Surviving Traumatic Brain Injury

SURVIVORS SPEAK OUT! Sandee Rodriguez

Survivors SPEAK OUT! Sandee Rodriguez

presented by

Donna O’Donnell Figurski

1. What is your name? (last name optional)

Sandee Rodriguez

2. Where do you live? (city and/or state and/or country) Email (optional)

Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA

3. On what date did you have your brain injury? At what age?

January 4, 1995     I was 24.

4. How did your brain injury occur?

Nasty car accident

5. When did you (or someone) first realize you had a problem?

Immediately. I was unconscious and paralyzed.

6. What kind of emergency treatment, if any, did you have?

I was airlifted to the hospital of the University of Michigan.

7. Were you in a coma? If so, how long?

Yes. Two weeks.

8. Did you do rehab? What kind of rehab (i.e., inpatient or outpatient and occupational and/or physical and/or speech and/or other)? How long were you in rehab?

I was in outpatient rehab for seven hours a day at Med Rehab in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had physical, occupational, speech, talk, and recreational therapies. I also had retrograde amnesia. (At 24, I woke up with my past erased.)

9. What problems or disabilities, if any, resulted from your brain injury
(e.g., balance, perception, personality, etc.)?

I had problems with all of the examples listed.

10. How has your life changed? Is it better? Is it worse?

This question has no easy or short answer.

11. What do you miss the most from your pre-brain-injury life?

My pre-injury life is still a blank mostly.

12. What do you enjoy most in your post-brain-injury life?

I appreciate the experiences I may not have had if my TBI (traumatic brain injury) had never happened. It’s different every day.

13. What do you like least about your brain injury?

Having it. It stopped the life I was creating at a time people become fully realized adults. 

14. Has anything helped you to accept your brain injury?

I have been helped by my family and by the tenacity I have.

15. Has your injury affected your home life and relationships and, if so, how?

Other people have had issues with my brain injury. Those people are no longer in my life.

16. Has your social life been altered or changed and, if so, how?

I have no active social life.

17. Who is your main caregiver? Do you understand what it takes to be a caregiver?

I am my own caregiver. My husband helps with what I ask. My mom and stepdad and my aunt were my caregivers in the beginning.

18. What are your plans? What do you expect/hope to be doing ten years from now?

The musical I wrote about my life with a TBI will be on Broadway by then.

19. Are you able to provide a helpful hint that may have taken you a long time to learn, but which you wished you had known earlier? If so, please state what it is to potentially help other survivors with your specific kind of brain injury.

(I don’t understand this question due to some aphasia I have now.)

20. What advice would you offer to other brain-injury survivors? Do you have any other comments that you would like to add?

Carpe diem (seize the day) and be easy on yourself. Meet one challenge at a time.

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