Correct.

I was on a bike ride that ended in the passenger seat of a Toyota Siena. I had a subdural hematoma and spend a couple of days in an artificial coma. When I was lucid about a week after being woken up from that coma, the gaggle of MDs in whose care I was were more than happy to talk about my broken neck, and my broken collar bone, and the road rash, and the plastic surgeon (the best in Canada, and he did a bang up job) was very proud of his work on my shattered face.

But nobody, NOBODY, at that time told me what the likely consequences were of a head injury like the one I sustained. So when I started to be moody, and snap at my wife and kids, and feel really sorry for my self, and depressed, and anxious - I had no idea where that came from, until my PI lawyer (they're good for something, sometimes) hooked me up with a team of people that had seen it all before and knew what they were doing. But even with those people around (neuropsychiatrist, occupational therapist, psychotherapist, rehab support worker, ...) I ended up in that dark, dark place about a year and a half later which required medication to extricate me from. Would it have been just me and my wife: I don't know, man. I may have swallowed those pills.

So Brooks, you're right. I don't know what happened. And I don't know what support she had available. But I *do* know what happens if you fuck up your brain, I *do* happen that even in the medical community there's not a lot of head injury expertise around, and I *do* know that you have to have people around you that support you. Because there's no way you can do it alone, and somebody has to tell you it's OK to be angry, sad, and/or anxious. And that it's OK that you can't solve the fucking second order partial differential equation you could derive blindfolded last week (*). But ideally that somebody should also tell you that even though it will get better (and it really does), there will be things that are lost forever (because there are).

And I was 45 when it happened to me. If this would have happened when I was 23: again, I don't know, man.

(*) True story: six months after my crash I had decided I was going to fill my days with building a Training Peaks/Golden Cheetah type application. Because why not. And I was having some trouble with some of the intricacies of Dr Coggan's NP formulas, and I posted here for help (WTF was I thinking, right?). And Jack Mott, bless his heart, tells me "What are you doing modeling that with a TBI. I don't understand it and I don't have a TBI". And that helped put things in perspective.