How Wounded Warrior Project Helped Two Warriors Manage Effects of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Returning from Iraq after a convoy accident, Army veteran Lisa Crutch remembered many of the things that happened in Iraq but lost some family memories from prior years. Her children would show her pictures of places they had visited, but she had no memories to go with the pictures. In addition to partial memory loss, she experienced massive headaches and the loss of her sense of smell. It took a while after she recovered from her visible injuries to figure out what was going on. “I didn’t even know what TBI was until I got home and went to the VA,” Lisa said. “They asked me how I had gotten from the vehicle to the ground [after the accident] and I told them ‘I don’t know.”
Lisa learned from others at the scene that the vehicle where she was a front passenger was going 40 mph when it hit a stopped truck in the middle of a lowvisibility sand road. Her head hit the windshield at 40 mph. “Prior to doing the tests, they were saying I had TBI just from hearing the story. They didn’t say, ‘you have traumatic brain injury.’ They said, ‘Sergeant Crutch, you have TBI.’” Lisa had no idea what TBI meant. She said there was no pamphlet on traumatic brain injury and no further instructions. For Jason Major, the shrapnel damage and loss of movement in his right arm was just part of the issues he would face after he was injured when his convoy hit an improvised explosive device (IED) near Syria. After six months of surgeries and physical therapy, he recovered some movement, but the invisible injuries were just beginning to surface.
“I didn’t even
know what TBI was until I got home and went to the VA,” Lisa said. “They asked me how I had gotten from the vehicle to the ground [after the accident] and I told them ‘I don’t know.’’
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WWW.HomelandMagazine.com / MARCH 2022
