It was such a simple thing. A bright, freckle-faced five-year-old little girl went potty before going to bed. It was such a simple childhood dilemma. Should she pull her tights back up or leave them down since she was going to bed anyway? Better ask Mom. It was such a simple response for a mother of two. She was only going across the hall to bed, what would be the harm? Leave them down. And down, they stayed. She had no idea her decision was about to kill her daughter.

She led her daughter towards her bedroom to tuck her in for the night. But they never made it. The child tripped over her tights in the hall and fell, hard, face-first, smashing her head onto the corner of the baseboard by her bedroom door. The little girl died on impact, but her mother couldn‘t tell. Blood seeped out of the gash on her forehead and trickled down past the child’s eyes. A nasty cut. Tears. Looked like she was going to need stitches. --Fade out-- swish-- now she’s in the car being rushed to the emergency room. Her mom is asking if she can hold a rag to her head to slow the flow of blood. --Fade out-- swoosh-- now she’s lying on a cold table with a bright light shining in her eyes, giggling. The doctors, puzzled, ask why she’s laughing. The little girl who hit her head was dead, but even the doctors couldn‘t tell. “It tickles,” she responds.

After three layers of dissolving stitches, a head X-Ray, and a brief interrogation of the injured child, the doctors pronounce her fine and send her home with her parents. “Wait,” you’re thinking. “Didn’t she just say the little girl died?” Now I’m telling you she went home with her parents. Which is it, you ask? The answer is anything but simple. She did both.

The little girl that went home that night was NOT the same little girl who tripped, fell and hit her head. Oh, she was the same in body, but certainly not in mind. And what, if not our minds, makes us fully alive or enables us to fully live? She would never grow up to be the person she might have been had she never fallen. How could she? Although it wasn‘t readily apparent to those around her, she damaged her brain in a way that would prevent her from becoming the fully functioning adult she was intended to be. For all intents and purposes, that little girl died the very second she struck her head. But because she was only five, no one noticed.

No one expects a Harvard Summa cum Laude intellectual capacity from a five-year-old. Hey, she’s walking; she’s talking, and giggling as we’re sewing...she’s fine! They were anything but educated in their final analysis. Her future apparently wasn‘t important enough to those attending to her wounds to warrant further scrutiny of her condition. In 1972, they had far less knowledge about traumatic brain injury than they do today. Those physicians unknowingly sent a child home that was now completely ill equipped to relate to the world around her. They failed to inform her parents that they now had a child who would never be able to make rational decisions or proper sense of the world of people and things around her without extensive rehabilitative measures. The invisible consequences of their ignorance were devastating.

Work, socialization, and life in general all require planning, organizing, problem solving, selective attention, personality and a variety of “higher cognitive functions.” All these skills are controlled by the frontal lobes of the brain. The part of the brain, it just so happens, which that little girl damaged when she hit her head; damaged in a way that wouldn’t surface until she was much older. As she grew, however, it became painfully obvious how defective her brain actually was as the need for these functions came in to play. To add insult to injury, because she wasn’t properly assessed and treated for her subtle brain injury at its inception, that sweet, innocent little girl spent the rest of her life being criticized, condemned, and misunderstood. She grew up feeling lonely, terribly sad, frustrated and confused, and was improperly labeled “mentally ill.” As an adult, she has proven unable to keep a job, because she never received proper rehabilitation for her injury. But how can one assess a microscopic injury with macroscopic diagnostic tools? How can a physician be absolutely sure a child’s executive functions are in tact when a child hasn’t had sufficient life experience for a doctor to be able to accurately assess his/her ability to function at an adult capacity? And yet, these doctors insisted that little girl was fine. On the contrary, her life history has proven she most definitely, was not.

I smell a whopping lawsuit here, and if I were more vindictive, and had the financial resources, I’d file it. My name is Stacey Sherwood, and I was the little girl in the story I just told you.

The day I took that fall, my life changed. I got lost in places I was formerly familiar with. I was easily distracted. Where once I was peace-loving, I was now picking fights with the little boys in my class. I was different; things were harder, but because I was only five, I didn’t understand what was happening to me and couldn’t find the words to express it. Furthermore, I was so embarrassed by my newfound idiocy, that I began trying to cover up and make excuses for the multitude of mistakes I was now making. I had a lousy sense of balance. I was awkward and uncoordinated.

The older I got, the harder life got. People and things made less and less sense. I grew into a frustrated, angry and depressed adolescent who couldn’t control her temper and started failing school by ninth grade. I was exhausted in class. I fell asleep at my desk and woke to find myself drooling all over my books. Only now do I understand that I was exhausted because I was asking more from my damaged brain than it was physically able to handle. I live with chronic migraines. I had few friends both growing up and now as an adult, because I am unable to perceive the social cues in the average interaction, so I inadvertently wind up offending others. I joke inappropriately. I lack self-control. I am unable to correctly assess what the possible consequences of my actions and words might be beforehand. I have spent most of my life feeling terrible about myself for having said or done something impulsively. I forget the most important of things. I have to think about smiling.

People always think I’m pissed, when really it’s flat affect. I just don’t fit in. I experience bizarre fits of emotion without cause. Like anxiety, fear, overwhelming sadness, and rage. I persist when I should cease and desist. I have no concept of time. I’m brilliant, but I don’t know how to use or access my brilliance. I have to be coached. My partner has to remind me to brush my teeth. If you show me how to get someplace in winter, you will have to show me again in spring, because the seasons change how the landscape looks and I will get lost. My memory is shoddy. I feel like an idiot. I seldom start what I finish. Employers and relatives call me lazy, but I‘m not. It has nothing to do with laziness or malingering as so many uninformed people have put it. I am crippled by a sporadic yet complete inability to force myself to do the things I know I need to do, even things I want to do at times. Even as I type, my partner is angry with me for not having followed through on some things I should have done today because I got sidetracked writing this and lost track of time. I’m perpetually pissing people off without meaning to and forever apologizing for my repeated failures and ineptitudes, all the while never really understanding exactly what it is that I‘ve done. If this paragraph seems disjointed and random, it’s because I have given you the benefit of seeing how my thoughts jump in real time, without the hours of editing I usually spend to make sure I get my point across correctly.

I was so despondent growing up, I took to writing poetry and immersing myself in music. I love to sing, and needed an outlet for my frustration and emotional pain, so I began writing songs about my life when I was seventeen, and taught myself how to play guitar. Music is the only thing I’ve been able to stick with over the course of my life. It’s wonderful, invigorating, cathartic, therapeutic and uplifting, but it certainly won’t pay my rent. I do believe I have genuine potential as a musician, but I will never be able to fully realize that potential, because I simply do not have the reflexes or motor skills to make my hands cooperate with my ambition. I almost always settle for an accompaniment that completely differs from the one I hear in my mind as a result. Still, music is the one constant in my life. And, once in a great and wonderful while, I am actually able to play what my mind hears. That’s my greatest joy in life. The kind of joy that brings tears to my eyes. I live for those rare and precious moments.

The one reason I so love using the written word and song to express myself, is because I can see and hear my thoughts laid out in front of me. Only then can I put them in their proper order and perspective. Writing affords me the time and space and quiet I need in order to make sense of and to the outside world. Conversation and interaction do not. I drift in and out of conversations and situations because I can’t focus. I often find myself smiling and nodding to hide the fact that I have no idea what has just been said. I’m there in body, but again, not in mind. It’s an awful way to live. Especially when no one can see a cognitive impairment. I’m attractive, well-spoken and ambulatory. On the surface, there appears to be nothing wrong with me. My disability is invisible save for the light scar on my forehead. Sadly, I am only one of countless walking wounded.

I’m currently un-rehabilitated, unemployed, uninsured and undereducated. I discovered that I was brain damaged 19 years after the fall, while living in Texas. As an aspiring singer/songwriter, I enlisted the help of a performance coach. After a short time working with me, she recognized my deficits and suggested I get help from the Texas Rehabilitation Commission. Unfortunately, budget constraints precluded my getting any actual rehabilitation. I got a couple dozen sessions with a psychologist and spent a few months in group home designed for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. I suppose their thinking was that this would properly socialize me. My disability has made it impossible for me to keep a job. During my 17 years as an adult, I’ve been through 38 jobs. My prognosis for a quality life is completely at the mercy of state and federal budgets. With no income and no insurance, I have been reduced to a common beggar. And beggars can‘t be choosers. I am forced to take what I can get, and often, what I can get really has very little to do with what I actually need. BIAOR has helped me find some of the resources I need to turn my damaged life around, and I have just recently begun that process.