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High-profile brain injury advocate Lee Woodruff accepts award in Vancouver

It's just over 10 years since a roadside bomb exploded next to U.S. television anchor Bob Woodruff and his Canadian-born cameraman Doug Vogt in Iraq.

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It’s just over 10 years since a roadside bomb exploded next to U.S. television anchor Bob Woodruff and his Canadian-born cameraman Doug Vogt in Iraq. Both survived, but Woodruff’s grievous injuries kept him in a medically induced coma for more than a month with part of his skull removed to accommodate swelling in his brain.

Bob Woodruff
Bob Woodruff founded the Bob Woodruff Foundation to help wounded veterans re-enter society. Photo by John Parra /Getty Images

Learning to walk, talk and write again, Woodruff returned to work as a foreign correspondent for ABC a mere 13 months after the attack. With his wife, Lee Woodruff, he wrote a memoir called In an Instant and founded the Bob Woodruff Foundation to help wounded veterans fully re-enter society. It distributed $4.2 million in grants in 2015 from a total of $30 million since its inception in 2006.

Lee was in Vancouver Tuesday to accept the Public Leadership in Neurology Award on Bob’s behalf at the American Academy of Neurology conference. She is also the author of Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress, and her first work of fiction, Those We Love Most, published in 2014.

The Vancouver Sun spoke to Lee Tuesday. This is an edited and condensed version of the conversation.

Q. Is the foundation dealing with more “invisible” brain injuries like post-traumatic stress disorder?

A. Absolutely. We’re calling it post-traumatic stress now, to get rid of the stigma of calling it a disorder. And, yes, post-traumatic stress of the caregiver is going to be the next wave in the front lines of military medicine in terms of empathy fatigue and burnout of nurses and medics. I’ve heard nurses say, “I’ve had one too many young man bleed out in my arms and I can’t do this anymore.”

If you see trauma after trauma after trauma, that does things to your brain.

It also has an effect on family caregivers.

Q. You and your husband are high-functioning, educated, A-type professionals. Was it easier for your family to recover?

A. One hundred per cent. Bob had unlimited resources through his employer — cognitive rehab, neuropsychology, all the therapies that he needed — whereas most insurance runs out in four weeks which, in a brain injury, doesn’t even begin to touch what’s needed.

Because Bob had a lot going for him before the injury — being super-intelligent, speaking several languages — he had a lot of neurons he could “flex” after the injury to build new connections in his brain.

His biggest problem was aphasia — not being able to find the right words. He literally woke up speaking gibberish, making absolutely no sense. To watch his brain reboot itself over the next year and beyond, that’s when you see how neuroscience is so cool.

Q. A lot of people change after a brain injury. What happened in your case?

A. Bob’s injury was so severe that half of his skull was removed, but there is very little about his personality that’s altered. Yet his cameraman, who had a much less severe injury, was hit in the frontal lobe and his wife told me he had almost no emotion toward her for at least a year.

I’ll take the guy who woke up loving me with half a head any day than to lose something that critical.

The AAN conference, attended by about 12,000 brain researchers from around the world, ends Thursday.

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