Crooked Smile: One Family's Journey Toward Healing

by Lainie Cohen

A mother struggles to keep her family together after her eldest son suffers a brain injury in a car crash. Within months, her youngest son becomes involved with drugs and his sister suffers a physical collapse that puts her in a wheelchair. A moving and inspiring memoir written with emotional honesty, filled with hope and celebration for life's small successes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1550225731
• ISBN13: 9781550225730
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Dealing with Distress within the Family

This book concentrates on the early recovery and inpatient rehabilitation of the author's son Daniel. It gives families an excellent road map of where they're headed: the ICU and its ventilators and intracranial pressure monitors; the agony of the unknown; the celebration over the tiniest of improvements; and the other countless, but bearable, challenges ahead. Crooked Smile nicely illustrates how brain injury impacts the family. Daniel's sister, Alyssa, begs her parents to let her postpone her first year of college to help care for Daniel. They refuse, and, at school, Alyssa develops her own medical problems, possibly as a result of feeling anxious and powerless to help her family. Daniel's younger brother, Jonathan, resorts to self-destructive behavior, perhaps in an attempt to gain some attention from his parents, who are preoccupied with Daniel. What may surprise some readers is that the Cohens did not sit watch at the comatose Daniel's bedside. Instead, they returned to their jobs, physically, if not emotionally. Later, when Daniel was emerging from his coma, they alternated visits to be with their son. When Daniel began his rehabilitation his parents again stepped away, "to allow the therapists to get to know Daniel." There's wisdom in this approach. The Cohens allowed themselves to live outside the exhausting world of brain injury, to refresh themselves for the rigors of Daniel's homecoming, and to spend extra time with Jonathan. They knew that an exhausted caregiver is a poor caregiver and that a disturbed family is a poor environment for anyone living with a brain injury. Crooked Smile is worthy reading for all families just beginning to live with brain injury.