In 1996 I was in a car wreck that left another driver dead and me with a traumatic brain injury resulting in disability. Because I already had a history of depression my complaints about symptoms were put down to mental illness. Eventually I got a doctor to listen and he did an MRI which found some frontal lobe damage. An EEG showed some temporal lobe damage as well. Finally some of my symptoms started making sense. Odd quirky things like thinking I was smelling smoke. I wasn't hallucinating, as was originally thought, my brain just wasn't processing some signals correctly. I was smelling something (still don't know what) and my brain was interpreting it as smoke.

With the right diagnosis I started getting the right treatment. Anticonvulsants and Alzheimer's medication have helped a great deal.

I was a biomechanical engineer with a hobby of training horses when the wreck happened. I lost the ability to do math and that was the end of my engineering career. But I didn't loose the interest and ability to train animals. My legs were damaged in the wreck and training horses was no longer feasible, so I began training dogs.

I found a dog who could accurately predict my complex partial seizures and trained him as a service dog. The sense of freedom he gives me is as good as when I talked my sister into helping onto my horse, legs still bandaged and one in a brace and took off at a gallop across the pasture. Scared her pretty good, but oh, it meant the world to me to be free of that wheel chair and to a degree, under my own power.

So now I'm into service dogs mostly. I also enjoy knitting and spinning, and growing herbs.