Customer Reviews

Brain Injury Survival Kit: 365 Tips, Tools and Tricks to Deal with Cognitive Function Loss

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This book is a great road map for people with brain injury and for families of people with brain injury. What this book does not do: It does not delve on the reasons how or why there is brain damage, or to the degree or extent of brain damage. It does not compare severe vs. mild brain damage. It does tell of all kinds of symptoms, many more than I personally have. Dr. Sullivan showed ways to get around them or ways to deal with them. But most importantly she showed me that one can learn to accept and live with brain damage. My life changed and I had no direction from the medical field. The doctors fixed the physical, but then left me adrift. I read several books once my reading comprehension returned and not one of the books offered any solutions to fix or help. Dr. Sullivan's book is a no nonsense book with honest to goodness answers for ways to deal with every day issues, not only to help the person with a brain injury, but will also help the family of the brain injured understand what is happening and how to help. She also offers resources for all kinds of additional help that is available. This book is easy to read and will be used time & time again.

Many people do not understand the wide spectrum of results from brain injury...from the severe and most obvious to those who live day to day with moderate disabilities and their consequences. Many of the survival techniques in this book are directed to those who suffer from the subtle changes that are a disaster to the sufferer but hardly noticed by those surrounding them. Dr. Sullivan speaks to those of us who can function--just not as well as most of the population. She extends a helping hand to those of us who need her--those of us who keep our moderate symptoms a secret but still need help. It would also be a great tool kit for those suffering "normal" memory loss in the aging process. My sincere thanks for this survival kit.

There are few injuries more traumatic than brain injuries. Not to be able to find just the right word at just the right time can be...devastating.

This book will teach you tricks for how to cope. Much of it consists in learning to plan, to take notes, and to organize, organize, and organize again so you can regain your life.

I would like to point out also that this book would be of extreme value to any caregivers. Sometimes it can be difficult to persuade someone with brain injuries to read a book like this. Even so, this book will show you how to help your loved one.

The physician who wrote this book suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury herself, and is thus intimately familiar with the myriad effects a severe concussion and worse can have on memory, organization, thinking, and on and on. She does a truly fantastic job of concisely explaining strategies and techniques for coping with all sorts of difficulties following a brain injury.

Her sparse writing style is particularly useful to the brain injured, who frequently have difficulty with reading dense prose. The reader can easily use the book section by section; each chapter and section stands alone, so that there is no need to read chapter 2 in order to make sense of chapter 4, etc. Every page of this slim volume is packed with extremely valuable tips.

Of all of the books I've read since my mild brain injury several years ago, this is amongst the very best.

This book is perfect. I had a TBI, and I have an aphasia. This should be the first book in the libary. From memory to parking, diet to finance, speech to energy. One of the best is that book has a bunch of quotes. I do like quotes. Buy it or borrow it. Good book.

Don't think of this book--written by a medical doctor who ultimately learned to live well with her brain injury--as a guide to read once and set aside. Rather, Brain Injury Survival Kit is a resource brain injury survivors will turn to over and over again as they strive to cope with the cognitive deficits caused by their brain trauma. Written in a sparse easy-to-read manner, this book is ideal for teaching survivors (and their caregivers) how to use specific and concrete strategies and assistive devices to address their impaired attention, memory, organization, communication, and other executive functioning skills. Survivors of both minor and severe brain injuries will find this book to be an invaluable guide to overcoming the challenges they face every day. This book will be particularly helpful to survivors who did not benefit from formal rehabilitation.

I got this book while in long-term relationship with a brain injured partner. In reading it, I ended up using many suggestions from this book in my own life as well as to better understand my partner. Even if you are NOT brain injured this book provides many positive tips for how to pace oneself better, and teaches simple but effective methods for organizing both oneself and one's home in ways that enable you to live a more manageable, sane life. This book is also useful for people who suffer from chronic health issues, especially auto-immune disorders and ADD symptoms as well, since it gives specific instructions for how to effectively function with compromised energy/fatigue and impaired attention levels. Suggestions in this book include how to establish routines that will enable you to function more effectively.

After my husband's TBI and partial recovery, I purchased many books and thought promoting activities to help us get started with a new way of life. This is the only one of all of the items that could grab my husband's attention. He read from it daily & he would become energized with hope for his future. It was like he developed his own personal "relationship" with the author. She became his advisor & mentor. He felt more inspiration and satisfaction thru reading this book than he felt from all other sources combined. It helped me better understand it all too. I'd recommend this to anyone with TBI. We couldn't have made it nearly as well without it.

I very much appreciated this book. I began to read it to see if it might have some ideas for a client of mine who has brain injury impairments. I was hooked when I found that it was written by an MD who both has and treats folks with TBI (traumatic brain injury). But my client and I continued to be launched into it's organized, clearly expressed ideas: it is so easy to read (early high school and up) and yet idea-provoking and empowering, propelling folks with TBI toward self-care actions and awareness. This might just be a 'must' for those of us working with folks with TBI, whether you're a professional - doctor, nurse, visiting aide, counselor, therapist, or family or friend. I am proud to have it on my shelf.

I would have liked to have seen more on coping with the emotional impact and changes of TBI on both the patient and those around them, as well as the medical tools and medications now being developed. Maybe the next book the author writes?

In sum, I strongly recommend the pennies for the book, and still turn to it again and again to get the concrete, practical and compassionate ideas it offers.

Brain Injury Survival Kit by Cheryle Sullivan, MD is fantastic guide to creating order out of chaos. I have seen a number of books and tools for organizing oneself, geared toward the brain injury survivor as well as those marketed toward the general reader. This is by far the most user-friendly and well-written of the lot. Whether you are living with significant cognitive function loss, or simply need to find ways to make the most of your time and reduce unnecessary stress caused by poor organization and planning, this little book will help you on your way.