Interrogating Care: The Trauma of a Traumatic Brain Injury

Breakfast at the Hospital

When we speak of traumatic brain injury (TBI), the focus is often on the "brain" and the "injury." But what frequently remains overlooked is the word traumatic. In my own experience, the trauma was not only the impact on my skull, or the emergency surgery that followed—it was also what unfolded afterward, in the prolonged years of recovery.

Trauma, in the context of a near-death experience, begins in the very first response. It is the moment when control is relinquished to strangers, when one's body becomes the site of intervention. Modern healthcare systems maximize survival and extend life beyond what might otherwise be possible. For that, I remain deeply grateful. Quick action saved me. Precision in the operating room gave me the possibility of continuing my life.

But the deeper trauma resided in what came next.

My injury was specific: a blow to the right side of my head near the temple, an impact so severe that it affected not only the injured side but also reverberated across to the other hemisphere of my brain and brain stem. My eye socket bruised, my face swollen, my skull fractured—and yet it was not the injury alone that would alter me most profoundly. Despite this, I found the strength to endure and overcome.

What truly transformed me was what I now call the trauma of care.

Waking from emergency brain surgery, I immediately thrust into survival mode. My brain, already altered, was now forced to process an environment that was not only unfamiliar but unsafe. I had lost my ability to communicate and understand the German language. I awoke not to reassurance or human touch, but to absence—to the cold realization that no system of care was present to hold me in my most vulnerable state.

This paradox—being saved yet not cared for—was indelibly written into my nervous system. In those moments of disorientation, I realized that survival would mean not only healing from the surgery but also negotiating an environment where I felt at risk. 

Instead of care, I experienced fear. Instead of safety, I was overwhelmed by the possibility of harm. I had to be strategic, using what energy I had to advocate for the most essential needs. I questioned why the doctors saved my life, only to be now in the conditions where I would be left to die.

The lack of care is the definition of trauma in my traumatic brain injury. It was not only the injury to my brain but the imprint of how my care—or lack of it—reshaped me. That imprint became as much a part of my recovery as the neurological rewiring itself.

Over the years, I have devoted myself to untangling this experience, to healing not only the physical but the psychological aftermath. PTSD became an unavoidable part of my recovery, demanding as much attention as my surgical scar.

In my artistic work, I return again and again to this intersection of trauma, care, and survival. To live with a TBI is to navigate an ableist society, and to reimagine myself in the aftermath of injury is to interrogate what care means, what it fails to provide, and how its absence shapes our ability to belong.

My story is not unique, but it is personal. Each human body carries its own map of injury and survival. What binds us is the need for care—genuine care, beyond survival. The kind of care that acknowledges not only our physical bodies but also our humanity. This is not just a desire, but a necessity for all of us.

In speaking about my TBI, I am referring to the whole of society: how we treat vulnerability, how we define worth, and how we imagine futures where all people—not only the abled—can thrive. My recovery and my art practice are rooted in reimagining care not as an afterthought but as the foundation of a just and inclusive world. A world in which I am an active participant.