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  • Prognosis

  • A Memoir of My Brain
  • By: Sarah Vallance
  • Narrated by: Cat Gould
  • Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (11 ratings)

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Prognosis

By: Sarah Vallance
Narrated by: Cat Gould
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Publisher's Summary

The searing, wry memoir about a woman’s fight for a new life after a devastating brain injury.

When PhD candidate Sarah Vallance is thrown from a horse and suffers a jarring blow to the head, she believes she walks away unscathed. The next morning, things take a sharp turn as she’s quickly led from work to the emergency room. By the end of the week, a neurologist delivers a devastating prognosis: Sarah suffered a traumatic brain injury that has caused her IQ to plummet, with no hope of recovery. Her brain has irrevocably changed.

Afraid of judgment, and deemed no longer fit for work or study, Sarah isolates herself from the outside world. With a disability pension that barely covers her grocery bills, Sarah spends months at home, with her dogs as her only source of companionship, battling a personality she no longer recognizes and plagued by overwhelming depression, uncontrollable rage, and the shock of losing simple functions she’d taken for granted. Once an ambitious young government executive, her life is consumed by fear and shame until a chance encounter gives Sarah hope that her brain can heal. That conversation lights a small flame of determination, and Sarah begins to push back, painstakingly reteaching herself to read and write, and eventually reentering the workforce and a new, if unpredictable, life.

In this highly intimate account of devastation and renewal, Sarah pulls back the curtain on life with traumatic brain injury, an affliction where the wounds are invisible and the lasting effects are often unknown and misunderstood. Over years of frustrating setbacks and uncertain triumphs, Sarah comes to terms with her disability and finds love with a woman who helps her embrace a new, accepting sense of self.

©2019 Sarah Vallance (P)2019 Brilliance Audio, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic Reviews

"Powerful in its depiction of the author’s will to rise above the limitations of her disability.... With a mission of giving voice to the voiceless, Vallance shares the little-understood experience of surviving a traumatic brain injury." (Kirkus Reviews)

What listeners say about Prognosis

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

The author investigates the impacts of TBI -

The impacts of TBI are analysed in good humor - underpinning it all are determination and talent.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

if you have ever hit your head

this is a really good piece of work that helps cast light upon the relatively misunderstood stood issue of traumatic brain injury.

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  • IRB
  • 08-01-2020

I couldn't finish it.

This may be a good story but I found the narration so insipid that I just couldn't continue.

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