Warriors Guide to TBI

Traumatic Brain Injury.  I have observed an overwhelming number of veterans who have TBIs who really don't know very much about how it is affecting their daily lives or what they could be doing about it beyond what the military and VA offered directly after the event.  In my opinion, this is a great disservice to our veterans.  Where are all the nonprofits benefitting from research from neurological studies on how to best heal a TBI?  I know there are some, working as hard as they can, but this is not a forefront issue currently.  More veterans are surviving, and different kinds of weapons are injuring them than in any war before.  We have a massive amount of young to middle-aged men who walk around every day with a brain that is actively healing.  It is atrocious to me that I know more about their injuries than they do, neurologically speaking, and I'm just a yoga teacher.  

They call TBI an invisible wound of war.  It is invisible, sometimes even to the persons who suffer from it. Anything going on in your own brain is hard to see for yourself.  Immediately upon enduring a TBI, soldiers are carried off to the hospital where they are monitored and then discharged to continue healing at home.  There can be many unpleasant physical symptoms that follow in the next weeks, months, and sometimes years such as blurry vision, headaches, nausea, and all kinds of not-so-fun stuff, but these symptoms are obvious.  What happens further down the road to healing when these apparent and physical symptoms resolve, but the brain still has healing to do?  The person looks and feels fine, but what about their cognitive skills, sleep habits, and interpersonal relationships?  A TBI can completely change someone's personality in severe cases, or just subtly in other cases.