Dr. Claudia Osborn tells her amazing story of the transformation from an adept physician to a traumatic brain injury (TBI) patient following a life changing accident and of her long, painful journey of recovery. Her book is easy to read and understand and helps convey to the reader the experience of having a TBI from a very unique point of view - "from the Inside Looking Out".
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it was an eye-opening read for me. To have an actual TBI patient tell about her challenges and frustrations first-hand is a perspective we do not have the chance to hear very often. What makes this account even more compelling is Dr. Osborn's experience as a medical doctor and extensive knowledge of medicine. Her medical background allows for a very insightful read as she melds objective medical knowledge with her own personal feelings and emotions. The book is a mix of Dr. Osborn's personal accounts, passages taken from her personal notebook, as well as parts of her friends' journals. Together they help tell Dr. Osborn's journey to recovery. I highly recommend this book especially brain-injured patients, their friends and family, medical professionals, and anyone who is interested in brain injuries and happens to a person when his or her brain suffers from TBI.
Dr. Osborn opens with a very detailed account of a typical day in her life. What she purposely does not do, however, is give the reader initial context which leaves us slightly puzzled about why she is very specific about certain details. Dr. Osborn writes in detail about mundane tasks that we as readers would usually do normally without thinking much about. She explains her process of waking up and the thoughts that run through her mind, the steps of taking a shower and getting dressed, and her humorous adventure to look for a place she has not yet explained. On the way to her appointment, she forgets her bus money, returns to her apartment to get the money, realizes she didn't brush her hair and is only wearing one earring, and heads out again only to get lost and realize she was hungry because she forgot to eat breakfast. To the reader, this account may seem like the story of a very forgetful, eccentric lady until Dr. Osborn explains at the end of the first chapter where she is going for her appointment - the Head Trauma Program at New York University.
What Dr. Osborn does for the reader with this opening chapter is give them a feel of what it is like to suffer from traumatic brain injury. She presents the multitudes of challenges, problems, and frustrations a TBI patient may face on a typical day. She reveals the difficulties facing TBI patients in performing even simple tasks.
Dr. Osborn describes the events leading up to her accident and after she awakes in the hospital. She recalls, "[...] I could see white shoes and legs sheathed in surgical scrubs moving beneath a drawn white curtain. Everything looked familiar but the perspective was wrong. This was a hospital but I was in the bed. A hospital bed. Dear God, did I fall asleep in an empty room? Overworked doctors do that sometimes." Dr. Osborn was so injured she could not comprehend what happened to her as her friend tried to explain the accident. She writes, "[My friend] told me the details, I took nothing of what she was saying - not then or the next half dozen times I asked her. Over time, I learned the story."
Dr. Osborn goes on to explain her time in New York University's Head Trauma Program (HTP) which accounts for much of the book and recounts her long journey of recovery with the members of the program. In the process, she had to lose a lot of the objectiveness that she had developed and needed as a medical profession in order to recover. Essentially, she had to become the patient and instead of the doctor. Dr. Osborn writes, "[My HTP coach] had intuitively and correctly assessed that my many years of professional training had made my need for an objective demeanor second nature, even if, for the present purposes, it was an impediment." Eventually, Dr. Osborn recovers enough to return to medicine, an impressive feat of courage and perseverance.
The book all in all is extremely enlightening and educational. Dr. Osborn avoids writing in heavily technical terminology, making the book very easy to read even to those outside of the medical field or those without knowledge in neuroscience. There are moments of sadness, humor, and hope throughout and I highly recommend this book to anyone who has experienced brain injury, knows someone who has brain injury, or even potential be in contact with someone who has brain injury. The book is very hard to put down and exposes another side of brain injury we usually don't see every day.
I learned a lot from reading Dr. Osborn's inspirational story and hope that other readers feel the same.
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Top reviews from other countries
M J Kerr
Great book showing what a head injuly is like form the inside
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 31, 2019