T.B.I., what do these three letters mean to you? They didn’t mean anything to me before the morning of Dec. 6, 1997. I woke up that morning full of excitement and enthusiasm. My family along with my best friend, Jeff Bacetich, and his parents were going to get our Christmas trees. We all met for breakfast at the Calico Cupboard where we enjoyed a wonderful meal. Then it was off to get our trees; the destination was a tree farm in Stanwood. My parents were in their van, my siblings in one of their cars, Jeff’s parents in their car, and Jeff and I brought up the rear in my new Ford Probe. Almost everybody made it to the meeting point safely. Everybody but two. Jeff and I were about a mile out of town, when we hit black ice, and flipped my car. Jeff sustained a broken arm, but I did much more damage. Everything that I write about the accident from here on out is hearsay, for I don’t remember anything after eating breakfast that day.

I sustained a degloving of the left, upper side of my face, multiple skull fractures, and thusly a Traumatic Brain Injury, T.B.I. I always thought I had life pretty easy, and I did, the key word here being did. However, the loss of friends, loss of motor skills, and losing my girlfriend, all the effects of T.B.I., have made life more than a little bit difficult.

I’ll start at the beginning, and again this is Jeff’s recollection not mine. Neither of us strapped our seatbelts on. We were driving in the left lane at somewhere around 60 miles/hour, and suddenly we were spun backwards. So here we are rolling uncontrollably down the highway at 60 backwards. We then went up on the median, and this shot the car about 15 feet up in the air. The car flipped so we came down on the roof. Jeff lucked out, his seat broke and he was thrown to the back of the car. I, however, was not so lucky. The car ended up with the driver window, my window, on the road. Because I didn’t have on my seatbelt, my head went through the side window, and skidded along the road. This is what caused the degloving. A degloving is when the skin and all tissue are peeled back, like removing a glove from your hand. I was knocked unconscious, but Jeff was not.

We came to a stop on the far side of the road courtesy of a rock wall. Jeff called my name once. Then he realized I was making a very strange breathing/gurgling sound. For a moment he thought I had a red ribbon attached to my face, but it turns out I severed a main artery. What he thought was a ribbon was actually blood pulsating out of my head. Lucky for me, he remembered his first aide class he’d taken in school. He grabbed a stocking hat and applied pressure to my open wound. The first person on the scene just happened to be my other good friend Nolan Gerlach’s father, Dick. Dick is a physician’s assistant, so he coached Jeff through this ordeal. He also had a cell phone and called an ambulance. The ambulance arrived about 5 minutes later, and the medics, did a great job trying to get me stabilized. They had to give me a shot rendering me paralyzed. They took me back to Island Hospital, and called in the helicopter to air lift me to Harborview Trauma Center, in Seattle.

At Harborview, they operated on my skull and face, piecing me back together. This operation lasted about nine hours. Family and friends stayed at my side for weeks. I am grateful for all the support I received. I was in Harborview ‘til the New Year, and on January first I went to a sub-acute rehab center in Tukwila called Synergos.

I love soccer I could never lose that…WRONG! Receiving the T.B.I. that I did all my abilities on how to move my body were also lost. I had to learn how to walk, talk, and even swallow again. This has been an ongoing battle for me; even today I am still struggling with my speech. Traumatic Brain Injury is a horrible thing, and I, unknowingly, was at the very beginning of a long, long road. It affects everything about your life, whether it is the relationships with your family or the ability to do just about anything. It’s like someone erased part of your brain, and it’s up to you to go get it back. This is what makes it so hard, the fact that it’s up to you and only you. It’s an extremely frustrating thing, having to relearn how to do everything again. Because it’s all there in your head, it’s just the roads that your brain waves once traveled on are all broken up, and you have to reroute your brain messages. Having to relearn how to swallow was pretty difficult; walking wasn’t much easier. I realize now, how important the small things in life are. Or I should say, rather, I don’t take anything for granted. Like being able to do some of things that everyone does on a daily basis, such as, talking.

I can vividly remember the first night I spoke! I was in my bed at Synergos with my older brother, my dad, and my mom. I used my only form of communication, a paper with the alphabet on it. I tried to tell my dad I had something on my tongue, and it was bugging the heck out of me. But he couldn’t understand what I was trying to spell. I guess I was going to fast for him. After the third or fourth time of him asking what I was trying to say, I got so frustrated that I tried to say I had something on my tongue. What came out was less than understandable, but it was a starting point, and my family was all very excited. My parents then, remembered what the doctors had told them asked me to try and say mmmommm. This is the easiest sound to form with your mouth, and I hesitantly said mmomm. Well that opened the floodgates, and I started trying a bunch of new words. I succeeded at most of what they asked. When I got home the most frustrating thing for me was going out to the soccer field, and realizing that I could no longer do something that once came so naturally to me before. I haven’t given up on soccer, I’ve just prioritized the things that I need to work on, and thusly soccer is on the back burner. After Synergos, I went to the U.W. hospital for acute rehab for two weeks. I finally came home on Friday the 13th of February.

I arrived at home the day before my girlfriend and I had our one-year anniversary. Things were never the same between she and myself. We celebrated our first year of being together, as well as we could, with me having just come home from the hospital and all. We went through about another two months of being together, when she dropped the bomb. I had just gotten back from a weekend in Victoria with my family, and I called her on the phone. We had a short conversation, and then she was like, "Kev, I don’t think we should see each other any more." I was blown away! The girl, whom I thought I’d be spending the rest of my life with, was just discarding me like it was nothing but a middle school relationship. And it was over the phone no less. She was with me through all my time in the hospital; I’ll give her that. However, it was now, the adjusting back to life, when I really needed her.

My accident came at a really bad time, for I was now at the age where all of my peers were starting to move out, and get their lives started. So I came home to a town where memories was about all I had. However, the friends that hadn’t moved away were great. These friends I’ll have for the rest of my life. I know that if they were there for me during the toughest time in my life they’ll be there through anything.

So as you’ve probably figured out the loss of my friends and girlfriend, the loss of my motor skills, as a result of Traumatic Brain injury, has been the hardest thing I’ve had to overcome in my life thus far. The loss of my motor skills has probably been the toughest. There are plenty of "fish in the sea," and my friends that have stuck by me, will be the people I enjoy the rest of my life, a life I am very blessed to have. I hope that I have raised your awareness of Traumatic Brain Injury, and the affects it has on not just the person whom suffered it, but all the people around that person. I remember a quote by Charles Swindoll, "I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me, and 90 percent how I react to it." It is this quote that is on my mind just about all the time. If I am ever feeling down or I am thinking about giving up, it is this that helps me through it.

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