How I Found My Life Purpose Through Brain Injury
By Susana Stoica, PhD
“I am ever so grateful to my family, especially my son, for the support they gave me on the path to blossoming into the person I am today and to the many people who cheered me on my path to recovery, sometime stretching the boundaries of what I thought I could do. If I would have to give some advice from my experience, it would be to always look for the lessons offered by your trauma, else you might miss important blessings.”
I had no idea how much my life would change on one of those rare perfect winter mornings in Michigan! It was a February Saturday and the world seemed to smile under a deep blue sky. There was not even a hint of a cloud, and the sun was bright. It seemed like the weather was mirroring my disposition. I was elated that the week at work had gone well, and I had been able to define an easy-to-execute test method that could considerably improve the quality of our electronics. At the same time, my “other life” was going well too: I was just heading to the clinic where I worked several times a week after my engineering hours. I loved my life as a creative engineer working on complicated technical problems, and my work as a healer provided a perfect balance to my logical mind. Everything seemed perfect that beautiful winter day!
After doing a demonstration of my healing work for a doctor from another practice, while I was locking the doors of the clinic, I suddenly lost my footing and found myself flat on my back. The back of my head had hit the ice-covered cement with a resounding thud. Scared to move and with the wind knocked out of me, I was concerned my fall might have reinjured my back, which had already undergone surgery. My thoughts then turned to the fact that the clinic was going to reopen in another hour, and quite a few people could be injured in the same way I had been.
Even though I was rather shaken, I decided I should buy some salt to put on the icy spot to prevent others from being hurt. I drove very slowly, as I seemed to need to make a lot of decisions on the way—driving was no longer an automatic activity. In the store, I had to ask the store owner where I could find the salt, as I could not visually separate the different items on the shelves. I was so confused that I was unable to follow any of the owner’s instructions, so I had to ask again for help. Other customers, recognizing my confusion, asked me if they should drive me home, as they doubted I could drive safely. I refused, trying to convince myself that everything was okay.
With much difficulty I returned to the clinic and started pouring the salt on the icy spot. I was extremely careful since I was feeling quite dizzy and did not want to fall again. Despite my best efforts, I lost my footing again. This time I tried to stop the fall and, in doing so, I injured my head again. I fell on my left side before ending up flat on the cement sidewalk.
Suddenly seeing a night sky full of stars despite the sunshine of a clear day, I was aware of a noise in my skull typical of bones moving against each other. I do not know how long I was down, unconvinced that I could even get up. During the time I was on the ground I realized that I had to decide whether I wanted to stay alive or die. At that moment I heard my son’s voice saying, “Mom, I don’t know what I would do without you.” That had a sobering effect, and I decided that whatever it took, I would fight back.
It felt like a long time before I tried slowly and carefully to get up. The world was spinning. Unsure of my step, I felt pain throughout my whole body following the initial shock. Very slowly, I got up, got into my car, and drove a few hundred yards to meet a friend for lunch. Everything was happening in a fog. Driving was a nightmare of decisions, especially figuring out how to make a left turn.
I could not eat anything; I became nauseous, and everything was spinning. I was surprised and frustrated by my inability to remember words in any of the many languages I had spoken fluently just two hours earlier. Attempting phrases was out of the question!
After lunch and within an hour of the accident, my friend gave me a Feldenkrais treatment that gave me the ability to speak in short sentences. An hour later, a talented chiropractor completely rearranged my traumatized spine. Thanks to her and a weekend of icing the whole length of my spine, I was able to return to work the following Monday.
In spite of my best efforts, by Tuesday night the impact of the trauma hit full force. In time I found out that I had major injuries all over my body. My skull was stuck to my Atlas bone (the top cervical vertebrae), explaining why I was unable to turn my head. My palate bones (the bones of the mouth ceiling) were on top of each other, my eye sockets were out of place, I had jaw and teeth injuries, my skull bones were shifted, my diaphragm was stuck in an upward displacement which, together with my overlapped ribs, made breathing difficult. I had a hairline fracture in my neck, I was hurting under both my scapula bones, my tailbone was broken, I had broken bones in my right palm and arm, my pelvis was out of place which made my walking very painful, even my toes required osteopathic adjustments. Later I was told I had injured my brain stem and my spinal fluid circulation was impacted: the spinal fluid could not be drained from my head. As a result of my injuries, my blood pressure was spiking, and I was sweating profusely one minute, as if just out of a shower, and freezing the next. Also, my pituitary/hypothalamus complex that controls all the endocrine system was injured too. This created extreme headaches, so for about two years I could not lie down in bed. My visual nerves were also injured, as were the muscles controlling the position of my eyes, so my vision was blurry, and I could not read. The constant extreme pain eventually led to fibromyalgia, a condition that is related to adrenal exhaustion.
The exhausting pain was also making me fall asleep without warning, which could happen at work as well as while I was driving. I ended up eventually with my driving license taken away.
Imagine somebody who worked ten to twelve-hour days developing advanced technologies, speaking at technical conferences, an inventor, a person who also worked, after long engineering hours, in a medical practice using her knowledge as a healer and medical intuitive. Can you imagine the pain of having her life stopped by two traumatic brain injuries and being relegated to a barely functional state?! That was me!
From being the main income for my family, a person who did everything from working in a highly demanding job, to taking care of my family, to healing, I ended up being a burden to my family. The repeated failures to improve, in spite of trying every healing avenue I was recommended, eventually drove me into depression. I felt myself useless. My basement was full of papers as I could not sort what was important and what was not, I could not figure out how to clean my home, and I nearly burnt down my home twice while trying to cook simple dishes (I was an excellent cook before the accident!).
As I was “hiding” in a darkened home in the middle of the day, with the shutters closed and feeling at the lowest point in my life, I felt my family would be better off without me. That was the point at which I decided to fight my way back using my knowledge accumulated as a healer working with brain injuries. I also decided that I would document what I was doing to get my mind back, so I could help others. The latter was playing on my drive to help others and it was something that would push me forward every time I felt like giving up.
It took me many years until I was able to read a three-word window and understand the words. Then it was a paragraph, which I would forget by the time I read the next one. Eventually I figured out that if I wrote a short description of each paragraph content at the edge of the page, I could get a sense of the content of a few paragraphs. It took years to get from that to read a full chapter in a book in one sitting, but I was not going to give up. I had a purpose: I was going to be well and write my book that was going to help people with brain injury.
About seven years after the double brain trauma, when I was trying to finally function in the outside world, I had a major setback: about half a year apart I had two more serious brain traumas. I fell on ice, barely clearing some cement steps and, in a separate incident, I tumbled down thirteen cement steps to land on the cement floor on an unfinished basement. The latter fall amazed those who watched me go down, as I only lightly touched the steps on my way down, like a ball bouncing down the steps. Also, when I landed, it was as if I was put down gently by some invisible hand. After the latter, my doctors decided that I had some important work to do in my life, as the only explanation for my survival was divine intervention!
About twelve years after my double brain injury, I started slowly remembering my childhood. Around the same time, I also started cooking with a special method that I discovered for myself. Cooking was still difficult as I needed to shop one day, then make sure I rested well overnight, and cook the next day without being interrupted. I could not have any music, much less talk radio, as that would represent an additional input to process. My cooking was extremely simple in the beginning, but I celebrated it as a victory!
Slowly, after fifteen years had passed from the trauma, I decided it was time to start fulfilling my promise to myself and write my book on brain injury recovery. To make that effort less of an intellectual jump, I decided to re-issue one of my previous books: “Reluctant Healer” adding to it the information I gleaned from my recovery process. Once I published the first book, I went on to work on the next one: “Heal Your Brain, Reclaim Your Life: How to Recover and Thrive after a Concussion”, which fulfilled my promise to help others. It is a book about all sorts of neural trauma, and it talks about how to be prepared for a brain trauma in order to help doctors better diagnose brain injury, how to limit the effects of brain injury and how to recover. As in the book I talked about how helpful cooking was for recovering my cognitive abilities, I decided to publish my cooking method and the recipes I written in a way that help me work around my disabilities. To my delight, the process of producing the five books in the series “Cooking after Brain Injury: Easy Cooking for Recovery” also represented another step in recovering my cognitive abilities. The process of re-cooking all the recipes in the five books, brought me from being able to cook one dish a day with the shopping the previous day, to cooking several dishes at the same time. Only somebody with brain trauma can understand the enormity of that recovery step! The book became a bestseller and I received thankful notes from local rehabs.
There was still an aspect of healing that I did not cover which, according to my experience, the major driver of our state of health: emotional healing. I knew from my own work with others as well as my own emotional work, that people are typically afraid to open up to this important avenue for healing, so I decided to write a book that would show what happens during emotional healing sessions and write the book in a way that would help people start their own path into emotional healing. This was the birth of my next book “Five Mirrors, Five Blessings”. The book practically wrote itself. It came to me as a movie, so it got written within a few short months.
To complete my work as a writer, I also expanded a previously written book dealing with all sorts of illnesses, this time transforming it from a book filled with stories of healing when all medical solutions were exhausted, to a book which also provided guidance in finding more avenues for healing. The book “Healing with a Loving Heart: Discover the Power of Energy Healing” fulfilled my dream of helping people with my knowledge accumulated in over thirty five years of doing energy healing.
After the publication of “Heal Your Brain, Reclaim Your Life”, I was invited to speak at a conference on brain injury recovery at Harvard Medical School, and my findings about delayed brain trauma were published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. On the way I also taught doctors, nurses, medical students, lay people, and insurance companies about brain injury preparedness, limiting its effects, and cognitive recovery at any age, as well as how to incorporate alternative healing method like energy healing into mainstream medical practices.
Today, more than twenty years after the double brain trauma, I can clearly see the path that drove me eventually to my true Life Purpose: helping people achieve their full physical and life potential. From my PhD thesis in designing computers with brain cell-like circuits, to discovering my gift of healing, to a technical career in defining advanced technologies that taught me how to find valid patterns in research, to the design of an expert system which provided insights into how we think, to working in a medical practice as a healer, to having a brain injury so I would recognize the value of my ability of healing brain injuries (not all healers can even perceive brain trauma, much less do anything about it), to my decisions to push myself on the road to recovery by deciding to write a book about it, to being able to help so many people with raising awareness and doing healing.
I feel blessed for being pushed “kicking and screaming” (yes, sometimes I was screaming in pain after the injury!) into fulfilling my Life Purpose. Without my own trauma I would have never been aware of the value of my work, and without my experience of researching advanced technologies and talking at technical conferences and I would not have known how to document my work as a healer, and how to present it in an easily accessible form.
It is true that I lost many years of my life due to the brain trauma and I went through a lot of pain both physically and emotionally, the worst being the loss of what I thought was my identity as a human being, but I had so many gifts in return! Today I am an active, useful person. I fulfilled the promise to help as many people as I could with my knowledge and I am not done yet!
I am ever so grateful to my family, especially my son, for the support they gave me on the path to blossoming into the person I am today and to the many people who cheered me on my path to recovery, sometime stretching the boundaries of what I thought I could do. If I would have to give some advice from my experience, it would be to always look for the lessons offered by your trauma, else you might miss important blessings.
Susana Stoica has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and over 30 years of experience in defining and using advanced technologies. Born with the gift of healing, she worked with doctors to aid in healing people worldwide. After two traumatic brain injuries on the same day, she decided to focus her healing practice on helping people with neural impairments, especially those who have recent and old brain trauma, including strokes.
For more information on Susana Stoica and about her work go to https://healingbraininjury.com