As many of you know, Veronica and I are in our fifth year of teaching high school students about traumatic brain injuries.
Dr. Nunley was our neuropsychologist when we sustained our brain injuries 18 years ago and we are still in touch with him today, even now that he has retired. He is the only doctor that told us Veronica would walk out of the hospital in three months. Where, at the time we were being told by other doctors that, “She may never get better than today.” And she was barely out of a minimally conscious state. For both of us to have healed to a place where we can actually teach about our injuries is nothing less than unfathomable when looking where we came from.
Now, we don’t record many of the classes we teach, but when we do, we text the videos to Dr. Nunley so he can watch them and give us his opinion on how we can improve in the future. He said he wanted to talk to us about the last video, and when someone says that I get nervous that I have done something wrong. I think that is pretty normal. So, we called him and he shocked our socks off!
P.R.O.U.D.
Proud is the word Dr. Nunley spelled out as a response to watching our most recent video where we taught a high school class of juniors and seniors about brain injuries. He told us he is not quick to give praise and left us completely speechless. If there is anyone whose opinion we value the most about this subject, it is him. The respect we have for him is boundless. He took care of brain injury patients in the hospital for 45 years. He knows more about this subject than anyone else we know.
What a great feeling! Great, surprising, and almost unbelievable. We don’t look at ourselves as something special, but maybe we should when it comes to teaching. Dr. Nunley has always recommended a movie titled Broken Rhymes to those that want to understand what a severe brain injury actually entails. Well, he said he is going to recommend people watch our class video if they want to learn about brain injuries now. He is also sending a copy of the video to the doctor that took care of us on the Rehab floor of the hospital we stayed in.
All the effort we put into all of the 81 classes we have taught is paying off. If anyone is interested in watching this video to learn more about brain injuries, please go to YouTube and look under Dawn Corbelli or Veronica Corbelli.
And if you would like to learn more about brain injuries and our family’s journey through the first 12 years of healing, please read my book titled,
A Miracle a Day, One Day at a Time: Hope After Traumatic Brain Injury
It is available right here on my website. Go to the menu and click on Book.
*Living With a Brain Injury* (I didn’t write this)
“Maybe some things don’t get better, but we do.
We get stronger.
We learn to live with our situations as messy and ugly as they are.
We fix what we can, and we adapt to what we can’t.
Maybe some of us will never be fully ok, but at least we are here.
We are still trying.
We are doing the best we can.
That’s worth celebrating too.
If you are reading this, congratulations, you made it to today. You made it.”
Look, it took us 81 classes to finally get our teaching where we want it. 81 classes. If that is not persistence, I don’t know what is. We are still slow at things now and that is ok. We are brain injured and this is our life now.
Dawn Corbelli 