Things i'd like to say - if i could

 
November 2012 – Things I would say if I had the chance.
There are people I’m no longer able to talk to – for fear of breaking my loved one’s requirements. But there are a lot of people I’d like to talk to, once friends of mine, who have judged me for the person I lived with, and people we used to associate with; I’d want them to know emphatically that there are “tests” designed to ABSOLUTELY prove that the person they once knew is not a monster, nor any of those other things that the police and the press, his colleagues, and his community, suddenly believed he was.
Amazing after 15yrs of serving your community, crossing paths with hundreds/maybe thousands of people, with no past history, yet suddenly they turn on you because of something they don’t understand. The mind is a scary place, and once damaged, you really don’t know where it will go. Frontal lobe damage, if seen in hospitals, following major trauma, TBI or Aneurysm, is excused crazy inappropriate behavior as ”typical of that type of injury”. Symptoms of cerebral concussion include post traumatic amnesia, sleep disorder, and non-mental automatism, and are grounds for immediate acquittal, if something goes wrong. IF they can be proven.
We know for sure that some people have lied. I hope they are prepared to live with that for the rest of their lives. Karma’s a bitch! There are things that were mis-construed, things that couldn’t be brought into court, and then sometimes bad things just happen to good people.   We absolutely know from eye witness, that things in history didn’t happen the way people said they did. There was missing evidence all over the place. But we decided we just couldn’t expend more time, more money, and more stress to take everyone to court. That would have been torture, for all involved. So we didn’t.
But none of that made a difference. We lost. We knew all along that the there was no ‘intent’, no guilty mind, but we didn’t know how to prove it. So where he has been, what he has seen, what has happened to him, and what will remain of him when he gets home, and what I’ve become without him, I’m scared to find out. What I know is I’m proud of him, for facing what happened, with as much grace & dignity as he could muster in that broken brain of his. IQ doesn’t get reduced by Brain Injury, so his work experience & scholarly pursuits are all the more impressive considering how much extra hard he had to work to overcome. And yes we knew it was broken, doctors knew, there were previous accidents & issues, his physical medical history was troubled, varied, medicated, and well compensated for. However what we didn’t know, could never have known, that after three more hits, in rapid succession, this could have happened.
The brain is a complex and mostly uncharted science. You’d think there were tests to see if you’re compromised, but we’ve found there aren’t. Fancy tests (fMRI, SPECT, PET scans) can be done to study celebrity’s brains, listening to music, and watching them light up, but try to get one if you’re an ordinary Joe. What we’ve learned, and what I can’t believe, is there are no tests to show if you’re suffering mental illness, or brain damage, depression, anxiety, stress, Bi-Polar, diagnosis is all based on history, X-Ray, EEG, MRI, CAT Scan, and if what you have doesn’t show up, then you’re fine. But what if you’re not?
That’s all I have to say. I wish things could have been different, I wish we’d be able to fight, and prove Not-Guilty, or even NCR, but the law is a complex, and slippery mechanism, that hasn’t caught up with the medical world. And we fell victim to it. I’ve been shocked, angry, confused, alone, saddened, but mostly I’m just sorry.