This is a part of podcast series from the Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center on Disorders of Consciousness. Gail Strom, mother of Hannah, shares her personal experience navigating the emotional ups and downs of a loved one’s recovery from a disorder of consciousness. 

So this type of injury? Yes, it's unpredictable. It was described as a roller coaster. There's going to be ups and downs, and then it's going to be up again and oh, this is great, but then it's going to be kind of rock bottom again. And it was almost like the roller coaster of up and down. You may never get to here again, but then you go up and you're going to come here and then up. And so it was kind of the climbing rollercoaster. It was described as a lot of ups and downs. So that was hard. You kind of had to have, you had to be prepared for the bad days. How I tried to handle that was I tried to do something positive on the bad days. So if it was a bad day, I happened to have a neighbor who was living next door, and she and I would regroup at night.

And if it was a bad day, we would do something positive, whether we would walk the loop of the floor, five times around was a mile. And then we'd turn around and go and we would pass the rooms. And every time we passed, we looked in to make sure, made sure Hannah was okay, but we just tried to keep positive all the time, but especially on the bad days. And even one day her family member had a milestone. So we ordered out, I think a dessert that got delivered to the desk and we celebrated. So it was like we tried to do the best we could inside here.

 Visit https://msktc.org/tbi and get the answers you need from experts who conduct innovative and high-quality research, provide patient care, and work to improve the health and overall quality of life for people with traumatic brain injury. That’s https://msktc.org/tbi.