Traumatic Brain Injury and the Northeast Center for Special Care

Abstract

No disability more than traumatic brain injury (TBI) reminds us of our own mortality. While the relationship between normality and disability is tenuous, we are reassured that by adulthood we escaped such childhood disabilities as autism and attention deficit and learning disorders. TBI, however, lives with us as a constant specter and we are vulnerable despite our caution. For example, although TBI occurs most often with risk-taking males, Erich Miethner is the inevitable exception. Miethner could not recall what caused his accident; one moment he was standing, the next he was on the floor paralyzed from the neck down. This example might be catalogued under “freak accident,” but the trouble is that we are all vulnerable to the freak accident, unable to take precautions however slight the possibility might be.

Courage, in its final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence, which must be borne for the actualization of one’s own nature.

—Goldstein and Scheerer, 1941, p. 240