'Bancroft Unplugged' Shows Off Triumphs of Brain Injured

Adrienne Beattie, 29, trained for 16 years to reach her professional goal as a dancer. A speeding car trashed her future on a New York highway, but not her spirit.

Ronald Sharpe, 61, a Marine who served in Vietnam, wasn’t expected to live through the night after a 1998 car accident. His face was so badly bashed that surgeons could reconstruct it only by referring to his military photographs. Today Sharpe, blinded by the accident, walks with a shuffle, but he’s not disabled in his self-image.

Gavin Rogers, 36, doesn’t remember the moment his life spun out of his control. He knows he was struck by a passenger train in Palo Alto, CA. His first recollection is being in a rehabilitation facility in Mullica Hill.

Monday night, at an event pulled together by Bancroft Brain Injury Services, Beattie, Sharpe, Rogers, and four other adults talked of their rehabilitation. No one spoke of grueling hours of therapy and counseling, or of the depression and anger that was as strong as the physical impact of their permanent injuries.

Instead, they talked of hope to live independently and of the respect and appreciation they hold for the medical and other staff that tugged them through years of intense rehabilitation.

“Bancroft Unplugged: One world, many stories” attracted about 100 supporters to Monday night’s program at the Cherry Hill Public Library. Dr. Zachary Eakman, a neuropsychologist, said he hopes the program is the first of many that will educate the public of treatment programs for traumatic brain injuries. The event was planned as part of Brain Injury Awareness Month.

The institution for the developmentally disabled has plans to move from its 19-acre campus in Haddonfield it has occupied for 128 years.  The scrum over the redevelopment of the land has nearly obscured the magic of Bancroft. The facility expanded its treatment programs two decades ago to include people with traumatic brain injuries.

Those injuries most frequently are caused by motor vehicle accidents, falls, explosions and assaults. Some injuries, like those of Bart George, 52, happen on the job. George was working as a logger in Oregon 21 years ago, when a log was hurled into the air and struck him, twice, in the head.

“It broke every bone in my face and my brain was bleeding,” said George, who admits his lifestyle before the accident may have been out of control.

“At one point, I was drinking 28 cups of coffee a day,” said George, who said with pride he now can use public transportation to travel to visit his family.

“I want to get a job and start working again,” he said.

Preparation of the speeches, none longer than five minutes, took weeks, including rehearsals. “It’s amazing what we take for granted in our everyday lives,” said Eakman. Presenters at the event had to work on memory skills and verbal expression. They had to concentrate to filter out distractions and focus while they spoke.

“Most of us are not brave enough to do what these people will do tonight,” Eakman said of the seven whose progress was showcased in the program. The group, Eakman said, embodied a “never give up attitude” that inspired each other and the staff that continues to work with them.

Each did it with emotion; several with humor.

“I died the same year as Jerry Garcia,” said Rogers, “but I was resuscitated.”

Beattie, who was resuscitated twice while being driven from the site of her car crash to a hospital in New York, said she “had to relearn everything: how to hold my head up, eat, swallow and go to the bathroom. It was as if I were a baby.”

A patient with Bancroft since 2006, Beattie said “learning that life would never be the same (was) frustrating, tedious, and exhausting.”

Injuries like hers to the frontal lobe of the brain control behavior, Beattie said, so she had to learn to determine the consequences of her behavior before she acts. “I have to think constantly to keep my actions appropriate, and I need to write things down so I will remember them.”

Throughout the years of therapy, Beattie, like the others in Monday’s program, maintained a positive attitude. “My goal is to be independent and completely rely on myself,” she said.

Her accident, said Beattie, “may have changed my brain but it did not change my heart.”