Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been brought to the fore by the war in Iraq, but not only soldiers experience it. Mason, a case manager in Tulsa, Okla., for people living with TBI, writes with passion and urgency about the unheralded but compelling stories of Americans injured in car accidents or through a miscalculation while snowboarding. Their lives are disrupted by seizures, memory loss, psychosis. One of Mason's clients is an ambitious former air force officer who now goes into waking trances in which he thinks he's dead, as a result of a herpes virus emerging from its hiding place to invade his brain. Mason lays out a damning indictment of the health-care system's failure to provide facilities and services that millions like his clients need. He also tells stories of tremendous courage and perseverance as survivors and their families work to re-establish the everyday skills they had before their injury. The strange effects of neurological damage will draw fans of Oliver Sacks, but Mason's poignant and caring accounts of his clients' lives are sure to touch the hearts of a wide range of readers. (Apr.)