Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath
Author: Michael Paul Mason
Head Cases takes us into the dark side of the brain in an astonishing sequence of stories, at once true and strange, from the world of brain injury.
Michael Paul Mason is one of an elite group of experts who appear in the wake of tragic accidents and coordinate care that can last a lifetime. On the road with Mason, we encounter survivors of brain injuries as they struggle to map and make sense of the new worlds they inhabit. We meet a snowboarder whose life became permanently surreal after an errant jump; an "ultraviolent" child who has lost the brain's instinctive check on the impulse to strike out at others; a young man who cannot cry; and an Iraq war veteran whose odd maladies suggest that brain injury will be the war's most conspicuous legacy.
Underlying each of their stories is an exploration into the brain and its mysteries. When injured, the brain must figure out how to heal itself, reorganizing its physiology in order to do the job, and Mason gives us a series of vivid glimpses into brain science, the last frontier of medicine. We come away in awe of the miracles of the brain's workings and astonished at the fragility of the brain and the sense of self, life, and order that resides there. Head Cases echoes both Oliver Sacks and Raymond Carver, and is at once illuminating and deeply affecting.
The New York Times - William Grimes
…[an] episodic tour of brain injuries and the strange behavior that often accompanies them…As a writer, Mr. Mason stakes out a position midway between Oliver Sacks and Oprah Winfrey. He goes light on the science, presenting his case studies primarily as human dramas. We meet the loved ones, revisit the hometowns, relive in minute detail the horrific accidents that caused the injuries.
The New York Times Book Review - Mary Roach
Mason deftly conveys the frustrations and inequities of traumatic brain injury…Mason performs a valuable service by calling attention to the plight of the brain injured. From reading Oliver Sacks, I had come to think of neurological dysfunction as an almost fanciful affliction, its victims like characters in a work of magical realism. Mason has provided a needed, and sobering, account of reality.
Publishers Weekly
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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.James Swanton - Library Journal
Brain injuries are too common, with as many as 5.3 million Americans-two percent of the population-living with a disability resulting from a head injury. Through 12 narratives of traumatic brain injury (TBI), Mason, a professional brain-injury case manager, makes real just how devastating TBI is to survivors and their families. Readers meet Cheyenne, an aspiring actor whose snowboarding accident has led to grand mal seizures that tear muscles and lacerate skin; Brian, a six-year-old suffering a brain tumor and violent fits of rage; and Julie, a car accident survivor who cannot retrieve memories. Mason also demonstrates how painfully inadequate treatment facilities and services are. Ironically, as medical advances improve TBI survivor statistics, resources for treatment are ever more strained, and, with the types of injuries that terrorism and the Iraq War make commonplace, Mason reports that the severely brain injured are being neglected, misplaced, and isolated. The facts of TBI are grim, but Mason succeeds in giving a strong voice and profound humanity to its victims. This unusually well-written, disturbing book is highly recommended for public libraries and health collections.
Kirkus Reviews
Dispassionate neuroscience meets fierce advocacy in this heartbreaking but hopeful look at the little-understood world of those who suffer traumatic brain injuries. Mason is a traumatic brain-injury case manager; brain-injury survivors (an estimated 5.3 million in the United States) go to him after they've exhausted every other option. His mission is getting help for people stuck in the purgatory of the U.S. healthcare system. His job, which takes him across the country, is convincing hospital administrators and neurologists and specialty care centers to give clients suffering debilitating brain injuries a new chance at life. Currently, Mason reports, there are at least 90,000 Americans with a brain injury severe enough to require an extended stay in rehab, but there are only a few thousand specialty beds, even fewer for patients whose disabilities are not just mental and physical but emotional. Clients include a man with encephalitis who is convinced he is dead; a woman with no memory, not even of the daughter who was killed in the car wreck that left her disabled; and an amnesiac serving time for a crime he can't remember committing. These patients' initial injuries are only prologues to the real tragedies, which begin when healthcare policies run out, or government support goes dry, and the severely disabled victims are left to fend for themselves, in many cases bankrupting their families. Few of the stories end happily: one client attempts suicide; another ends up in a mental hospital with no brain-injury experts on staff. Mason's goal here is to convey awareness, not to uplift. Intriguing case histories, related with a personal passion that sets Mason's book apart from Oliver Sacks'scooler writings on the subject. Agent: Anne Garrett/James Fitzgerald Agency
Table of Contents:
Introduction 3
The Hermit of Hollywood Boulevard 12
A Prisoner of the Present 43
An Insult to the Brain 65
Rob Rabe Cannot Cry 73
Portrait of an Injury 97
The Only Thing That Works 110
The Resurrection of Doug Bearden 119
Ultraviolent Bryan 147
Fugue of the Pony Soldier 176
In All Earnestness 205
The Hospital in the Desert 224
Wood of the Suicides 245
Conclusion 274
My Breakfast with Marilyn 283
Notes and Sources 287
Resources for the Care and Management of Brain Injuries 297
Acknowledgments 299
Index 303
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