Seth Kimbro Saved My Life
How Seth’s legacy in “Giving Light to Darkness” by Laura Kimbro Saved My Life
I’ve written before about the darkness that traumatic brain injury can bring — the memory loss, the isolation, the crushing weight that makes suicide feel like the only way out. In my lowest moments, when the “Who Is This?” type of phone calls and encounters with others and the disappearing friendships piled on top of constant uncertainty, I came dangerously close to believing the lie that my family would be better off without me.
And it quite literally helped save my life.
My 3 Year Anniversary
Today marks exactly three years since a wood splitter fell on my head and knocked me unconscious. Three years since the moment everything changed. Three years since I was, in a very real sense, reborn into a life I never asked for.
In the beginning, they told me I would be fine. “Just a concussion,” the ER doctor said. “You’ll bounce back quickly.” I believed them. My family believed them. I rested, followed instructions, and waited for my old self to return. In the days that followed I deteriorated, lost the ability to hold a memory longer than 15 minutes, became a lump on the couch sleeping 20 hours a day, headaches pounding, unable to think, process, watch a screen, forming words one syllable at a time, not able to think of what word was coming next or what word I had just said. After a day or two of almost appearing normal, I had quickly become unrecognizable, like a zombie.
Beauty in the Broken Days
Some people come into your life (even after they’ve left it) and quietly rearrange how you see everything. For me, one of those people is Claire Wineland.
Claire lived with cystic fibrosis—a serious, progressive lung and digestive disease—from birth. She spent huge chunks of her short life in hospitals, hooked up to machines, fighting infections, and facing the very real possibility that each day might be one of her last. She died at 21 in 2018, just days after a double lung transplant. Yet she left behind a voice that still echoes powerfully: sick people are not broken. They are not to be pitied. And their lives can be incredibly full, meaningful, and even beautiful—because of the pain, not in spite of it.
Pounding Headache, Fading Words
I sat down today with the best of intentions. Laptop open, a glass of lemonade, notes scattered across the table like I actually had a plan. The goal? Write a blog post about life with traumatic brain injury (TBI) recovery. Something honest, maybe a little hopeful, definitely real.
Instead, I got... this.
About fifteen minutes in, the familiar pressure started building behind my eyes. Not the dramatic Hollywood migraine with flashing lights and vomiting—just a slow, stubborn fog that turns simple thoughts into tangled knots. I’d type a sentence, then stare at it wondering if it even made sense. Delete. Rewrite. Delete again. The words that felt clear in my head came out jumbled on the screen, like someone had rearranged the letters while I wasn’t looking.
This is TBI recovery in a nutshell for me right now: the intention is there, the effort is there, but the brain hardware is still rebooting. And when a headache joins the party, even basic thoughts get confusing.
www.creedthoughts.gov.wwwcreedthoughts
Some stories are worth telling even if they only ever end up in a word document no one else sees. Your story matters. You are not alone. Perhaps like mine, your story right now has just been written in a word document, or not written at all yet. Maybe you have been able to share it in a support group, or writing it down, or perhaps - just telling a family member or friend. Or maybe like many with brain injury you have found you don’t have those people to tell anymore and like Creed it is just a story being written for you right now. It’s your story. Author the best day you can today.