Authors

Michael Paul Mason

Michael Paul Mason was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After earning an undergraduate degree in English Literature, Mason wrote and edited for a number of Oklahoma-based publications. In 2000, he created the unconventional literary journal Me Head, which included the works of writers and poets such as Sarah Brown, Matthew Crouch, Christopher Dooley, Jared Gilbert and Shin Yu Pai. Mason continues to write on a variety of topics and is currently a contributing writer to DISCOVER magazine.

From 2002 through 2007, Mason worked as a brain injury case manager for the Neurologic Rehabilitation Institute at Brookhaven Hospital. As a case manager, Mason traveled to nearly every state in America in an effort to help survivors of severe traumatic brain injury find appropriate treatment. Moved by the heroic struggle of survivors and their families, Mason began collecting stories, which became the groundwork for his first book of non-fiction, Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath.

In February 2007, by invitation from the Department of Defense, Mason traveled to Balad, Iraq where he witnessed the "brain injury capital of the world" in motion. The Air Force Theater Hospital at Balad Airbase proved to be the catalyst for several magazine articles, among them Dead Men Walkingand Iraq's Medical Meltdown. Mason also includes a moving account of Iraq War veterans and wounded Iraqis in Head Cases.

In the course of working as a brain injury case manager, Mason become a certified brain injury specialist and continues to advocate for reforms in brain injury care. Recently, he was one of the moderators of the first annual Brain Injury Consensus Conference, which brought together over 100 brain injury professionals in an effort to address treatment issues for Iraq War veterans as well as American civilians with TBI. Mason currently serves as vice-president of the Brain Injury Association of Oklahoma and regularly delivers engaging talks nationwide.

Review of Head Cases

Reviewed by Kris Shields, Program Administrator &TBI Coordinator for the Department of Health, Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Program

Head Cases is the most fascinating book on brain injury that I’ve yet read. Fascinating because, although we say it all the time, no two head injuries are ever the same. This book illustrates that in a way so plaintive, illuminating, and painful that each chapter becomes almost increasing difficult to read. Most books about brain injury deal with one survivor and the survivor’s families and friends, all who are trying to cope each in their own way. This book however, is a series of vignettes, chapters on a chapter in each individual’s life that irreversibly changes that life.

Take, for instance, the first chapter, “The Hermit of Hollywood Boulevard,” about a young man named Cheyenne Emerick, who was a most serious, experienced, and renegade (I guess that goes without saying) snowboarder who had traveled west to Snowbird mountain from his native Sugarloaf in Maine, to test himself. Snowbird was known as “the most daring, dramatic mountain the West had to offer.” It was on his first trip down the mountain that “the ground rushed up from nowhere. The force of the impact drove his knee into his forehead, blasting away all his senses in a burst of white pain.” Thus began the start of Cheyenne’s seizures that continue to control what he can and cannot do with his life. He cannot hold a job, he cannot drive, he is poor, living a “minimalist” life, not by choice, but by chance. According to Cheyenne and his mother, “Medicaid has denied them, and Cheyenne’s injury is too invisible for disability income.” So it goes.

Or take Doug Bearden, who served 20 years in the Air Force, many of them as an air traffic controller, a coveted and stressful job. In 2003 Doug took an early retirement because of the stress and began another chapter of his life. He never thought about the series of cold sores on his lips and mouth he had had. Never really had any health worries to speak of. But the bomb was ticking and it was called HSV-1, herpes simplex virus type I, which decided to manifest itself in Doug Bearden’s brain and wreak the same kind of havoc that a traumatic brain injury can. Doug Bearden who holds two masters’ degrees, one in education and one in theology, was working that summer as a regional training manager for a local pizza chain while he and his brother pondered establishing their own church with their own congregation. He never made it to work that morning or any morning after. He was found 24 hours and a over a hundred miles later, a three hour car drive from his home, asleep underneath a bush on the grounds of a plastics manufacturing company. Even today, over a decade later, Doug has no memory of that day, “it was already lost, along with other large chunks of Doug’s past.” Because of the damage of the virus to his brain, Doug lost his short-term memory, much of his long-term memory, the governance over his emotions and behaviors, and “In a matter of months, Doug Bearden went from a model of self-reliance to requiring round the clock care. He simply could not be left alone.” In one sense though, Doug is one of the lucky ones. Because a simple notation in his military medical record noted the instance of cold sores, he’s being treated by the VA system, but not before a pleading, public relations campaign on the part of his family with important legislators, including the governor in the state in which they live, did he get the services he needs. Mason writes, “In ways we may never fully appreciate, Doug Bearden lost his life. Within a period of three years, he endured over twenty different medical placements. His family was forced into bankruptcy, and every person he loves bears some type of scar, emotional or otherwise, from the experience.”

Survivors of brain injury and their families who may read this Brain Waves magazine know these stories and the consequences all too well. There are thirteen chapters to this book and all of them tell a unique and important story. They illustrate that even some of us who don’t willingly or knowingly put ourselves in harm’s way can experience the bewildering array of consequences of brain injury. They illustrate that the system of care in this country is woefully inadequate to serve this array of consequences and families spend months, years, lives trying their very best to deal with the situation they find themselves in. In the end though, two essential questions remain, one spiritual, one practical: “Who am I, really?,” and “Who are we, other than our brains, really?” And by this we mean memories and our ability to connect through shared experiences. As Mason writes in his introduction, “A brain injury can shatter your notions of the future, splinter your past, and send your sense of time whirling in any number of directions. And that’s just the beginning.”

Survivors, family members, friends, professionals in the field of brain injury, struggle to answer those questions probably daily. This book examines the problems, shares some insights, gives a bit of hope, and shapes a bit of a plan to refine the way each of us attempts to answer those two questions.