US veteran describes life with a brain injury

What is it like to live with a TBI? Sean served for 27 years as a marine in the US army. Concussions and head knocks can happen to anyone, but they are particularly common in the military, and can inflict wounds that aren’t always immediately apparent…

Sean - I can't put my finger on an exact moment when I can say a TBI happened. But, as a Forward Air Controller, I dropped 99 bombs from the air. For most of those we were in within inside of what was called danger close, so inside the blast radius of the bomb. And so that impact, I really believe, is the most devastating impact because you can imagine a soft brain inside of a hard shell, skull getting racked around by the overpressure from a bomb - I'd say 40 or 50 of those I was well within inside the blast radius. I think that rung my bell a number of times and created some injury. I was in the back of what was called a deuce and a half, a large, transport truck that got hit by an IED and fell off the side and saw stars and all that kind of thing. So a number of very specific instances, but generally it's a prolonged exposure.

James - I see. So it's fair to say, in your personal experience, there's no one big KO you can recall to, it's more a series of more mild ones, which we know now can have this cumulative effect.

Sean - Absolutely. And as I got out of the military, our Veterans Administration, our VA, does a profile. They were looking for very specific concussive [symptoms]: lost memory, lost sight, you were out cold, those kinds of things. But I couldn't answer those questions and so wasn't specifically diagnosed with TBI, but I believe that, quite honestly, most of the guys that I've gone through this programme with, they feel it's the same thing: it's that prolonged exposure, the number of different weapon systems that we go off that are very loud and concussive.

James - And at what point did you start to consider that TBI might be what you were suffering from in the years following?

Sean - Well, I took the advice of the VA and I followed as many of the different protocols that they offered and had a disability designation by the VA of PTSD. When you're a leader, you just file that back in your backpack and say, 'I can deal with this.' So I kind of dealt with it for a number of years. It was over a period of a number of different things happening in my life that really created high stress that, that I actually started reaching out and talking to some other friends that were going through some things. It was in about my mid forties that I started noticing a significant memory loss. I couldn't recall things or I couldn't even remember names of people that I knew pretty well. Obviously the ones I knew really well, I did, but it was really that memory loss plus not being able to handle some of the stress so that I thought, maybe there was something else going on.

James - I see. So the memory loss combined with those neuropsychiatric conditions. You mentioned PTSD, did you receive any treatment?

Sean - Yeah. I volunteered at the VA for a number of them. I went through speaking with psychologists and therapists, went through a mindfulness programme, and none of them really seemed to help. Even a psychiatrist who ordered up Zoloft which, as you can imagine, any of us that are on the front lines, you have your super aggression and your high activity, and we kind of thrive on that. The Zoloft just made me feel like I was numbing out. So I went through a number of types of therapy, and none of them seemed to work.

James - So is that what gave you the impetus to seek alternative treatment?

Sean - Well, actually, like I said, as a leader, an officer, you tend to think 'I'm fine, I'm fine,' and you file it back in your backpack and, at some point, the backpack gets too heavy to carry. I had gone through a period where, starting in 2017, my son committed suicide, that led to a divorce, shortly after that, within about a year or two, lost a job and then, decided to go build my own business, got into a property transaction that didn't work out. I lost about $650,000. You can see, all these things were building up so that I finally realised I couldn't do it on my own. So I reached out to a couple other friends from the military, and I saw a change in what they were going through and was like, 'okay, there's something different here.' So I started talking to them and they said, 'Oh, yeah, we went through this treatment, this therapy, and it just changed my life. And so I thought, I'm not really sure about it. It was a psychedelic therapy that they were describing and I have never taken a drug in my life. I'm not really into the whole psychedelic thing. That's a little creepy. Then, about three years ago, I would wake up every morning with a sheer dread, just an unimaginable amount of anxiety and dread where I actually had formulated a suicide plan. It would last about an hour in the morning, I'd go take a shower and try to shake it off, and then I'd realise, that's not me. And then I'd go about my day and then, again, the next morning, same thing all over again. At some point in there I said, 'I can't. Something's wrong with me, and it's noticeably not me. There's something inside that's off.' That's when I started to look at what the options were and started to talk a little bit more to my friends that had been through this medicine and this psychedelic therapy.