered a concussion, your family member had suffered a concussion,
and the doctors are saying everything's going to be better, and when you are a week after
the concussion, a month after the concussion, that's what you want to hear, and it may in
fact be the case, but for a significant minority of people, 10 to 15 percent of the people,
that may not be the case, and the doctor's advice that everything will go away, don't
worry, you'll be fine in six months, isn't always true, and for the significant subset,
the significant minority of people, there needs to be more information, there needs
to be more assistance and more focus has to be beyond long-term recovery and we've tried
to address that issue.
The third major issue is what is almost a complete devoid of information about the long-term
potential disability that can come either after a severe brain injury or after concussion.
In the concussion cases it is obvious why that information isn't given; because in concussion
cases the doctors don't think there could be any disability, but remarkably there's
still very little information given about the long-term consequences, long-term behavioral
changes after a severe brain injury. In the severe brain injury case there is this huge
focus of care and attention in the first 90 days; hopefully it extends out for a year,
but once you've gotten away from the neurosurgeon's care, once you're outside of the requisite
number of speech pathology visits or physical therapy visits, then there's very very little
done given information provided and focus on long-term recovery. We started a project
called TBI Voices a little over two years ago and we've offered almost daily installments
of the voices of people who survived injury, primarily severe injury, and what their life
was like as they went through it and what's it's like now. We are creating new pages as
we go that incorporates what we've learned from listening to the TBI stories on TBI voices
to help people understand the future impact of brain injury. To help them understand the
long-term symptoms that they may suffer.
We hope that you click on it. We hope that you find what you need here. We hope that
you will come back. We hope that you will use tbilaw.com, crashing minds, as your troubleshooting
guide for the challenges that are ahead for those with brain injury.