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Head Cases in the Press

Starred review from Publisher's Weekly

Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath Michael Paul
Mason. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24 (256p) ISBN 978-0-374-13452-5

"Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has been brought to the fore by the war
in Iraq, but not only soldiers experience it. Mason, a case manager in
Tulsa, Okla., for people living with TBI, writes with passion and
urgency about the unheralded but compelling stories of Americans
injured in car accidents or through a miscalculation while
snowboarding. Their lives are disrupted by seizures, memory loss,
psychosis. One of Mason's clients is an ambitious former air force
officer who now goes into waking trances in which he thinks he's dead,
as a result of a herpes virus emerging from its hiding place to invade
his brain. Mason lays out a damning indictment of the health-care
system's failure to provide facilities and services that millions like
his clients need. He also tells stories of tremendous courage and
perseverance as survivors and their families work to re-establish the
everyday skills they had before their injury. The strange effects of
neurological damage will draw fans of Oliver Sacks, but Mason's
poignant and caring accounts of his clients' lives are sure to touch
the hearts of a wide range of readers. (Apr.)"

Kirkus Reviews

HEAD CASES
Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

 Author: Mason, Michael Paul

 Review Date: FEBRUARY 01, 2008
 Publisher:Farrar, Straus & Giroux
 Pages: 256
 Price (hardback): $24
 Publication Date: 4/1/2008 0:00:00
 ISBN: 978-0-374-13452-5
 ISBN (hardback): 978-0-374-13452-5
 Category: NONFICTION

"Dispassionate neuroscience meets fierce advocacy in this heartbreaking
 but hopeful look at the little-understood world of those who suffer
 traumatic brain injuries.

 Mason is a traumatic brain-injury case manager; brain-injury survivors
 (an estimated 5.3 million in the United States) go to him after they've
 exhausted every other option. His mission is getting help for people
 stuck in the purgatory of the U.S. healthcare system. His job, which
 takes him across the country, is convincing hospital administrators and
 neurologists and specialty care centers to give clients suffering
 debilitating brain injuries a new chance at life. Currently, Mason
 reports, there are at least 90,000 Americans with a brain injury severe
 enough to require an extended stay in rehab, but there are only a few
 thousand specialty beds, even fewer for patients whose disabilities are
 not just mental and physical but emotional. Clients include a man with
 encephalitis who is convinced he is dead; a woman with no memory, not
 even of the daughter who was killed in the car wreck that left her
 disabled; and an amnesiac serving time for a crime he can't remember
 committing. These patients' initial injuries are only prologues to the
 real tragedies, which begin when healthcare policies run out, or
 government support goes dry, and the severely disabled victims are left
 to fend for themselves, in many cases bankrupting their families. Few of
 the stories end happily: one client attempts suicide; another ends up in
 a mental hospital with no brain-injury experts on staff. Mason's goal
 here is to convey awareness, not to uplift.

 Intriguing case histories, related with a personal passion that sets
 Mason's book apart from Oliver Sacks's cooler writings on the subject."

April 2, 2008

Books of The Times

Empathy for the Brain, After Insult and Injury

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Iraq may have many shortcomings at the present time but it is, sadly, a very good place to suffer a head injury. The theater hospital at Balad Air Base, 30 miles north of Baghdad, is “the gateway to an elaborate, frenzied ride through the most aggressive medical system in the world,” Michael Paul Mason writes in “Head Cases,” his episodic tour of brain injuries and the strange behavior that often accompanies them.

Balad is a big detour for Mr. Mason, who spends most of his time in the United States assessing brain-injured patients for possible admission to the neurologic rehabilitation unit at Brookhaven Hospital in Tulsa, Okla., where he works. It gives him the opportunity, however, to step into “the brain injury capital of the world” and witness medical advances in treating head injuries.

“A hundred years ago, a horse’s kick to the head would have done you in,” he writes. “In Iraq you can take a golf-ball-size missile through the skull and survive.” In the United States brain-injury patients stand a 71 percent chance of being alive a month after entering the emergency room. At Balad the figure is 98 percent.

Mr. Mason does not see many of the rocket-to-the-head cases in his practice. He deals primarily with patients struggling with the long-term effects of brain injury, the problems that start after the brain has been operated on and the skull put back together. Memory loss, uncontrollable emotions, olfactory hallucinations — the list of alarming post-injury symptoms goes on and on.

April 4, 2008
"Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath": Trying to restore beautiful minds

By Irene Wanner

Special to The Seattle Times
"Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath"
by Michael Paul Mason
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
310 pp., $25

"Ounce for ounce," observes brain-injury case manager Michael Paul Mason in his fascinating book "Head Cases," "a walnut enjoys more protection than the human brain." It's no wonder, then, that huge numbers of people sustain damage from falls, strokes, neurological diseases, accidents, suffocation, assault, poisoning, war wounds or other causes. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report 1.4 million cases annually, resulting in 50,000 fatalities. As many as 5.3 million Americans live with permanent disabilities resulting from brain injury. Almost a quarter million people are hospitalized, yet antiquated legislation and massive cutbacks mean "few states are capable of providing even the most minimal level of specialized care" for traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients.

Mason should know. One of only about 200 brain-injury case managers serving roughly 5 million survivors, he travels around the country trying to arrange patient care. Usually, he knows he'll fail. At least 90,000 Americans have brain injuries requiring extended care, but only a few thousand beds are available. A limited number of psychiatric facilities have neurologists on staff and even fewer have brain-injury rehabilitation programs.

Far more money is spent on pharmacology, technology and preventing deaths — particularly in Iraq, where the U.S. military is "proud of its production-line styled medevac capabilities." Such success has significant costs, however. Increasingly severe injuries in a system unprepared to offer extended care and/or rehabilitation means "we are no longer asking most soldiers to die in service; we are asking them to accept a lifetime of severe disability." The average lifetime cost per veteran? More than $10 million.

Mason visited Iraq, so his experiences will give readers information they've been sheltered from too long. But no less vivid, heartbreaking or movingly written are other cases. In "The Hermit of Hollywood Boulevard," for instance, a snowboard crash left a young man with more than 120 seizures monthly. After exhausting his options as well as his family's finances, he committed himself to a psychiatric crisis unit, his only venue for free care.

Mending minds
Tulsa World
by: MICHAEL WALLIS
4/6/2008  12:00 AM

Tulsa author writes of devastating injuries in ‘Head Cases’

After reading this book I must be direct. Stop whatever you are doing and get a copy of “Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath” by Tulsa author Michael Paul Mason.

Read every word of it. Memorize passages. Tell everyone you know to do the same. A truly exceptional book, this sequence of 12 compelling stories will impact your life or the life of someone you care about.

Mason’s words will touch your heart but more importantly open your eyes to the harsh realities endured by mounting numbers of traumatic brain injury survivors.

They come from every demographic category. They are every race and creed. They are young and they are old. They are athletes, soldiers and kids. They are rich and they are poor. They are us.

Mason is the ideal advocate to give us such a book. A skillful author, who writes with passion and clarity, he also is a professional brain-injury case manager who has worked closely with hundreds of survivors across the nation. With 1.5 million Americans sustaining a TBI each year and as many as 5.3 million more — or 2 percent of the population — living with a permanent disability resulting from TBI, Mason felt duty-bound to write such a book.

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright© 2008 Michael Paul Mason