DISABILITIES

By Daniel J. Vance

It's this clear-cut: John Fletcher of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., shouldn't have recovered so well from traumatic brain injury (TBI). But he has.

“My life now is absolutely wonderful,” he said. “I've gotten hold of the American dream again.” Today, the 41-year-old Fletcher and two relatives own a masonry company. He reads this column in the Fort Walton Sun.

Fletcher acquired TBI in December 1988 at age 25 while working as a seasonal snowmobile guide and mechanic in northern New Mexico. “I don't recall the accident,” he said in a telephone interview. “Police reports say I fell asleep while driving a snowmobile. I had been working more than 18 hours every day.”

In 11 degrees below zero weather and 11,700 feet above sea level, the snowmobile he was driving nosedived off a 50-foot cliff. Emergency workers rushed him to hospitals in Taos and later Albuquerque. During a 17-day coma when his body weight dropped to 90 pounds, doctors gave him a 10 percent chance of survival.

“In Albuquerque they told my wife I was guaranteed to be inpatient for two months and outpatient for two years. But after less than a month inpatient I went home.”

In Tacoma, Wash., his hometown, he began a six-hour daily routine of occupational, physical and speech therapy. Amazingly, only eleven months later he was working part-time at a saw shop.

“My short-term memory was affected, not my long-term,” he said. “At first, I could remember all about walking, tying my shoes and taking showers, I just didn't know how. Running was the last thing that came back to me.”

Perhaps his most difficult struggle the first years involved managing anger, common among TBI survivors.

“[TBI] put a tremendous strain on our marriage relationship,” he said. “In Albuquerque doctors told my wife that 80 percent of marriages involving TBI fail. We'd been married only one year. It took me years to control my anger.”

Today, except for some short-term memory lapses, he says he has full recovery. He attributes it to supportive family members and a determination to “become John again, my old self.”

“I'm a walking miracle,” he said. “To look at me today, you wouldn't believe it. More or less, I set out to prove the doctors wrong. They had book knowledge, but I had 'John' knowledge.”

For more, see www.danieljvance.com or www.ninds.nih.gov