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Friday, March 19
It's not all wheelchairs
It’s not all wheelchairs…… Bill Svihla is a CPA. He's also an accounting professor at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. In the fall of 2007, Bill was involved in a motor cycle accident that, even though he was wearing a helmet, left him with a traumatic brain injury (TBI). After time in an acute care hospital, Bill went home since all of the normal tests indicated he could walk, talk and carry on a conversation. As is typically the case, these tests don’t measure emotional issues caused by the changes in a TBI patient’s ability to deal with day to day issues. As Bill tells it, he knew something was amiss when it took him most of an entire day to compose an email. He grew more and more depressed and frustrated and his wife Terri felt more and more concerned and helpless. The situation was dreadful enough that at one point, Bill started to plan his own suicide. Luckily, Bill became aware of the nationally known Brain Injury Coping Skills group conducted at RHI by Dr. Samantha Backhaus. BICS is a twelve session program and is the first in the nation to involve both the patient and the caregiver. This program, started through RHI Foundation funds donated to the Dr. Lisa Thompson Center for Family Education at RHI, received a state grant and won Dr. Backhaus the Young Investigator of the Year for 2009 from the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Most importantly, as Terri tells it, BICS “saved Bill’s life and we don’t know what we would've done without it”.
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