Headstrong

Surviving a Traumatic Brain Injury

JoAnne Silver Jones

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781631526138
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

She didn’t see the hammer. For a fraction of a second JoAnne Jones saw a young black face, framed by a black hoodie, and then she descended into a place where she felt and saw nothing. Jones survived this sudden assault by a stranger, but it left her with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), fractured hands, and PTSD. Headstrong tells the story of how she learned to live with the daily challenges of TBI. It brings the reader into a life traumatized by violence and set in the context of a society full of violence and vocal, visible white supremacists. Woven throughout Jones’s account are the stories of how medical professionals, friends, family, and strangers became a foundation strong enough to hold her during the worst of times, and to give her the buoyancy to find a path toward hope.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• One: Lamb Shanks
• Two: Memory Shards
• Three: Rachel, Debby, and Trauma’s Long Reach
• Four: Awake
• Five: The Return
• Six: Apples and Trees
• Seven: Home Again and Other Sorrows
• Eight: Hand Surgery
• Nine: Therapies
• Ten: Back to Work: Down the Up Staircase
• Eleven: Trauma and the Adult Classroom
• Twelve: Doctors Extraordinaire
• Thirteen: The Permanence of Racism
• Fourteen: The Balm of Fictions and the Quest for Justice
• Fifteen: My Voice of Anger
• Sixteen: Assault Made Visible
• Seventeen: You Look Great. Are You All Better Now?
• Eighteen: Dueling Traumas
• Nineteen: A Claw Foot Hammer and a Black Hoodie
• Twenty: End of an Era
• Twenty-one: Divine Canines
• Twenty-two: I’m Mad As Hell and I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore
• Twenty-three: Gratitude and a Party
• Twenty-four: Another Campaign
• Twenty-five: And On and On and On
• Twenty-six: The Pull to Write
• Twenty-seven: A Club I Don’t Want to Be a Member of
• Twenty-eight: Crazy Human with Hope
• Twenty-nine: Taking Flight
• Appendix: Suggestions
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Selected Titles from She Writes Press