By Rebekah Vandergriff, LMSW ~ 2008

Rebekah Vandergriff takes a “head on” approach to living with a brain injury.   By sharing her personal fears, struggles, and challenges, she gives readers an inside view into what it is like to live with a 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.   By 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 reveals dynamics of siblings and parents.  

It’s more than a documentary on brain injury treatment and rehabilitation.   Exploring the changes in her thinking and reasoning, her social skills, and her emotions, she demonstrates this affected her self image and self esteem.   She and her family experienced trials and conflicts discovering this new world of brain injury.

She explores the impact of her brain injury on dating and friendships.   Becoming a parent changed her life completely again as she moved from being the person who was cared for to caring for her daughter.   Going to college added new goals and direction to her life as she looked for work and established a career.

Order “What Day Is It?”

by sending a check of $14.95 + $2.55 shipping = $17.50

to: Rebekah Vandergriff

PO BOX 4446

Overland Park, KS 66204-0046

Selecting a Rehabilitation Facility 

By Garry Prowe

What to do first?

You face a maze of urgent, complicated, and time-consuming medical, insurance, financial, legal, family, and personal issues. You have so many questions and you’re not sure where to turn for help. This book—which is based upon the experiences of hundreds of people living with a brain injury, their families, and the medical professionals who treat them—will answer many of your questions. It will teach you:

• The basics of brain injury and the recovery and rehabilitation processes
• The wide range of impairments caused by a brain injury
• Ways to make this stressful and exhausting time easier for you and your family
• What you need to know about health insurance and disability pay
• How a case manager and an attorney can help you
• The factors that influence how well someone recovers from a brain injury
• How to access the wide range of resources available to the families of brain injury survivors

“A brain injury is a devastating, life-altering experience for the patient and the family. As a trauma surgeon for the last thirty years, I see distraught families desperate for comprehensive and easy-to-read information about what the future holds. Successfully Surviving a Brain Injury answers most of their questions in a compassionate and thorough manner. This book is a must read for everyone who wants to confront, understand, and overcome the challenges of living with a brain injury.”

Lawrence Lottenberg, M.D. Associate Professor of Surgery and Anesthesiology, Trauma Medical Director, University of Florida College of Medicine

Successfully Surviving a Brain Injury: A Family Guidebook

By Garry Prowe

Order at www.BrainInjurySuccess.org

ISBN: 978-0-9841974-3-9

246 pages

$17.95

Brain Injury Success Books, Gainesville Florida

All profits from this book will be donated to organizations that support brain injury survivors in the U.S. and Canada.

Book of poetry on loss after brain injury

By Philip Hasouris

When his wife, Linda, sustained a devastating anoxic brain injury, poetry became a vehicle for Philip Hasouris to express his losses, anguish and hope as he struggled to make sense of their altered lives and relationship. 

Families who are touched by brain injury are often isolated and do not have the opportunity to share thoughts, feelings, or experiences with others who have been through it.  With this book, they are no longer alone.  The rest of us will stop and think.

To experience Hasouris’ sensitive and personal words is to become part of this poet’s life.  It is a new and difficult life but one that he is working very hard to adjust to and improve.  From the poem Now and then…

Your name is Linda
this is your house
you painted this room
you have two daughters
their names are Caitlin and Sarah
you, their beautiful mother.
I remember for you

Mr. Hasouris has an amazing ability to capture a moment and feeling with the perfect juxtaposition of words to transport the reader into his living room and his heart.  He takes such care with every word and every phrase in every poem to make the reader feel the emotional upheaval caused by this ax of brain injury that has split the natural progressions of a loving life together.

This collection of poems will enlighten and enrich not only those who are living this journey of brain injury but also the rest of the world who will look at their friends and families going through such a journey with new respect and empathy.  It will change the way the rest of us think, behave, and look at life.

Excerpt from section From life Before by Sandra Topalian, Brain Injury Association of Massachussetts

Order at http://hasouris.homestead.com/Home.html

Poetry, Softcover, 100 pages

Beachcomber Press, MA

© 2009   ISBN  978-0-9840679-0-9

Price $15

By Dixie Fremont-Smith Coskie

This special book about a child’s traumatic brain injury is aptly titled UNTHINKABLE. Facing possible death or life-long disabilities of her child in the early days of hospital care and medical treatment, this mother reveals her fears as she faces an uncertain future.  

After her son’s traumatic brain injury, Dixie Coskie and her family move from horror and despair to find hope, healing, and even greater love.  The simplest of things have new importance —when her son is able to blink his eyelids again, lift his finger, utter a word.  This book on surviving brain injury from a family’s perspective is powerful, moving and very real. Not only are the emotions of parents explored and revealed, but siblings are included as well.

This book will provide emotional support, hope and guidance for other families whose child has had a brain injury.  The tips for caregivers are especially useful with practical suggestions for support, communication, coping, stress reduction and problem solving at all stages of care and recovery after traumatic brain injury.  It is also highly recommended for direct care staff and professionals as it provides insights into the emotional trauma that inevitably accompanies the physical and medical trauma of brain injury.

 Order at www.DixieCoskie.com

ISBN: 978-1-932279-10-8,

224 pages

$17.99

Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, Deadwood Oregon.

Barbara Stahura and Susan Schuster, M.A., CCC-SLP

This workbook has been developed specifically for survivors of brain injury and blast injury. Based on journaling workshops led by the authors for survivors of traumatic brain injury, it is filled with journaling exercises.  They guide the user through examining and expressing the many ways that the brain injury has affected and altered their lives. Vignettes by individuals give it a personal touch and also serve as examples of journaling.

Breaking it down into sections, users explore…

• changing sense of self
• loss, memory and resilience
• altered relationships with family and friends
• anger and emotions
• grief and loss
• facing the future
• building hope
• moving forward

Journaling is a proven therapeutic tool used to explore one’s inner self by expressing emotions, confronting fears, relieving anxiety, coping with stress, celebrating successes, and preparing for new challenges. By writing for only a few minutes at a time, journalers can heal and cope with crises due to illness, death, or any life-altering event.

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.

After Brain Injury: Telling Your Story, A Journaling Workbook

By Barbara Stahura and Susan B. Schuster, M.A., CCC-SLP

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.

A delightful story book with colorful illustrations for young children features Billy Butterfly as he tries to compete in the Insect Olympics with a sore wing. 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. It is an excellent tool to help friends and peers be sensitive to the needs and 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.

A delightful children’s book on special needs.

Billy is a very determined butterfly who is sad as he watches the ants, grasshoppers, bees and other bugs race faster than he can. He has a sore wing because he flew too close to a bush with stickers and he can’t keep up with his friends.   The Insect Olympics is a really important race and he wants to compete but he is afraid to try with his sore wing.   He worries that the other bugs will make fun of him because he can’t fly as fast now.   With his Mom’s encouragement, he enters the race and learns that trying is more important than winning.

This story book for young children is a terrific tool for encouraging any child who feels, looks or acts “different” in any way to simply keep trying.   Children will love the colorful illustrations and the whimsical characters of Bertha Bee, Greg Grasshopper, Freddy Fly, and Mrs. Pettibloom.  

This story can also be used to increase children’s awareness of special needs and the importance of friendships among classmates and peers.

To order: click  Billy Butterfly Tries

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.

The chapter titles reveal her wit and sense of humor.

Chapter 1 Getting into a Pickle in a Pickle Suit “…absolutely everything about me changed that day; however, it would take me a long time to not only realize that but to remember it, too.”

Chapter 2 Cognitive Changes, describes herself as “A Little Dippy with That New Brain”

Chapter 3 Physical Changes or “Strange Gait” that led to her army discharge.

Chapter 4 delves into the Emotional Changes or How Does it Feeeeeeel to Get a New Brain? sharing shame, social cues and responses, depression, and social isolation versus solitude.

Chapter 5 “Mourning a Brain Change – What Do You Mean, This is Work?” covering the loss of a brain through the lenses of the four tasks of mourning.

Chapter 6 “Spiritual Recovery – it’ll Never Be Perfect, but it does Get Better” exploring layers and nuances leader to spiritual reconciliation and acceptance.

Order your copy today!

You can order this book directly from the author, click on  My New Brain  to order your copy today!