The Wire

The images we have of trauma are of ambulances, families anxiously waiting around the bedside of someone in a coma. But the real story of brain injury is the months and years of rehab, the story of someone who went out one day and came back as someone quite different, and the family and loved ones left to deal with that.

Roger Rees is Emeritus Professor of Disability Studies at Flinders University and he’s worked in community rehabilitation with brain injury and stroke victims for the past three decades.His book Out Of Calamity tells the individual stories of his patients and of the long and often heroic journey they have to make.