Contact: Tom Oswald, MSU Media Communications (517) 355-2281
6/30/98
"OVER MY HEAD": MSU PROF TELLS STORY OF LIFE AFTER A SERIOUS HEAD INJURY
EAST LANSING -- It was the defining moment of her life, but she has no recollection of it. One minute she's riding her bicycle down a quiet street in her suburban Detroit neighborhood; the next she's waking up in a hospital.
This begins the story of Claudia Osborn, a Detroit-area doctor whose life would never be the same after that July 1988 bike ride ended with a squeal of brakes and the sickening sound of head meeting cement.
Osborn, who is no longer a practicing physician but serves as a volunteer faculty member in Michigan State University's College of Osteopathic Medicine, has chronicled her 10-year journey from a serious head injury to a very different, yet happy life in a book titled "Over My Head."
Sprinkled with a blend of humor and poignancy, the book is written with the lay audience in mind.
"I wrote this book not only to help those with a closed head injury, but for people who don't have one," Osborn said. "It's my goal to increase awareness and understanding."
The book details Osborn's life before the accident, the ways in which she denied she was seriously injured, and how she was able to emerge from a life of confusion and dysfunction to one of clarity and productivity.
The night the accident occurred - July 11, 1988 - she spent several hours in a Detroit hospital before convincing the attending physicians that she was all right. Normally, someone with a suspected head injury will at least stay overnight. But because Osborn was a physician and she was sure she had just suffered a concussion, she was released.
"Doctors as patients often get their own way, a situation which often leads to less than the best treatment," she writes.
An injured brain can't interpret and analyze its own dysfunction, so Osborn thought she was ready to return to the demanding practice of medicine after a few short weeks. However, the decreased use of her right side, language deficit, and impaired reasoning skills made the transition impossible.
"I was 'adynamic,'" she said. "I didn't generate ideas or actions. I couldn't plan, organize or make decisions."
Nine months after her injury, Osborn was accepted for treatment at New York University's Head Trauma Program, where she spent a year and a half receiving the rehabilitation she needed.
"It was very useful," she said. "It was there that I got what I needed, not necessarily what I wanted."
Short-term memory loss meant that Osborn would consistently walk into a room and forget why she was there. Food would be left burning on the stove. Things were constantly misplaced.
NYU taught her strategies for compensating for her memory loss by using alarms, notes and recorders to make her performance more reliable. One alarm goes off every 15 minutes just to make sure she's focused on the task at hand. When she drives, an alarm beeps every three minutes so she can ask herself if she is still on the correct route to the destination listed on the dashboard.
It was in rehab at NYU that Osborn began to "come to terms with the injury." Probably the hardest part of the ordeal was the realization that she would no longer be able to practice medicine.
"Medicine was my life. It was the fulfillment of a life-long dream," she said. "Nothing made me happier."
While she doesn't see patients any more, she still remains active an associate clinical professor in MSU's College of Osteopathic. A 1982 graduate of the college, Osborn returned to her alma mater to teach first-year medical students some of the basics of doctoring.
"I teach them how to play doctor," she says with a smile. "I teach them how to take histories, conduct physicals and so on. It's an important part of medicine."
Osborn says that writing "Over my Head," which took nearly seven years to complete, was another form of therapy for her.
"When I was in rehab I took a lot of notes," she says. "My verbal skills were somewhat limited, so writing was easier."
With her verbal skills back intact, Osborn has recently become somewhat of a spokesperson for those who suffer closed head injuries. She's on the lecture circuit, speaking at colleges and universities, rehab facilities, TBI conferences, and to groups of health care providers.
In addition, an excerpt from her book appeared in a recent Readers Digest magazine and she was featured in a story on the NBC newsmagazine "Dateline NBC."
"Over My Head" is now available in bookstores.
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