Professor Cromer Learns to Read: A Couple’s New Life after Brain Injury chronicles the seven year journey Janet shared with her husband after a cardiac arrest left Alan with a severe anoxic brain injury. Janet details their process of composting a new identity, marriage, and life with meaning and gusto.

A wife describes the mixed emotions of becoming her husband’s caregiver after his traumatic brain injury changed their lives and their family. As Irene Young entered the new world of caregiving, she became responsible for managing his care, providing emotional support, measuring progress in slow steps, and maintaining hope for recovery. As the parent of a young daughter and the spouse of a survivor of brain injury, she learned the importance of changing expectations, setting goals, finding time, and finding a balance.

Married just nine months, her husband’s brain injury left Barbara Stahura feeling shocked, fearful and anxious about his survival and their future. Watching him in coma she questioned whether he would survive. Once medically stable, there were new concerns once he spoke as the severity of his brain injury became apparent.

She wanted to look inside Ken’s brain, to see what the scanning machines could not, to find his lost self. Would Ken’s brain heal? How much? When? No one could provide the answers. There was nothing to do but move through the days.