Claudia L. Osborn - Over My Head: A Doctors Own Story of Head Injury from the Inside Looking Out

A graduate of Vassar College and Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, Claudia Osborn is currently associate clinical professor of internal medicine at MSU. Until 1988, she had an innercity Detroit hospital practice in internal medicine. Dr. Osborn lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

OverMyHead copyright 1998 by Claudia L. Osborn. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information write Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

APPR

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:
Getting On with It by Grace Butcher and If I Had My Life to Live Over by Nadine Stair from If I Had My Life to Live Over I Would Pick More Daisies, edited by Sandra Haldeman Martz, 1992 Papier-Mache Press. Used by permission.
If I Live, 1977 by Cris Williamson, Bird Ankles Music (BMI). All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.
Lets Face the Music and Dance, words and music by Irving Berlin, from FollowtheFleet, 1936.
Wild Grapes from ThePoetryofRobertFrost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, 1951 by Robert Frost, 1969 by Henry Holt & Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt & Co., Inc.
Dropkick Me Jesus, words and music by Paul Craft, 1972 Screen GemsEMI Music Inc. and Black Sheep Music. All rights controlled and administered by Screen GemsEMI Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Osborn, Claudia L.

Over my head : a doctors own story of head injury from the inside looking out / by Claudia L. Osborn.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

E-ISBN: 978-0-7407-8663-1

1. Brain damagePatientsMichiganBiography. 2. InternistMichiganBiography.

I. Title.

RC387.5.083 1998

362.1!97481!0092

Cover design by Tom McKeveny
Author photo by Marcia E. Baker

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It is a daunting task for me to make my thoughts clear. My difficulty in telling this story was compounded by the deficits in my memory, language, and organizational skills. I have no memory of being injured and only a dim recollection of the nine months preceding my rehabilitation in New York. To compensate, I relied upon the memories of those close to me, copious notes from my journals, video and audiotapes, and the assistance of my mother, who organized boxes of my papers and edited my manuscript.

Some journal entries quoted in the book have been edited by me for clarity. My intention is to candidly portray what it is like to live with a head injury, not to require you to decipher my language at that time. The essays between chapters, entitled Piece of Mind, are excerpts from my journals, written at various times and used here to illuminate an idea or capture a feeling, and are unrelated to the story line.

As to the latter, I took creative license in setting scenes and recreating conversations in order to tell this experience in the rstperson voice, as a story, rather than as a medical documentary. The prologue is an example. During this period I was virtually incapable of registering detailed or structured information and recorded nothing beyond the essential. As a result, the circumstances and details used to describe some situations may have actually occurred later. However, the situations occurredoften over and over. Because those most involved have read this account and occasionally supplied a missing detail I am reassured that, while details and conversations may not be exact, they are nonetheless true.

The names of my fellow trainees and the professionals responsible for my rehabilitation are used with their permission. I have provided some anonymity to my preinjury medical work environment. All patients and certain minor characters have been given pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

This book is, of necessity, about the grief accompanying the loss of ones self. More important, it is about the process of rehabilitation and the building of a new life. It is also an attempt to provide insight into what happens when neural pathways in the brain are damaged and the most sophisticated computer in the universe goes awry.

I hope to show the effect head injury has on behavior and personality, and how thinking and problemsolving ability can be so altered that the simplest actions require extraordinary conscious effort. My purpose is to forever change the way you see someone you love, know, or employ who has experienced a brain injury.

We are different, we know it, and we would give much to have the dimensions of that loss understood, and thereby bridge the chasm between those of you who have not had this experience and those of us who have.

C.L.O.

Hello... Im in a phone booth at the corner of Walk and Dont Walk.

ANONYMOUS

A blast of music from WABC-FM blew my eyes open. I lay still, fully awake if not informed by what I saw. My eyes surveyed the room searching for a hint of something familiar.

Nothing.

I struggled upright, my protesting back announcing the quality of my sofa hide-a-bed, reached out, and tapped the clock radio into silence. Traffic noises wafted in through the open window, so I knew I was in a city.

If I had thought about it at all, I would have been surprised at how someone as curious as I am by nature could feel so little interest in waking up in a clearly alien place. Yet I sat quietly, devoid of wonder, serene in my disorientation. The most familiar part of waking up was its unfamiliarity. I was accustomed to it. I had become one of the fortunate few who could be catapulted through a time warp and arrive unruffled in Never-Never-Land in the twenty-third century. I wouldnt know it wasnt a typical day.