Living with someone who suffered a TBI in a car accident, an article on the front page of today’s WSJ (subscriber link) strikes a special chord with me:
At first, Joanne Schrimpf thought her life was returning to normal. She was recovering physically from the car accident that nearly killed her in February 2002. Then her behavior began to take an odd turn.
She was convinced it was 1998, not 2002. She mistook her daughter for a stranger and forgot the family had a cat. On a trip to the grocery store, she couldn’t decide whether to get cereal with or without sugar, and began to sob. To tackle the problem, Ms. Schrimpf was offered cognitive rehabilitation, a medical treatment that tries to reteach injured parts of the brain how to perform basic functions, like organizing the day or tuning out distractions. The therapy sent Ms. Schrimpf on a long road toward recovery that entailed twists she never could have predicted.[...]
Cognitive treatment has evolved rapidly over roughly the past three decades. Many of its techniques were borrowed from those used to teach children with learning disabilities. Others arose out of vocational rehabilitation programs that helped the disabled return to work.
The treatment takes many forms, including reading and computer exercises, as well as relearning everyday activities such as planning for shopping. Therapists at some centers use card games and computer programs in which patients are asked to identify pictures and colors. Patients are also taught how to sidestep their impaired memories through the use of stickers, timers, notebooks and handheld computers. Others are videotaped, so they can observe their altered behavior, which often involves speaking too loudly and swearing inappropriately.
The catch: many insurers don’t pay for such therapy, pointing out that it’s still fairly new and experimental, and that its efficacy is not yet proven.
But that plays into one of the challenges with TBI and other “invisible” ailments — it’s sometimes extremely difficult to get doctors, other medical professionals, and insurance claims staff to acknowledge that an issue exists. Diagnosing it and finding the right treatment are challenging, and, from what I’ve seen, necessarily require fairly individualized plans and (currently) a certain amount of trial and error.
It sucks.
You’d think that Americans would be becoming a bit more familiar with such conditions, given the number of vets coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with some level of TBI. Sadly, giving much public thought about the casualties of war seems to go against the Bush party line.
If you’d like to peruse a hodgepodge of information on “invisible ailments”, I can point you to “But You Don’t Look Sick”.