Lethan Candlish Part Eleven

Lethan searched for the answer to this question: Who Am I Again?

Who Am I Again is not just the story of one brain injury survivor finding himself again. It tells the stories of his friends from rehab. They also had to find themselves again after severe brain injury.

Sarah, one of the characters in Who Am I Again, had made a commitment to getting better. She would read and write again. Little by little, she would improve.

Tony has a really simple philosophy on life. “Born.  Live.  Die. It’s what you do with that middle word that makes you who you are.”

Larry says that if he had any wish it wouldn’t be that his accident didn’t happen. “I mean, it has sucked and it’s been real hard, but I also met a lot of really cool people who I wouldn’t have met if it hadn’t been for my accident,” he said. “ And I’ve done a lot of cool things that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. And you know, my accident, it’s kind of made me who I am today.”

For Lethan, finding out who he was is very simple too. His answer: “I am Lethan.”

He had to accept that he wasn’t the precisely the same person he was before the accident. “I began to rework those abilities and see what my new limitations were – what my new strengths were and what my new weaknesses were,” Lethan said. “ It was about being open to change because as the guy used to say when I worked at the mini mart (and I was handing people change for cigarettes or whatever) ‘the only thing constant is change.’” See Lethan’s blog here. 

The TBI Voices project is a story about who these brain injured people are before and who they become. It tells the stories of the families who were affected by severe brain injury. It gives these people a chance to speak and share their stories.

Thank you for reading on. It is our hope that somehow the word of what we have done in TBI Voices filters through to the medical community. They too need to listen to the voice of brain damage and survival.

Gordon Johnson

Attorney Gordon Johnson is one of the nations leading brain injury advocates. He is Past-Chair of the TBILG, a national group of more than 150 brain injury advocates. He has spoken at numerous brain injury seminars and is the author of some of the most read brain injury web pages on the internet.

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