No Soup For You

UPDATED 8/6/2017

It's so hard to get services. "No services for you." Oops, that's "No soup for you." Same thing.

I talk about that in "An Attitude Adjustment" http://thoughtfulveg.blogspot.com/2011/08/attitude-adjustment.html, and we see it happen with more severe disabilities in "Why Wait So Long" http://thoughtfulveg.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-wait-so-long.html. I had to think "Why?"

Why is it harder to get services for brain injury and not other disabilities? This is an area in which I worked for years, and I was finding it hard for myself.

It occurred to me, and this will come as a surprise to many why:  

Terri Schiavo.

How could this one person cause all this? It was actually the case about her. Terri Schiavo had a brain injury caused by a medical condition. She ended up having to be fed through a feeding tube. The Florida Supreme Court decided that she couldn't recover and her feeding tube could be removed. (In other words you don't have to feed her. I know this sounds crude and barbaric, but that's all a feeding tube is.)

It was a Right-To-Life case, but basically, that Florida Supreme Court decision decided all brain injuries. It said the brain could not get better if injured. Other states follow it because it set a precident.

Now we get to services. The government is not going to spend money on rehabilitation when rehabilitation isn't possible. (I know firsthand this not to be true.) It determined how services would be given (or not given) if you have a brain injury. It also perpetuated  a national feeling that the brain was irreparable. It was incapable of being rectified, remedied, or made good:

I was reading https://americanhospice.org/caregiving/coma-and-persistent-vegetative-state-an-exploration-of-terms/ which gives explanation of a lot of terms. This is what most will come across if faced with a brain injury. It is set up for the dieing though.

Remember, the court found that there is no recovery if the brain is injured. I disagree. I'm not dieing. Recently I read: 

1) Functional neurogenesis: This is the fairly recent discovery that thoughts change brain structure. Even more fascinating is that thoughts alone can trigger the healing of brains severely damaged by strokes or other causes. This healing begins precisely in the same brain structures responsible for our sense of self, personality, memories, and relationship to god. The newly formed brain cells then migrate throughout the brain to where they are needed. (Dr Melvin Morse's personal blog)

The brain DOES get better. This changes all those rules. Services will have to be there for those with brain injuries, and what is already will have to be more easily accessible to persons with injured brains. This will just be one more area to cover in Civil Rights. Not soon enough, either. There are many soldiers with brain injuries returning home to a country with the belief they can't be fixed.