Brain-injured face stigma

EDMONTON - Barb Baer Pillay, who's 50, remembers when anybody who wasn't the brightest person in the world was told, "Oh, you're brain-damaged."
"It was definitely not a good thing to be," says the program development manager for NABIS, a local brain injury society.
There's still such a stigma attached to brain injuries that admitting you have one is like coming out of the closet, Baer Pillay says, even though 10,000 Albertans a year suffer a brain injury.
So it's a testament to people such as Garnet Cummings and his family that he is talking publicly about the brain injury he received in a near-fatal collision 12 years ago, she says. The former high-profile chief of emergency at the Royal Alexandra Hospital and former medical director of the northern division of STARS Air Ambulance loved practising medicine, but had to stop after the brain injury affected his short-term memory.
Cummings hopes to raise public awareness of brain injuries when he speaks at NABIS's annual fund-raising breakfast June 4.
About 2,000 Albertans suffer a brain injury annually from such traumatic events as motor-vehicle collisions, falls or assaults. Another 3,000 brain injuries have a connection to such medically-related events as surgeries gone wrong, infections, meningitis, encephalitis, insulin shock, tumours, aneurysms, overdoses and substance abuse, says Baer Pillay. The other 50 per cent are the result of strokes.
"Thirty years ago, you wouldn't survive many of the brain injuries that occurred," Baer Pillay says. "Now, we have such amazing medical advances we're saving a lot more people, which is changing the whole scenario."
Communication disorders are common with brain injuries, so once all of a person's physical problems have abated and they're back running, walking, speaking, etc., he or she is still likely to have memory problems and aphasia (the partial or total loss of the ability to understand words and use language), Baer Pillay says.
"In conversation, the person has to slow down because they can't process words as fast as you," prompting people who don't understand brain injuries to think they're stupid, she explains.
"That's something people with cancer or people who have had a heart attack don't have to deal with, but people with brain injuries do, unless you walk around with a label on your forehead that says, 'I have a brain injury; it doesn't mean I'm stupid,' " Baer Pillay says.
Brain injuries range from those whose only problem is not being able to read as fast as they could before, to no longer being able to live independently.
Garnet Cummings counts himself among the lucky ones who is not able to do a lot of the things he loved, such as practising medicine or running marathons, but can still do "a lot of stuff," including communicating well.
His life after the collision was recorded in a series of black-and-white photographs taken by his stepdaughter, Kristin Olinyk, for a documentary photography course she recently completed at Grant Mac-Ewan University. You'll find those images in an audio slideshow she produced.