"HEAD CASES," Stories of Brain Injury and It's Aftermath by Michael Paul Mason

I've just finished reading Head Cases. Mason, the author is a "brain injury case manager," for a rehab facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The hospital has limited facilities and it is Mason's job to travel the country meeting and evaluating people who have suffered serious brain injuries who are likely to benefit from an intensive rehab program. He writes that there is a crisis with the number of brain-injured Americans on the rise:

As many as 5.3 million Americans are living with a permanent disability resulting from a brain injury, a full 2 percent of the population. The Centers for disease Control and Prevention reports that 1.4 million Americans sustain a brain injury each year, and that fifty thousand people die from that injury.

The book describes the struggles of the people he meets, who desperately need help, and the hard choices that he is forced to make. And these numbers do not do justice to the problems of veterans who receive extraordinary emergency medical care so that the survival rate from injuries sustained in battle from bomb blasts etc., is extraordinary, but who then are the victims of the general collapse of the U.S. medical system. I want to call it to the attention to everyone concerned with the need to address the present U.S. healthcare crisis, and particulary folks like Jim and Ilona and DEFuning who have special interest in the problems of PTSD. He writes with great empathy for people with brain injuries despite the problems they face in processing information and functioning in a demanding enviroment nonetheless struggle not loose the essential humanity. This is a book it was hard for me to put down and I highly recommend it.