Traumatic Brain Injury
Does Brain Injury Life Feel Like a Healing Journey?
Personal Perspective: Faith and perseverance battle naysayers in my TBI odyssey.
Posted April 28, 2025 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
When I was 16, my grandmother’s physique puzzled me. Her shape suggested obesity, but her limbs and face contradicted my observation. I asked my father, a gastroenterologist and professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, about this puzzle. He obviously knew the answer; he refused to tell me. He sent me away to figure it out for myself. So I headed for my high school library.
I sat on the floor between stacks, perusing a pile of medical books, when I hit on the answer like I’d struck a hidden vein of gold. The sense of pride, the rush of enthusiasm and triumph at figuring it out and presenting it to my father, has remained with me all my life.
It’s why when anyone presented with a disease or condition I didn’t know about, I’d research it, poring over medical tomes, textbooks, biographies, and, since the 1990s, online journals or well-researched articles. If, before my brain injury, anyone had told me they’d been diagnosed with brain injury — and had suggested books to me that their rehab had recommended to them — I’d have not only bought those books, I’d have parked myself in the library until I’d read up on everything I could find that’d help me support them.
It’s why I couldn’t understand my well-educated social network not doing so.
Nor comprehend the many medical professionals assuming they knew enough not to read up on it. The counselling GP who refused to spend an hour talking with my diagnosing physician about brain injury because he had no time for that was not an outlier but the norm.
The lack of curiosity and aversion to join me in recovery fought against my efforts to heal.
When the Brain Injury Society of Toronto (BIST) asked artists to express their brain injury odyssey, I thought of my decades-long struggle to persevere against the naysayers. They asked, “How has your experience of life with brain injury evolved? Does it feel like a journey of healing?”
Short answer: No.
I received two messages early on in my journey: (1) I was not worth saving. And (2) the medical system doesn’t believe learning for the sake of curing patients is worth professionals' time and energy.
My faith that God would guide me to treatments persevered against those who wanted me to quit pursuing full healing, the ones who scoffed at neurostimulation, and the ones who refused to learn, participate in, and support me in my brainwave-based treatment programs. No matter how slowly God worked, or during my times of doubt, my belief hummed quietly like an everlasting battery.
While I discovered one treatment after another, with fallow years in between, others who’ve followed have benefited from the whole of what I’ve learnt. They’ve been inspired by how I found brain injury treatments that target the cause and eliminate one symptom after another through permanent healing instead of managing them.
I’m not inspired.
I’m angry; bitter; sad; sometimes proud that I’ve been the guinea pig that lead other people’s lives to being fully restored.
I’m saddened that 20 years after I began brain biofeedback, a treatment now long since proven to heal brain damage, physicians still do not refer patients to it. Too many concussion clinics still do not provide it nor prescribe at-home devices. Hospital outpatient clinics remain impervious to learning neurostimulation or neuromodulation methods. They cling to 20th-century knowledge and limited ideas of neuroplasticity.
Every victory I attained on my own came at the cost of battling blinkered minds, despairing doctor appointments, and being subjected to lectures against pursuing active neurostimulation or neuromodulation treatments by one or more of my social network who hadn’t read one book on brain injury, not even the one my rehab recommended. These experiences sucked my energy, robbing me of the full healing power of active brainwave-based treatments.
Neurostimulation and neuromodulation treatments are hard work.
Your brain is having to rewire or regenerate or both. It’s like rebuilding muscle, healing bones, and restoring endurance after major physical injuries. Having to exert willpower against the headwind of those who prefer strategies and behavioral therapies over neurostimulation drained me. I questioned where God is. Am I supposed to fight for every good thing to restore myself? Am I to exhaust myself seeking before God will send me the person and funding I need? Yet it’s my faith that God wants us to heal, not just live with devastating symptoms, that lifts me up out of a season of quitting, to try again.
As I create my artwork, I think about BIST’s second question. Despite my radical healing and the massive strides in my cognition, writing, reading, conversational skills, energy, stamina, mobility, I don’t feel like it’s been a journey of healing because of these battles. I doubt many doctors have gone to the modern equivalent of the library where I went to research my grandmother’s condition when I was 16 to research brain injury. I attacked my research about my grandmother and, decades later, brain injury treatment without presuppositions. But in seeking help, too many times I've encountered out-of-date and/or plain wrong presuppositions about brain injury and treatments. Assumptions hinder healing.
Struggling against this blinkered thinking for 25 years has worn me down. Yet I believe God didn’t send me to the very few innovative clinics to show me neurostimulation’s healing power for me to now give up using my at-home devices. These devices continue to heal my brain. And I look for moments of joy to fuel perseverance.
I will probably never attain a full cure nor my pre-injury energy levels. That permanent loss I lay at the feet of incurious doctors, afraid to learn and apply decades-old proven knowledge to their practices, who shook their heads at the idea of saying, “I don’t know but let me join you in learning and actively help you heal.”
Copyright ©2025 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy
