Lee Woodruff - brain injury seminar

originally written May 2010

As I have said before, the Brain Injury Program at Scripps Encinitas is fabuloso.  They called the house one day to ask if my parents and I would be interested in being interviewed and photographed by the Union Tribune newspaper when they covered a story about brain injury and the annual conference being held at Scripps La Jolla this year.  And, we were invited to attend the conference and listen to Lee Woodruff speak about brain injury and its affect on her family.  She and her husband co wrote a book and if I can get just one person to read their book and begin to understand brain injury then I will feel like my struggle has made a difference.  Please read  In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing by Lee and Bob Woodruff, its brilliantly written and you will have a greater understanding of Brain Injury when you have read and digested their book.



Caring for brain-injured is subject of seminar



By Keith Darcé, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER






Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 12:05 a.m.





(photo from the grocery store goes here)
Steve Schlimmer helped his daughter, Nikki, with a shopping list last week at a supermarket. Nikki Schlimmer suffered a serious brain injury during a fall last year. Her therapy sessions have been cut by her insurer. 


LA JOLLA— For Lee Woodruff, wife of the ABC News anchor who was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2006, the kindest act directed at her after her husband’s injuries came weeks after the explosion.
One of Bob Woodruff’s physical therapists asked Lee Woodruff how she was handling things, the author and TV news editor said yesterday in La Jolla, where she spoke to a packed room of health providers who care for brain-injured patients.
“Floodgates,” Woodruff said, recalling her reaction to the inquiry. “An entire box of tissue was gone.”
More tears came when the therapist began massaging Woodruff’s neck.
“Human touch is so important,” she said.
But doctors, nurses and other caregivers often miss opportunities to offer such simple gestures of comfort to family members of their patients, who can be stricken by depression, fear, isolation and anger over their relative’s debilitations,
Woodruff was the keynote speaker at the fifth annual Brain Injury Rehabilitation Conference sponsored by the Rehabilitation Center at Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas. The two-day seminar, held at a conference center at Scripps Memorial Hospital-La Jolla, featured sessions on recent research efforts, emergency room care and sexuality after brain injuries.
Yesterday’s audience included Nikki Schlimmer, 35, who moved in with her parents in the Scripps Ranch area of San Diego in October, nearly three months after she suffered a brain injury.
Schlimmer had been working as a pastry chef at a hotel in Hawaii when she bounced out of a moving Jeep and landed on her head.
After nearly dying from the injuries, Schlimmer returned to San Diego to continue her recovery. Her speech remains stilted and her balance is uncertain. She can’t drive and she hasn’t returned to work.
“It has been difficult to watch her struggle day to day with trying to improve,” said her mother, Lana Schlimmer. “Yet she has been persistent in slow progress that is really miraculous to see.”
A major problem has been getting Nikki Schlimmer’s health insurer to continue paying for therapy sessions with professionals, Lana Schlimmer said. The daughter received care through the brain injury day treatment program at Scripps Memorial Hospital-Encinitas until the insurer cut off funding for the service.
Psychologist Nicole Andreatta told seminar attendees that the lives of family members are significantly altered when they take over the care of a brain-injured relative.
The disruption and stress can lead to increased conflicts, isolation from the outside world and divorce, said Andreatta, who directs an Escondido brain injury center for Learning Services.
Support from health care providers and community services, particularly beyond the second year after the injury occurred, could prevent many of those problems, she said.
Help can even come in the choice of words that health providers use to discuss recovery expectations, Andreatta said.
“When you start talking about the future in terms of what the person was before (the injury), it tends to be more negative,” she said. “But when you talk about moving on to better things to come, that tends to be more helpful.”
Woodruff’s personal struggles have included severe panic attacks, worries about the psychological well-being of her children and overcoming an addiction to sleeping pills, which she wrote about in one of two books about her experiences.
Recalling moments when doctors discussed her husband’s early outlook in discouraging clinical terms, Woodruff exhorted seminar attendees to offer family members reasons for remaining hopeful, no matter how dire the diagnosis for their relatives.
“You have to give me something,” she said. “Tell me the story of the patient who completely surprised you — who defied the odds.”
Woodruff’s husband returned to work as a television journalist more than a year after the roadside bomb crushed the left side of his head and sent rocks and shrapnel ripping through his face and throat. He continues to work as a full-time reporter for ABC.