My Sister’s Head Injury

            On Thursday October 12th of 2004 my 13 year old sister Hana became dizzy after taking a header during her soccer game. The next day she fell off a chair at her friend’s house and hit her head on a cement pillar.  At first she seemed fine and we just thought she had a minor concussion.  Though neither of my sister’s injuries would have been serious by themselves, the interesting thing about head injuries is that when they occur within a short space of time, as in my sister’s case, the severity of the head injuries increase exponentially. By the next afternoon Hana had lost the ability to understand what people were saying when they spoke to her.  She later told us that speech sounded like the beating of insect wings.  Her vocabulary was comprable to that of a three year old child.  Although her memory of her life was intact she had lost all of the information she had learned in the previous eight years of school.  She could not do simple math and had no concept of money.  She became very childlike.  She would become obsessed with an activity such as dancing and would be unable to stop.  She was incapable of dealing with even minor stresses.  For example, if she thought some one was angry at her she would become hysterical to the point where she was unable to sleep at night.

            By December my sister had improved enough to attend school part time and at this point has returned full time.  However, she continues to switch back and forth between the girl she was before the injury and this childlike girl with day and night respectively.  Though during the day now my sister is completely normal and the effects of her head injury are gone there are nights when she’s especially tired and she goes away in a sense thus returning to the state of mind she was in for the first two months of her head trauma.  It is not only being tired that makes my sister go away and six year old child take her place.  Whenever she’s in a situation that she finds hard to deal with, for instance when I yell at her for refusing to get off the computer when I need to get my work done, she just disappears.  Before my eyes the obnoxious 13 year old girl transforms into a simple, sweet and overwhelmed little girl. Living with my sister has been very difficult, never knowing if she’s going to be her obnoxious self or a sweet little girl when I see her, and never being sure of how I can react to her when she is herself in fear that I will push her over the edge does not make it any easier.

            What has happened to my sister this year has been very hard on my family.  Though we no longer worry if she’s ever going to get better at all, because if she had permanent damage she would not be able to lapse in and out of her true self, it is still very difficult to deal with her when she becomes overwhelmed and starts acting like “head trauma Hana,” as she refers to herself when in such a mode.  What has made it particularly hard for me is that I have been feeling extremely guilty because I actually enjoy my sister’s company more when she’s not all right than when she is all right.  Though I am not really comfortable saying this, my sister is not the nicest of people when she is of sound mind.  With other people she’s great, from what I hear; she’s nice, she’s compassionate and she’s understanding; however, with her siblings she can be extremely cruel and cold hearted.  In the early months of my sister’s head injury when she was never all right, before she started her Jeckyll and Hyde thing, and now still when she’s not all right she is unable to hide the sweet, compassionate girl that she really is behind a mask of cruelty and indifference to me and my other sister’s feelings.  Her head injury has allowed me to see a side of her that I have never seen before, and will allow me to know how she really feels, regardless of her mean and tough act, after she completely recovers.

            Even though my sister’s injury has been very hard on my family, it hasn’t been harder on anyone than it has been on my sister.  My sister is now back in school, has already made up all the work she missed, and will not have any catching up to do academically; socially, however, my sister will pretty much miss out on her entire 8th grade year.  Though this may not be as important to a teacher as it is to me, my sister is missing out on an extremely important transition from middle school to high school.  Even though my sister will not have any head trauma by the time she enters Schreiber next year, high school itself seems to have the ability to cause a certain amount of head trauma in every girl -- even more so, I fear, in one who has not had a year to prepare for it.  I hope that my sister will be able to adapt to high school immediately and that she will be able to progress in life the same as she would have had she never suffered a head injury.  I also hope that she will not completely undo this new way I see her once she is better.