Devastating reality of brain injury

Antonio Uribe lies very still on a hospital bed in the middle of a Victorian home in Manassas. Remarkably handsome, he has limpid brown eyes with black lashes that look as if they’ve been touched up with a curling iron.

When he moves, it’s the flex of his left arm, perhaps, or the upturn of a cheek and lip into a smile.

“When we first brought him home it was like having a new baby,” says his mother, Geri. “You feel like you’re starting over with a new relationship. You’re listening for every sound, looking for every movement. We were hoping we’d get the quick miracles. But now we keep getting the little ones — like the first time he smiled, the first time he turned to look when you said something to him, the first time we gave him a comb and he knew to take it up to his hair.”

He is not a new baby. He’s a 19-year-old who should be a college sophomore now, pitching a game of his beloved baseball, goofing around with one of his five siblings.

Mr. Uribe, however, has suffered a traumatic brain injury, sustained 20 months ago in a car crash that left the driver and the other passenger, his old high-school buddies, dead. The lives of Mr. Uribe’s entire family changed at the moment of impact.

Brain injury is a devastating intrusion into the lives of many Americans. For survivors, it can wreak havoc on concentration, memory, judgment and mood. It might rob its victim of strength, coordination and balance, and compromise senses such as vision and touch. It might bedevil the survivor with emotional difficulties ranging from instability to impulsivity.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.5 million people nationwide sustain a traumatic brain injury, via an external force such as a car crash or fall, every year. Two percent of the population — 5.3 million people — have suffered consequences of that injury severe enough to classify them as disabled. Millions of others are permanently disabled by other types of acquired brain injury, such as strokes and tumors.

As further insult, brain injury blights families, devastates personal finances and exhausts community resources.

Though it occurs more frequently than breast cancer and AIDS, brain injury is not recognized as a massive public-health problem, says Allan I. Bergman, president and chief executive officer of the Brain Injury Association of America, a nonprofit organization based in Alexandria.

“We still have a major public awareness problem,” Mr. Bergman says. “I think it’s because brain injury is not genetic, it’s not contagious, and therefore we get caught up in the semantics of the language, ‘This is an accident and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ That’s why brain injury is called ‘The Silent Epidemic.’”

People need to care, he says, because brain injury does not discriminate.

“This could be any of them or their family members,” he says. “In an instant, literally, a person’s life is dramatically changed as is the life of their family. None of us know when our number is up.”

‘Two different people’

The Uribe family certainly didn’t know about this silent epidemic, this thing called brain injury, before Nov. 10, 2001.

Story Continues →