Traumatic brain injury survivor shares story in new book

There are actually two separate Neil Ligons — the first one who played tournament tennis and graduated from the University of Virginia as an English major and the Tulane University School of Law.

That Neil Ligon had taken the Georgia Bar exam and was scheduled to start a new job in Atlanta with a major law firm in 2005.

The 2012 Neil Ligon doesn’t remember much of that, can’t recall what is real or false. He has no recollection of the car accident in 2005 that nearly killed him and left him with a traumatic brain injury.

Friends and family have told him stories about the past. Ligon has interviewed others and looked at old photographs. Some of his memory has returned, but only in fragments.

Those without knowledge of the accident would not realize that Ligon even has a brain injury. He is friendly and outgoing and is engaged to his longtime friend, Carrie Lofstrom. Aiken County residents will have the chance to visit Aiken Office Supply on Whisky Road for a book-signing Saturday afternoon — Aiken native Ligon will be there signing the autobiographical “The Detours.”

As the book recounts, one never recovers from a brain injury. Ligon still has memory issues and eventually realized a few years ago he could not practice law in the manner and style he had planned.

“When I create the past me, that person in many ways was destroyed and will never exist anymore,” Ligon said. “But I’ve learned my capabilities now and about growing up again. I’m not a finished product, but I’ve seen a lot of growth.”

He has dedicated his book to Lofstrom and also his mother, Em Ligon — a longtime English teacher at Aiken High. He calls Em the strongest mother he can imagine. Without her endless support and understanding, he would not be here today.

In 2005, Neil had been visiting his then-girlfriend in New Orleans and was driving to Aiken to see his mother, who was recovering from pneumonia. He was in Alabama, driving through a severe rainstorm — the aftermath of a earlier hurricane.

“Neil hydroplaned and went off the road,” Em Ligon said. “His van flipped several times, and his head took all the abuse. That was how it started.”

He would soon spend three weeks in a trauma unit in Alabama before being transferred to Walton Rehabilitation Services in Augusta. Neil’s jaw had been broken in several places.

Cognitively, he was in bad shape. He didn’t look like himself. His brain was swollen and bruised, and Neil couldn’t talk or walk at first and appeared to have to lost all short-term and long-term memory, Em Ligon said.

Yet over the next 10 weeks — much of it living with his mother as an outpatient — he did make remarkable progress. Ligon even returned to Atlanta in January 2006 to work part-time with the law firm he had interned with before the accident. Yet the problems associated with his brain injury soon emerged.

He couldn’t remember details of client cases.

He needed extra sleep — difficult to manage with the expected 60-hour work week. Ligon wasn’t driving at that time and was taking special driving lessons while relying on public transportation.

In many aspects of his life, he was surpassing benchmarks. Yet, overall, he felt himself flat-lining.

“I realized this was a new direction,” Ligon said. “I needed to align my goals with reality and begin to accept my present self as what I wanted to become.”

But that process has not come easily. Ligon had no idea at the beginning that his ecovery would continue for the rest of his life. He hit years three and four, and he was still not where he expected to be. Ligon would say things impulsively to friends that often offended them. A brain injury is an isolating event, and people don’t understand what he and others like him go through, Ligon said.

He credits his last law job with giving him a new sense of hope and confidence.

Ligon did electronic discovery work, classifying items in relation to subpoenas.

It was repetitive but necessary work and was appreciated at his firm. Yet he realized it wasn’t want he wanted. He left that job to write the book and address the questions about himself he couldn’t stop asking.

He needs the stories he has heard to mean something to him.

Ligon now serves in a volunteer position — director of advocacy for the Brain Injury Association of Georgia — and hopes to get into that field more formally. He mentors a young man with TBI who is trying to return to college and knows so many others with brain injuries far more severe.

“I have been very lucky,” Ligon said. “It has been important to be able to say that my recovery is a result of hard work and the support of people around me. I’ve met some incredible people through the association. Those experiences make me want to be a better person. They inspire me.”

He met Carrie Lofstrom in 2008, and they quickly became fast friends before they started dating early in 2010. Over time, the couple began to peel back the layers of Ligon’s life, with Lofstrom getting to know the old and new Neil. She supports his advocacy plans and plans to obtain her own master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling.

Ligon has acknowledged that his previous self didn’t seem to have much in the way of meaningful goals and apparently had a narrow view of the world.

“He was somebody in the past I would not have liked very much,” Lofstrom said. “I’m glad I get to marry my best friend.”

From the September 30, 2012 Aiken Standard