Story of a Brain Injury - CTV's W5

Inside Television 530

Publication Date: 12-03-10

By: Hubert O'Hearn

Those who know me well, or at least regularly follow this space, will understand why I am choosing a particular program to promote this week. I hope that it won't prove a disappointment that I'm not writing about a Christmas special, although as this is a story about will and family and love I do like to think that it matches this season's purported themes.

This Saturday evening and repeated again on Sunday afternoon across the full CTV network, W5's Sandie Rinaldo will tell you the story of Captain Trevor Green. Whilst serving in Afghanistan in 2006, was blind-sided with an axe-blow to the head during what was supposed to have been a routine meeting with village elders. He wasn't killed, but was left with a massive amount of brain damage.

There is no real telling how an injury to one area of the brain or another will affect a person. The old story is absolutely true of a railroad foreman being felled by a spike driven through his skull yet got up and proceeded to yell orders and lead a normal life afterwards; or as normal as one can be with a doughnut hole through the cranium. On the other hand, lobotomies which were performed in the 1940s through the 1960s on the 'uncontrollably mentally ill' with the intent of only slightly dulling the patient's energy often left dull and empty shells where once there stood a man or a woman.

In the case of Captain Green, the axe did not sever his personality nor his will. You see, Green was engaged to Debbie Lepore and damn it, he was going to walk that aisle and stand for that ceremony.

It took four years. I'm not really giving away an ending here; television rarely features noble failures. But the story of Trevor Green's recovery is one that – well, I hope you never have to live through anything similar but if you do, you will be much the better off for the knowledge.

A brain injury is unlike any other illness or physical malady. Improvement and recovery is measured in inches, not in feet. I've recovered from open heart surgery and relatively one is leaping about like a stag from bed to chair, chair to hall and once around the floor. No, a brain injury is inches; it is syllable by syllable, thought by thought, and one second more of memory than there was yesterday, last week, last month, or last year.

As a tale of will and a demonstration of the massive amounts of therapy, community and family support required to assist the patient back into a world with a goal of love, I don;t know how this story can fail to move your hearts.

Be seeing you.