ALLENTOWN, Pa. — More than 5 million people in the United States live with a brain injury, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A Carbon County woman is using her brain injury story to inspire others to never give up despite the cards they are dealt.
National statistics show that every nine seconds someone suffers from a brain injury. That was the case for Emily Brong, of Palmerton, 10 years ago when she was in a car accident on her way to softball practice.
“It was a Sunday. I'll never forget the phone call 11:11, 1/19/ 2014. There's been an accident,” recalled Brong’s mother, Beth Winter.
“She was in with her other girls. They were on their way to softball practice. They were over by Beltzville Lake and a car hit black ice and hit the kids head-on.”
That accident left the 15-year-old Brong with a traumatic brain injury and wheelchair-bound.
“Emily was the only one with life-altering injuries,” Winter said. “We spent two months at Lehigh Valley Trauma and then, fortunately, Good Shepherd was able to offer her an acute rehab bed, and she rehabbed at Good Shepherd for seven months following her injury.”
The outlook was grim, but somehow the teenager found the strength to carry on.
“Emily still obviously is a brain-injured individual though her brain injury has made her more intelligent than she was prior to injury,” said her mom. “That's my look on it all, but she is wheelchair-bound. She walks with the therapists, however, her left side is paralyzed and she requires 24/7 care.”
A decade later, Brong is thriving. “Whatever part of her brain was affected, it affected something that has made her a very happy-go-lucky and just a pleasant, pleasant person,” said Winter.
Her mother attributes much of her progress to the work she does at Good Shepherd Rehabilitation’s Hyland Center for Health & Technology.
“We offer a diverse offering of rehabilitation, but we also hyper-focus on some catastrophic rehabilitation, which particularly evolves in spinal cord injury, stroke, rehabilitation, and traumatic and nontraumatic brain injury,” said Dr. Sandeep Singh, Good Shepherd’s chief medical officer and senior vice president of medical affairs.
He said roughly 5% of their patients have a traumatic brain injury, so there are a multitude of resources offered to those who are part of that group.
“We try to incorporate where the necessities of deficit are and identified so that we can layer in technologies, whether that's a functional stimulation unit that helps a patient take and pick up a glass of, you know, for the first time after their injury, or help support their arm through mechanisms like a neuro move,” said Singh.
With the help of those resources, like the Zero G technology, Brong and patients like her have advanced in their overall movement.
“When you implement that technology, we're really trying to tap into what we call the seven central pattern generator, which ideally is to help facilitate neuroplasticity, which is kind of the model of the mindset behind neuro rehabilitation, and really help these patients progress in their path of recovery,” said the chief medical officer.
“Emily is able to basically do a lot for herself independently even though her left side is paralyzed,” her mother said proudly. “Emily goes to speech. She is reading books now, which she has not done in over 10 years. She's comprehending things, her memory's improving. Her speech is much clearer. Through occupational therapy, she's able to make her own bed. She can clean her own teeth. That’s huge for someone like Emily.”
"Clearly, it's a journey. It's not like an episode of care and then you're done."Dr. Sandeep Singh, Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network
“Clearly, it's a journey. It's not like an episode of care and then you're done,” explained Singh. “It really is this long-term journey of longitudinal care model that Good Shepherd buys into and what was really required for the brain injury population.”
Good Shepherd provides physical, occupational, and speech therapy to the 25-year-old.
This month, during Brain Injury Awareness Month, Winter said she wants people to know there is hope for progress toward a normal life for survivors.
“Keep fighting. Keep a positive outlook on life. You know, it's easy to give up. Very easy, but you just gotta keep fighting,” she said.
When it comes to the volume of brain injuries, Singh said Good Shepherd is seeing a decrease in traumatic brain injuries that relate to motor vehicle accidents, because of the safety technology that's being implemented in vehicles today.
However, they continue to see an increase in brain injury events in the elderly population, who are at a higher risk of falling and hitting their head.
