Writing in the New York Times Magazine, David Bergner profiles an Iraq veteran who cannot speak and is barely able to move, the result of a traumatic brain injury that occurred when a mine exploded under his Humvee. Shurvon Phillip (left, with his mother, Gail) is one of an estimated 900 returning veterans with TBI, one of the war’s signature wounds.

Supported by his mother, as well as a pioneering neurologist and a Cleveland lawyer who took up the fight for his care, Phillip has made great progress in the three years since doctors thought him incapable of purposeful movement. Now, his mother says, this man who had been considered “the brains of the family” wants to earn a master’s degree.

The article’s conclusion:

… [When I heard that Phillip could correctly answer multiple-choice comprehension questions] I thought that there seemed little reason that Shurvon couldn’t someday earn a master’s degree. But at other moments the reasons appeared too immense ever to be overcome; the notion of college, let alone graduate school, seemed merely a soothing fantasy. And sometimes impossible to overcome, too, was the idea that Shurvon’s life might not be worth living; that I, in his place, would rather stop breathing, cease thinking, that I would prefer to die.

Whenever this idea took hold, I recalled a medical ethicist at R.I.C. telling me about studies showing that doctors and nurses tend to rate the quality of life of severely impaired patients to be far lower than the patients do themselves. The ethicist had spoken, then, about the ways that a life acquires meaning. And I thought about Malik scrambling onto Shurvon’s bed to show him pictures, and about Malik and Kyla [Phillip's nephew and niece] curled and comforted on the floor below him. I thought, too, about a kind of exercise that Shurvon’s family discovered recently by chance and that Gail [his mother] described: with Shurvon sitting in a wheelchair in the driveway, his nieces and nephews tossed inflatable beach balls, one pink and another blue, softly toward him, and he tried to move his arms to bat them back. “They were cheering like at a baseball game,” Gail said, remembering the first time the children did this. “ ‘Yeah! Go on Ya-Ya!’ ” Beach balls and high voices of excitement floated in the air around him.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under brain damage, caregivers, families, parents, quality of life, rehabilitation, veterans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post