Michael Paul Mason, author of Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath, spent years observing the effects of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) on people while working as a brain injury case manager. He even traveled to a hospital in Iraq, where he was surrounded by disabled veterans from both sides of the war.
Mason’s often-futile attempts to obtain assistance for brain injury survivors opened his eyes to the plight of this growing population of people, many of whom who are met with misunderstanding and neglect from society. His experiences also served as a fascinating resource from which to draw while writing Head Cases.
In the introduction to Head Cases, Mason presents several statistics to illustrate the number of people affected by traumatic brain injury. One such statistic aptly puts the enormity of the situation into perspective: “In America alone, so many people become permanently disabled by a brain injury that each decade they could fill a city the size of Detroit. Seven of these cities are filled already.”
After making readers aware of the magnitude of the problem, Mason takes it down to a more personal level by delving into the case studies of 12 brain injury patients – including how the injury has affected their families and friends. Among the patients are a snowboarder who experiences more than 120 seizures every month after a catastrophic crash and a former Air Force officer who believes he is dead as a result of encephalitis tinkering with his brain.
Even by focusing on only a dozen TBI cases, Mason makes it evident that the symptoms caused by brain injuries are myriad and not easily treated.
Through this journey into the lives of brain injury survivors, Mason not only conveys the fragility and complexity of the human brain, he reveals that America is already far behind in the race to adequately treat those with traumatic brain injury.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publish date: April 8, 2008
320 pages
ISBN-10: 0374134529
ISBN-13: 978-0374134525
