Living life one day at a time

A 64-year-old father whose son is now recovering from Traumatic Brain Injury is doing whatever he can to raise awareness about the condition, during an exceptionally important month: Traumatic Brain Injury Month.

Joel Goldstein says his fight isn’t “just about him anymore.” Rather, he’s doing it for all the sons and daughters whose lives have changed because of life’s ways of unfolding.

Joel’s son, Bart, was 16 when a car accident left him in a coma for a month in 2001. The struggle had only begun, however, as he woke up with catastrophic injuries that would alter his life forever. Once an athlete and an A student, Bart had to train his brain to do basic tasks. He was out of high school for nine months and in a rehabilitation hospital for three months.

“It transformed his life,” noted Goldstein, “as if he lost seven years [of his life].” According to his father, Bart missed out on many experiences during his youth that would have helped him grow up, and “understands that he’s not as mature as he should be,” but, thanks to his own determination and that of his family, Bart has been able to recover partially.

“He’s 85 percent better,” noted his father. Now 28, Bart – who underwent a combination of conventional medicine and alternative and emerging therapies that helped him with his remarkable recovery such as craniosacral, hyperbaric oxygen, sensory learning and vision restoration — is semi-independent.

In 2005, he moved out of his parents’ home and is now living on his own in upstate New York—where his parents also live — working in a restaurant. He breaks down boxes from the night before and sorts beer bottles, responsibilities that no one expected him to take on after the types of injuries that he suffered.

“He loves it; he feels very happy doing it,” said Goldstein, author of No Stone Unturned, a book which chronicles the family’s ordeal from his point of view.

But, the story doesn’t end there. Goldstein and wife, Dayle Groudine, with more time on their hands then they had been used to since one of their two kids moved out, have had time to reflect on what happened.

“How do you make sense out of all of this?” he mused, adding that as the writer of the family, he’s thrown himself into shedding some light on the number one cause of death among people under 45 years of age. Through their journey, Goldstein and his family have met families who shared similar experiences.

“My mission should be to retire and spend my days in Greece with family,” he concluded; instead, he said, they “have something that we can devote ourselves.”

To learn more about Bart’s story, visit http://tbibook.com/.