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.

The comprehensive how-to guide for psychological wellness after traumatic brain injury or stroke covers understanding the self, recovering emotionally, thinking in new ways, and changing behavior. Written in plain language and formatted for easy reading and use by caregivers, families and survivors, it is filled with practical worksheets and exercises. This is an essential tool for families and survivors on coping with the effects and consequences of brain injury. It addresses the daily stresses and challenges faced daily as well as the long term challenges for the future.

Written by a TBI survivor and coach, the book cautions against expectations of a “return to normal” in favor of a more realistic hope: start where you are and strive to be a little better every day.

New series available now!

Developed by Dr. Jeff Kreutzer and Dr. Stephanie Kolakowsky-Hayner at the National Resource Center for Traumatic Brain Injury, this series of 3 workbooks voices the many thoughts, feelings, and reactions that survivors, families and caregivers experience but too often do not talk about after brain injury.

My skull was crushed. I was dead. When I came back to life, reality became a psychedelic dream inside billions of bolts of lightening happening everywhere at the same time. This unimaginable constant sound inside my head still trumpets like a symphonic horn section gone mad forever. Only those who hear the sound understand this mysterious reality medically called Tinnitus (defined as: a continual noise in the ear, e.g., a ringing or roaring, usually caused by damage to the hair cells of the inner ear).

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.

Successfully Surviving a Brain Injury is a just-in-time, easy-to-read guidebook for families suddenly thrust into the painful, confusing world of brain injury. It teaches readers the basics of brain injury, guides them step-by-step through the recovery process, inspires them with stories of others who live successfully with the permanent sequelae of their injury, and provides the practical information readers need to handle the insurance, financial, legal, family, and personal issues that accompany a brain injury. Finally, it is a love story and a celebration of how one couple transcended profound changes in their relationship and created a fulfilling new life.

His wife’s brain injury left husband Philip Hasouris grappling with mixed emotions of joy for her survival and anguish for her losses. His poems capture the physical and emotional pain of surviving brain injury and the struggle within families to rebuild relationships while grieving their losses. Expressing a love that is unsentimental, unflinching, devoted and determined, Hasouris exposes the complexity of mourning what has been lost.

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.