Managing TBI and finding success

Managing TBI and finding success

Schuyler:

I had trouble orientating myself in a vehicle; sometimes I get confused in intersections or certain traffic situations and that was interesting because I was always a land nav guy; maps and coordinates, that's my specialty and now all of a sudden, I can't drive a car. I'm having trouble changing lanes and stuff. The GPS would be telling me to make a right and I would have so much trouble concentrating and focusing on what I was doing that I would drive right by that right turn, while it's saying, “Turn right here. Turn right here. Recalculating,” and I'm just out in another world. Sometimes, I don't know how I was driving a car. I had trouble concentrating. I had a lot of trouble reading. It was hard for me to read. It put a lot of strain on my eyes. It was hard for me to use the computer a lot. When I got out of the military, I had a lot of issues concentrating, reading out loud or talking for long periods of time. My loved ones were frustrated with me because I couldn't complete simple tasks that I used to be able to do and not only did I have to learn that I had a traumatic brain injury, but they had to learn that too. They had to learn not to get frustrated with me. They had to learn different tasks to help them help me remember what I needed to do.

I worked with the speech pathologist and TBI Clinic at the VA and they helped me improve my speech. They helped reduce a lot of the eye strain I had when I was reading and, in a few months, I was in school and school is challenging, you know, I have to read a lot. I have to speak in public a lot. I have to maintain a schedule. I have all sorts of time constraints that I’m not used to experiencing since I got out of the military and the skills that they taught me at the TBI Clinic and at speech pathology, they were all relevant and they all helped in my transition to school.