Difficulty finding information about recovering from brain trauma prompted Chrissy Wang (王詩婷) to establish an information platform for people in her situation.
A bicycle accident in August 2019 and her experiences while recovering prompted her to establish the Restart With Chrissy platform, Wang, who is the chief executive officer at the Ren Shin Wellness Park nursing home in Taichung, wrote on her Web site, www.restartwithchrissy.com.
“I had a skull fracture, hemorrhage and clavicle complete fracture, so I was in the ICU for two weeks,” she told the Taipei Times yesterday. “After I returned home, I slept for 20 hours a day and was told to rest and to not work for two to three months, and no running for six months.”
Photo courtesy of Chrissy Wang
She was proactive in her rehabilitation process, said Wang, who in 2018 became the first Taiwanese woman to complete the six races on the Abbott World Marathon Majors’ list.
“I started doing a lot of research to understand more about TBI [traumatic brain injury] and found out there’s barely any information in Mandarin, but there are thousands of TBI cases per day in Taiwan,” she said.
“As brain injury symptoms are so invisible — fatigue, tinnitus, memory loss, insomnia, anxiety, sound sensitivity, dizziness, vertigo — I decided to support other patients through this lonely journey of this invisible injury,” she said.
She sought advice from experts in the US and Singapore after finding that there was much more information available in English than in Chinese, Wang said.
“I was enthusiastic about the process and wanted to share my experience with others,” she said. “I translated the information that was most helpful to me into Chinese.”
Wang said that she lost two days of memory from immediately after the crash.
“This type of amnesia is an automatic process that lets the brain forget the traumatic experience,” she said.
“I sat at home every day feeling depressed until I started working again with the encouragement of my family,” she said. “They told me life would have more meaning if I were working, so I started out slowly, working for two hours per day, two to three days per week.”
The decision to slowly ease back into work was backed up by an expert in Singapore who told her that the brain needs time to rest after a traumatic injury, she said.
Wang said she is happy to provide information through Restart With Chrissy, but added that people going through rehabilitation must first seek professional help.
“Although I work in medical management, I am not professionally trained to help those with brain trauma,” she said.
She invited people with questions to message her on her Facebook page, Run with Chrissy (跟著詩婷跑).
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