However Long It Takes

If you are a caregiver, nurse, medical staff, family, or maybe a loved one to a person with a brain injury, or possibly a reader who knows we don''t all live the fictionally perfect "Hollywood Life," you must read my book. You will look at life from behind the eyes of my eighty-eight-year-old mother who was encumbered and burdened with a left-sided brain injury.

It not only scrambled her memory and brain, it scrambled the lives of all who loved her as well. A blood clot was putting pressure on her brain.

Mother could no longer live alone, so I started writing down her incidents and accidents, our conversations and her confusion, and our activities as we traveled together down an unknown road. I started writing to keep my family updated. We were blessed to get to keep our mother longer following her cranial surgery, but we found we had been gifted with a revised edition. She did not come with an instruction manual. The world that slowly encompassed her, and the difficulty she had residing in the world she used to know, made memories that were far too precious, far too unique, far too emotional not to write about, so that''s just what I did.

These stories did not have to be created, embellished, or made up, for reality took us on an awesome adventure that began with my mother''s cranial surgery.

My son and I climbed into her world, as she was not comfortable in ours. She had lost the memory of most of her life, but amazingly, she remembered her own childhood like it was yesterday. Many times, she told me she must go home because her parents didn''t know where she was, and they would be waiting for her. She was wandering and lost in the first quarter of her life.