Beating Brain Injury
Every once in a while I come across an uplifting story about a victim of severe traumatic brain injury making significant recovery. I came across this story while perusing the Chicago Tribune, by Lisa Pevtzow
Special to the Tribune
November 20, 2009
Chicago Police Sgt. Mike Dineen should have died.
That's what his doctors said after Dineen suffered a massive brain injury in a still-unexplained, off-duty incident on New Year's Day.
On Jan. 1 Dineen was found in a parking lot on the southwest side of Chicago, barely alive with the back of his skull partially caved in. Dineen has no memory of what happened and has no idea of why he was there, although it's believed he may have slipped on a patch of ice or fallen down a flight of stairs, he said. He had his wallet, so he does not believe he was the victim of a crime.
Dineen was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center, where his face was so unrecognizable that his parents initially thought they were in the wrong room, said his father, Chuck Dineen, a retired Chicago firefighter. Doctors told them that he would probably die, and if he didn't, he likely would be brain-damaged.
Dineen suffered the most severe category of traumatic brain injury, as well as contusions on his lungs, said Stacy McCarty, one of his doctors at the Rehabilitation Institute.
Surgeons at Christ operated on his brain to temporarily remove part of his skull to relieve the pressure and drain the large amount of blood. He spent the next three weeks in a coma, on a ventilator and a feeding tube. When he awoke he was transferred to the Rehabilitation Institute, where he spent a month before transferring to outpatient rehabilitation at its center in Willowbrook.
Dineen, who has been cleared to rejoin the force in a week, was clearly a man happy to be alive.
"When I went to the neurologist two weeks after I woke up from the coma, the doctor said to me, 'It's nice to see you walking and talking, because you were supposed to be dead,' " Dineen said. "I had to go through death to realize how valuable life is."
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