Welcome

 Welcome to my new blog!

I intend to use this space to share my own experiences with a traumatic brain injury.

More to follow soon. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving!

 

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Music and TBI recovery

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I love music, especially live music. Just in the last twelve months, I’ve seen nine concerts.   I love singing along to songs that I love alongside a crowd that loves them too.   One of the cognitive techniques I use to remember new things is association.   For example, if I’m looking at a picture of a bowl of ice cream with a cherry, it is easier to remember that than if it were an image of ice cream with peanut butter because no one associates ice cream with peanut butter, but many do associate an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top.   I associate music with certain periods of my life: high school; college; music I studied and listened to in law school, and even music I played for my kids at bedtime.   So it makes sense that I enjoy seeing music live that I associate with these happy memories. What is the relevance of music to brain injury? I engaged in music therapy after my brain injury. As it turns out, music has a strong an...
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Brain Injury Awareness Month

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 March is Brain Injury Awareness Month. This is relevant to me as someone living with a brain injury. Every year an estimated 2.8 million Americans sustain a brain injury. That number is far higher than most people would expect. 5 million people are living with a permanent brain injury disability. That's one in 65 Americans!   Each brain injury manifests differently.  Some people have no physical challenges but cognitive ones. Some present cognitive challenges but no physical ones (sometimes referred to as invisible brain injuries). Both my cognitive and physical abilities were impacted by my brain injury. I could publish 100 posts about my TBI or brain injury more broadly, but this graphic really captures it for me.  There will always be a gulf between pre- brain injury me and post -brain injury me, but I work to close that gulf every single day. I Never Give Up! #braininjuryawarenessmonth
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Ten years and counting

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  Brooke Taylor   9:41 AM (3 minutes ago) to me I’m a little late on this post given the subject matter.  I’ve always been a person focused on the calendar or numbers of personal significance to me. There are obvious ones that you remember like birthdays of immediate family and social security numbers. For me, that also includes the date I started working at my law firm: August 19, 2002.  Other examples are my bar number and social security number.  Those dates and numbers were significant well before my accident. I recalled them easily both before and after my accident. Maybe that's because they were stored in long term memory.  Information in long term memory is more likely to be preserved. 4/24/2016 held no significance to me until it became the date of my accident. This year marks ten years of my recovery. This anniversary reminds me that I have made more progress than people thought possible in those earliest days. I firmly believe that I can continue ...
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