005: Lauren Spear

01/26/21 • 27 min

Lauren Spear worked as a special education teacher in South Australia, when she was involved in a work place accident in 2018, whilst helping one of her struggling students off a piece of playground equipment.

For the last 2 and a half years she has been living with and working hard in her rehabilitation and recovery from a brain injury, supporting and advocating for the wider concussion and brain injury community along the way.

In 2019, she decided to begin her personal blog and organization called The Orange Butterfly, reminding all to embrace new life and challenges with hope, and dedicating herself to closing the often misunderstood gap between the brain injury community and the wider community by spreading education and awareness.

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004: Elizabeth Peirce

Elizabeth Peirce is a Halifax-based writer, editor, and teacher. Her 2019 book Lost and Found: Recovering Your Spirit After a Concussion is based in her own experience and that of other mTBI survivors, and shares strategies for self-healing from this difficult injury. Find links to her books, workshops, and blog at https://elizabethpeirce.ca

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006: Mariah Morgan

On the morning of November 13, 2018, I looked both ways before crossing the street as I entered a pedestrian crosswalk on my two-block walk to work. My memory gets dodgy from here but my brain still holds a few snippets: a quarter of the way across the street I watched the fender of an SUV hit my knee, I slammed onto its hood, and then my head quickly hit the pavement. Hard. I was rushed to the hospital, put in a medically-induced coma, and, when I came to in the ICU at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, was told my 34-year-old body was not how I last remembered it. I’ll spare you the details of the insane list of diagnoses I was given- some knee, neck, and brain-related- but the most important one to know about is that I had an acute subdural hematoma.

I am a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, and a business owner. It has taken a long time to even begin to process the accident (and may take my whole life) but, looking at my life and how close I was to slipping away lends serious perspective. During the months after my accident, I struggled with feelings of loneliness and depression and did not realize at the time that they were direct results of my brain injury. If I can help others feel less alone during their recovery journey, I feel that some good will have come from the trauma that changed my life.