Month: June 2013

Jas Boothe has served over 13 years in the United States Army and is currently on active duty in the United States Army National Guard.
She deployed during the Operation Iraq Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom campaigns and her military career has been dedicated to working with and advocating for Soldiers and their family members.

In 2005, she was a single parent in the Army Reserves living in New Orleans. That spring, she learned she would soon be deploying to Iraq. During her mobilization, Boothe’s life was torn apart by two significant events. In August she lost everything she owned due to Hurricane Katrina. She tried to shift her focus to her platoon that was counting on her for leadership through the deployment. The very next month in September, she received a devastating diagnosis of an aggressive head, neck, and throat cancer, and was now unable to deploy.

My guest tonight is Janet Cromer, who is a psychiatric nurse and professional speaker living in Bethesda, MD. Janet is the author of the memoir, Professor Cromer Learns to Read: A Couple’s New Life after Brain Injury, which chronicles the seven year period Janet shared with her husband after he suffered a severe anoxic brain injury. For more information, please visit www.janetcromer.com.

Janet also writes the “Caregiver’s Compass” feature for Brain Injury Journey magazine, a free online subscription to Lash Publishing (lapublishing.com)

In January of 1989 Mike Strand suffered a severe brain injury followed by a 10 day coma after his pick-up was broadsided by a semi-truck. He was in the hospital for 8 weeks and had a lengthy recovery. After the first year he had completed all his rehab therapy, but as we all know, he was far from recovered. He has spent the past 24 years steadily improving himself. Since 1998 he has been a regular columnist for the Brain Injury Alliance of MN’s newsletter and he has published his best and most popular columns in a book titled “Meditations on Brain Injury” available from Lash Publishing, his second book, containing more recent columns, will be available later this summer.

My guest tonight is Tonia Wittkower. Her husband David, is a film maker whose work has been featured on TLC, History, Discovery, PBS and several other notable channels. He has won 21 film festival awards for excellence in film making. One of the most personal films he’s done is called TBI: One Woman’s Journey, about his wife.

In 1980, Tonia’s life was changed forever. This DVD follows Tonia beyond the accident that almost took her life, through the steps she and her family took when “life isn’t normal anymore.”