Luckily, my friends and family would encourage me and I decided that I would recover for them. After almost a 6 month hospitalization involving surgeries, tube placements and removals, and a whole lot of therapy, I was discharged from the hospital and I moved in with my mother while I recovered. 

My Struggle:

I was alive, but I had lost everything! I was to continue therapy, but I hit a wall. I wasn’t progressing much anymore and I feared I never would.

After months in the hospital of being fed liquid nutrition with vegetable oil, corn syrup solids, and soy protein isolate, I was steered towards a nutritional protocol. I was skeptical that it would do anything and I asked a lot of questions. The damage was to my brain, not my belly. Why are we working on my digestion?” I thought.

But my functional neurologist had studied and successfully worked with other brain injury survivors, so I did what he said… even if it didn’t make sense at first. I vowed that if I didn’t get better, it wouldn’t be because I didn’t try. I was not going to allow myself to look back on what I was told was a relatively short period of “rapid recovery” with regrets…

My Transformation:

So I took some foods out of my diet… I added other foods, supplements, liquids, and powders into my diet… and I started doing vision and vestibular exercises that were absolutely exhausting and seemed ridiculous to me at the time. 

And then something amazing happened… one day I woke up with a noticeable degree of mental clarity! And I suspected that it had a lot to do with the food I was eating.

“Wow!” I thought, “this nutrition and supplement protocol is actually making a real difference!” 

So why didn’t they tell me this in the hospital? And what else didn’t they tell me?”  

I realized that the doctors don’t have all the answers like I had been told and I needed a plan. 

So I used my new found clarity to study everything I could to give myself the best edge to recover. I empowered myself.  I started a blog called Adventures in Brain Injury where I documented my recovery. While writing this blog, I was also in therapy and relearning how to walk, talk and use my hand, and while at home, I was using the Internet to educate myself on functional medicine, functional nutrition, and naturopathic medicine. 

I was using my brain to heal my brain!

I spent hours a day watching videos, listening to podcasts, reading articles, learning how to read peer reviewed medical research, and I even enrolled in online courses from universities renowned for their excellence in medical education and research. 

I began taking courses in neurology, nutrition, physiology, digestion, and more from universities like Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the University of Chicago, CalTech, and Duke University. 

I was studying because I wanted to become a doctor… and I was so fortunate to see that my damaged brain could do it! 

My Revelation:

As I studied, I noticed a huge discrepancy between what I was reading in the research and what I was learning from the universities. I was also learning from clinicians who were getting real results with their patients and sometimes these clinicians were doing the opposite of what was being taught at the universities… particularly when it came to nutrition. And what these clinicians were doing was working very well! And… I had also felt and saw firsthand that there was crucial utility to natural foods, therapies, and treatments that are not part of the standard of care in medicine.

How is it that nutrition, a crucial piece of the puzzle, is not only inaccurate in our education system, but also inaccurate in our healthcare system?

While I was completely perplexed at the time, the bottom line was that I needed to recover… I needed real world results… not academic consensus. So I created a framework for how I was going to choose my treatments in order to optimize my recovery potential. 

By using this framework and empowering and educating myself, I began to regain my abilities at an accelerated rate! I was soon able to walk without a walker and began taking long walks in my neighborhood. I also began to regain my ability to type and I even started to play guitar again! I was also getting my voice back and taking it to the next level by learning how to sing.