I'm Missing Part Of My Brain

by ComputerBob

June 13, 2008

We had only been married for 3 years. After our first 6 months of marriage, we had joined church volunteer service as a couple and worked as full-time Pastoral Assistants at a small church in Orlando, Florida for a year. When that first year ended, we stayed in volunteer service for a second year, working as full-time Pastoral Assistants at a small church in Perrysburg, Ohio. For the first year, the church paid for our room and board, plus we each got $5 per month. For the second year, we got a raise to $10 per month apiece. While we felt like we were doing a lot of good work for those 2 years, they were financially and spiritually difficult times that tremendously strengthened our faith and taught us to live very simply. We also learned to rely on each other — and hardly anyone else — for spiritual and moral support.

Our long-term goal was to become full-time Christian musicians, so during the second year of our volunteer service experience, we began to occasionally sing together at various churches and religious functions around Ohio on our days off. I wrote folk/rock Christian songs and played the 12-string guitar, and we sang my songs and told stories of our shared faith experience.

Of course, at the end of our second year of volunteer service, we were even poorer than we had been when we had first started. By that time, our music ministry was beginning to be popular in the Ohio/Indiana/Illinois area, but since we left it up to each group to decide how much they would pay us, we barely made enough money to feed ourselves and pay the rent on our tiny apartment. Seeing our plight, a couple in our church offered to let us live with them in their house out in the country until we could afford to move out. We accepted their offer.

Some evenings, I went jogging, to try to stay in shape. There were no sidewalks anywhere around us — only farmers' fields, dotted with occasional houses. So I jogged on the side of the road, between the asphalt and the omnipresent northwest-Ohio roadside ditches. To the end of the road and back was 2 miles. Around the block was a 3 1/2 mile jog. I usually jogged to the end of the road and back. Luckily, there was never any traffic to speak of — in fact, even when I jogged all the way around the block, I rarely saw more than one or two cars pass me by.

One hot night, on my way home from the end of the road, I was really exhausted and my shirt was soaked with sweat. As I passed the only house on my route, I remember thinking "Just another half-mile, and then I can lay down on the living room floor, in front of the fan."

My eyes were closed, but their slight stinging sensation told me that I was in a brightly lit place. Then I recognized some voices, talking quietly nearby. I heard my wife's mother say, "I think he's asleep now." Thinking that I was being hilarious, I sing-songed, "Oh, no, I'm no----ot."

I was awakened by the sound of someone screaming in the distance. As I slowly came to my senses, it got louder and louder. When my eyes opened, I realized that it was me. Several people hovered over me, within two feet of my face. Someone was holding me down firmly. A man with a German accent was yelling at me to hold still. He very quickly cut off my hair with an electric hair clipper. It felt like he has ripping it out of my head. I passed out again.

I was in bed. A hospital bed. My wife was there. She says that I kept asking her what happened. She would tell me the whole story. A few minutes later, I would ask her what happened. And she would tell me the whole story again.

While I had been jogging along the side of the road, a 17-year-old boy from the nearby town had driven past me in a large car — one of those rolling battleships. A friend of his rode shotgun. In the trunk of the car, they had 3 pipes, each about 12-feet long, and about 3 inches in diameter. Instead of sticking out the back of the trunk, they rested on the side of the trunk, sticking out at an angle, several feet from the side of the car.

As he drove past me, the pipes had hit me in the forehead, crushing it into the front of my brain.

They stopped when they had heard the sound of the pipes hitting me. Running back to where I lay on the side of the road, they thought I was dead. So they ran back to the car, took the pipes out of the trunk and threw them in the ditch, and got back in the car to drive away and leave me there. Fortunately, the woman who lived at that house — the only house within a half-mile — had also heard something happen, and she came out of her house and saw the boys. She called the police. The boys stayed at the scene.

An ambulance arrived. The paramedics found a piece of my brain outside on my forehead. They rushed me to the county hospital several miles away.

When it seemed like it had been a long time since I had left home to go jogging, the wife of the couple that we lived with got worried and decided to drive out make sure I was OK. A half-mile from home, she saw the flashing lights of the state highway patrol cars. She stopped and asked them what had happened. They told her, "Some jogger got hit by a car."

She sped home, got my wife, and the two of them raced to the county hospital. As my wife walked into the emergency room, she overheard a doctor on the phone, talking to a different hospital. He said, "We got a headwound we're going to send you, but he's probably not going to live through the night."

They told her that I needed brain surgery right away, but I was probably going to die. If I lived, I'd probably be blind, or paralyzed on my right side; or I'd have a speech impediment; or I'd lose all of my emotions, so I would never feel happy or sad or angry or scared about anything any more; or I'd lose my memory and wouldn't know who she was; or I'd get spinal meningitis from the dirt and rust that the pipes had left inside my brain.

When she saw me, my entire head was black, bloody and swollen. My eyes looked like black tennis balls. They had cut off my shirt, and I was struggling against several nurses who were trying to hold me down, to keep me from doing more damage to myself. They were talking about drilling holes into my head to install one of those metal halos to keep my head still.

My wife approached me and said hi. As soon as I heard her voice, I instantly stopped struggling and said, "Hi, Bon. Would you get me a Dr. Pepper?" She says that, despite what the doctors had told her, as soon as she heard me speak, she knew that I was going to be OK.

The county hospital transferred me by ambulance to the medical college hospital in a nearby city, where they would perform my brain surgery.

During 12 hours of brain surgery, they were were unable to find the place where my brain had been torn, but they had to stop anyway, because I had lost too much blood for them to be able to continue.

To give me time to recuperate from the first brain surgery, they scheduled the second brain surgery for the following week. And they put me into a medically induced coma, to let my brain rest and try to protect it from further damage.

After a few days, they brought me out of the coma and told me what had happened. Over and over. And they warned me that when they did the second surgery, and they found the place where my brain had been torn, they would have to cut out some more of my brain, to make sure that they removed all of the dirt and rust from the pipes that had hit me. So I could still end up blind, or paralyzed on my right side, or have a speech impediment, or I could lose all of my emotions, or lose my memory.

You might think that by laying in a hospital bed all day every day, I would have gotten a lot of sleep, but the opposite was true. Every few hours, "the vampire" would come with her little cart filled with needles and alchohol wipes, to take a sample of my blood. And every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, a nurse would come in and ask me a series of questions, like what year is it, what day is it, who is the president of the United States, where are you, why are you here, etc. Then she'd look into each of my eyes with a flashlight. Then she'd tell me to take her hand in each of mine and squeeze it, and she'd pull the blankets up off of my feet and tell me to push against her hand with my feet. All of that was designed to make sure that my brain was still working correctly. It was — in fact, after a few days of that routine, I started telling her that I was at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.

On top of that, I had never been able to sleep on my back, but in the hospital, I had no choice. I couldn't turn onto my side because I had tubes going into every part of my body, including one stuck into my head, to drain the extra fluid from around my brain and keep it from swelling up and killing me.

My wife stayed with me every minute of visiting hours, every single day. When I was awake, she talked with me. When I was asleep, she read or talked to the doctors about me or tried to take naps in the chair next to my bed. At night, she got a few hours of sleep at the nearby home of a couple who we had met while we were singing at a local church. She sent out letters to all of the churches where we had sung, telling them what had happened to me. Within several days, the walls of my hospital room were covered with 175 get-well cards and I was covered with the prayers and best wishes of concerned people from all over the country.

The only thing I remember about the first surgery was the painful pre-surgery haircut. But I went into the second surgery knowing that there was a good chance that I wouldn't be the same person when I came out of it — or that I might not even remember who my loving wife was any more.

After the second surgery, everyone was calling me "a miracle man." Not only had I survived, I didn't have any of the complications that the doctors had warned us about. The only problem I noticed was that I had very slight double vision when I looked at things that were about 20 yards away. But that went away within a few weeks. And I had a new, plastic forehead — broken skull bones don't heal, so after they had found the tear in my brain and cut out some more of my brain, the doctors had repaired the torn protective lining around my brain and then poured in a liquid plastic that would harden to become my new forehead. If you want to, I'll let you feel a "corner" of it that sticks out a tiny bit, just inside my hairline.

Just 17 days after my accident. I was released from the hospital, 17 pounds lighter and $17,000 in debt. I remember thinking that the sky looked incredibly blue and the grass looked incredibly green that day — more beautiful than they had ever looked before, or have ever looked since that day. And I had a very strong sense that I was still alive was because God still had a purpose for me here on earth.

We stopped at a McDonald's on the way home. My hamburger tasted great, but my french fries tasted weird. Not bad, but different than how they were supposed to taste. That's because one of my two olfactory nerves had been destroyed in the accident, so from then on, some things were always going to taste different. And I wouldn't be able to taste other things at all, like mushrooms. I figure that's a very small price to pay for being in an accident like mine.

About a week after I got out of the hospital, my wife and I went back to our singing schedule. When we sang at a large annual church conference, my head was still all bandaged up. I learned afterward that some people who hadn't heard about my accident had assumed that the bandages were probably because I had head lice.

When I was in the hospital, they had started me on Dilantin, a prescription drug that helps prevent seizures, because no one knew how the torn and removed parts of my brain might affect the rest of my brain over the long-term. Early one morning, about a year after my accident, I suffered a grand mal seizure and had to be taken to the hospital. There they determined that instead of the 20 part per million of Dilantin that I was supposed to have in my system, I only had 4 parts per million. In their words, my liver had been "eating that stuff for breakfast." They increased my daily dosage to try to ward off any more seizures, but the more I learned about Dilantin's side effects, the less I wanted to have to take it every day for the rest of my life. Knowing how I felt, my wife prayed that the Lord would protect me without me needing to take Dilantin any more. I don't recommend that anyone else do this, but a few months later, I began to slowly wean myself off Dilantin it by taking my normal 6 capsules each day for a month, then 5 capsules each day for a month, then 4 capsules each day for a month, etc., until I eventually took only 1 capsule each day for a whole month. At the end of that month, we were in the middle of a 13-state singing tour, so I flushed the rest of the capsules down the toilet at a church that we were singing at, somewhere in the western U.S.

I never had another seizure.

During the next 4 years, we sang at 427 places in 26 states, and were able to minister to about 50,000 people. The denomination in which my wife was raised did an article about us in their international magazine. Back then, I liked to say that we were world famous in a totally unknown denomination. Nowadays, I just say that most people don't know how famous I am.

It was my idea to stop singing for a living. When we started out, I had always hoped that a lot of people would come to hear us so that we could minister to them. But slowly, it turned into a job, and by the end, I found myself hoping that a lot of people would come to hear us so that we could pay our rent. That's when I knew that I needed to do something else.

I went to college, where I got a Bachelor's degree, a Masters degree, and took all of the coursework for 2 doctoral degrees — I got 2 "B's" and all the rest of my grades were "A's." So much for missing part of my brain.

As I see more and more of my life in the rearview mirror, I associate more and more calendar dates with either memories to be celebrated or memories to be grieved. Today, June 13, 2008 is the 30th anniversary of my accident. My wife and are still together after 33 years — and we're celebrating it.

UPDATE: On February 13, 2007, I had a stroke that put the left half of my body to sleep. So now not only am I missing part of my brain, but another part of my brain is dead. For the whole story, see My Previous Life Is Over.