Brain injury survivor: You are not alone

John Brady was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, an average student and member of the ice hockey club team.

“I was your stereotypical frat boy,” Brady, 37, said. “I grew up here in Bloomington.”

Then, the unthinkable happened.

“My accident was in 1991,” he said. “My little brother returned my motorcycle without telling me he wrecked it. I rode it, and I couldn’t steer it. Since he brought it back, I thought it was rideable. He said that I pounded on some railing.”

Brady suffered a traumatic brain injury and was in a coma for six months. He lost his sense of taste and smell due to damage to his olfactory nerve and lost all feeling in his left leg.

After nearly two years of rehabilitation, including a spinal-fusion surgery that allowed him to walk again, Brady has returned to IU to finish his associate’s degree in general studies. He currently has 12 credit hours left before completing his degree.

Cori Mitchell, also 37, shares a similar story.

She suffered her traumatic brain injury when she was involved in a car accident in November of 1987 in Colorado. After a month in a coma, two months in the hospital and three months of rehabilitation, Mitchell came to Bloomington to take courses at Ivy Tech Community College and IU. She maintained a C average while holding a job and dealing with her condition.

“The focus of my life was what I could become, but now it’s changed,” Mitchell said. “Now it’s trying to get back what I lost.”

Mitchell lost a lot, by all accounts.

She now suffers from ataxia, a lack of coordination above the brain stem, which can cause tremors. In her rehabilitation, Mitchell had to learn how to breathe properly, coordinate her body, retrain her eyes to dilate themselves to light and many other functions our bodies normally perform automatically.

“Breathing is number one,” she said. “I had to do this thing where my mother and father built this ladder made of wood and hung it from the ceiling of our recreation room. I had to swing from bar to bar, which helped the body build up coordination. At first, I had to have my parents spot me 100 percent to get from bar to bar, but eventually I learned how to swing and how to move. One of the hardest tasks was that.”

Brady had to use a method of training on parallel bars to learn how to walk again.

“I could only get, like, two or three inches, like baby steps, just to retrain my muscles to be able to walk,” Brady said.

Both Brady and Mitchell now face many challenges in their daily lives that most people take for granted, the biggest of which is transportation.

“I’m not able to drive,” Mitchell said. “Everywhere I go must be public transportation. I can’t just get up and go. My life is requiring much more planning and structure.”

Although day-to-day tasks have become more of a struggle for Brady and Mitchell, they have decided to learn from their accidents rather than use them as an excuse to give up on life.

An example of this sentiment is Mitchell’s work with abstract art, one of her passions. She enters her pieces in art contests, and, although she has yet to win, her efforts show the strength she has within herself to continue doing what she loves despite the obstacle of ataxia.

“I’m very good with colors and what colors go well together,” she said. “I like to kind of be alone with my art and with my radio on.”

Brady’s injury has brought him a different perspective on life.

“For me, it brought a sense of maturity,” Brady said. “I grew into accepting people for what they are. I was mature enough to know what was right and wrong, but I still made those wrong choices.”

The two deal with life as it comes, take each day as a blessing and face their struggles in stride.

Mitchell believes that life is full of obstacles, but that you can get through them with the help of others and your own strength.

“If you look around, everyone has their own set of problems,” Mitchell said. “You are not alone.”