A mother’s narrative of perseverance following her son’s traumatic brain injury, Unthinkable is a book filled with universal lessons of struggle and triumph. Each chapter includes insights and tips for families and caregivers on coping, managing stress, and surviving the trauma of brain injury.

Dixie Fremont-Smith Coskie is a mother of eight, writer, public speaker, fundraiser, and advocate for children and persons with disabilities. Dixie Coskie and her son Paul speak at schools, camps, trauma centers, hospitals and rehab hospitals talking about the consequences and the reality of traumatic brain injury and childhood cancer.

This workbook guides survivors of brain injury and blast injury through the powerful healing experience of telling their own stories with simple journaling techniques. By writing short journal entries, survivors explore the challenges, losses, changes, emotions, adjustments, stresses, and milestones as they rebuild their lives.

After her husband, Ken Willingham, sustained a traumatic brain injury in 2003, she created a journaling workshop for people with brain injury and began co-facilitating it with Susan B. Schuster. Those workshops were the basis for After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story.

Written and illustrated by a survivor of a severe brain injury, this is a story of perseverance, hope and overcoming the challenges of having a disability. Written for young children, it will help friends and peers be sensitive to the needs and special abilities of children with disabilities. Billy’s story shows the importance of helping children try and the meaning of encouragement and support from friends and family. This delightful story book has colorful illustrations for young children featuring Billy Butterfly as he tries to compete in the Insect Olympics with a sore wing.

While in the US Army in Germany, Lori Williams sustained a severe traumatic brain injury that forced her medical retirement from the military. Not only did she have to adjust to the physical and cognitive changes caused by her injury, she also had to adjust to civilian life back in the states again. Her memoir takes the reader through her cognitive, physical, emotional, and spiritual recovery.

Making the transition to becoming a civilian again involved mourning the loss of her identity as a soldier. Her experience will resonate with service members and veterans today who have been injured.

This personal story traces Rebekah Vandergriff’s journey from runway fashion model to survivor of a car crash and a traumatic brain injury. Despite grim predictions for her recovery, she progressed from learning to walk and talk again to achieving a master’s degree in social work and raising a family.
Revealing her family’s reactions and involvement from her early days in rehabilitation to her struggles at home and in the community for independence and self-reliance, she rebuilds her life with grit and determination. Her candor exposes the dynamics among siblings and parents when a family member is seriously injured.