Kevin Wald-Stubbornly Seeking Post Traumatic Growth
On a Sunday morning, February 5th, 2023, I was skiing in the terrain park with my younger brother at Granite Peak. We'd been out since first chair, finding and perfecting lines off jumps in the park, when I told him we should "two-skip". That is the superstitious lucky way to call one last run. It was on this last run before heading to the parking lot to make breakfast when tragedy struck. I don't remember saying “two-skip”. I don't remember the run. Those memories never encoded. My brother later told me that as I was going off the jump, I accidentally caught the edge of my ski, causing me to rotate out of control in the air. I became inverted and came crashing down on my head and shoulder from two stories up.
My brother didn't see me hit the ground from his vantage point above the jump, but from my flailing during the inadvertent rotation in the air, he could tell that something horrible was about to happen. He immediately skied down and found me unconscious and struggling to breathe. Immediately he alerted people on the chairlift to call for ski patrol help. Ski Patrol was dispatched and Jack was the first one on scene. In the middle of the chaos, he gave my brother a job to do: hold C-Spine stabilization. That was something to focus on besides watching his brother possibly die in the snow. After I was loaded into the ambulance, Jack made sure to find my brother and check that he was okay.
I have no memory of any of the crash. I have no memory of waking up from the six-day coma that the TBI caused. I have no memory of the ICU, the step-down unit, or the first few weeks of inpatient rehab. My first memory that I have with me today didn’t form until nearly a month after the accident. I can't tell you what that gap felt like, because as far as my brain is concerned, it didn't happen to me. It happened to a version of me that was there and isn't the one writing this.
What I came back to, and slowly became aware of, was a body and a brain that worked differently. Physically, I have less coordination on my right side, neuropathy in my right hand, and a heightened sensitivity to temperature in my hands and feet. The worst of it, though, is my vestibular system. It still works, but it sends additional bad data, noise on top of the perception of space. I describe it as tinnitus of the vestibular system.
Cognitively, the deficits have eased the longer I've worked at them, but not without staying stubborn. My analytical thinking took a real hit, and the frustration of feeling slower and less capable than I used to be is a big part of why I walked away from my old career. Writing takes longer now. Word choice doesn't come as easily. Two months after the accident, I remember the specific, bizarre experience of noticing myself think about my own thinking for the first time since the crash. This metacognition, gone and then slowly, strangely, coming back online over the following year and a half was bizarre to witness from inside. I regret not journalling throughout the experience.
Journaling has become important to me, but in a different way than most. I started keeping a musical journal playlist not long after the injury, adding a song to the playlist after anything substantial happened. Adding songs to a playlist requires substantially less cognitive friction than trying to write, making the practice very accessible. Then, listening to the playlist later is another rehabilitation technique, trying to remember the significance of each song can only be good to help improve my recall abilities.
My mother was and has been the constant through all of it — caretaker, taxi service for rehab appointments, and eventually the person who told me I should go back to school. If it weren't for the people closest to me, especially my mother, I don't think the post traumatic growth outcome would have happened.
For most of 2023 I didn't know if skiing — or even standing normally — was going to be possible again. My vestibular system was too far gone. It wasn't until I was prescribed scopolamine, and my brain somehow rewired itself enough to make standing tolerable, that getting back to anything active felt even possible. That fall, almost a year after the accident, I went and met the people who'd responded to my crash and saved my life. I don't remember the exact moment the idea took hold, my brain was still scrambled, still new to all of this — but somewhere in meeting them, the thought got planted: join ski patrol. Give back what was given to you. Jack is on that Sunday crew. He was the first person at my side the day I nearly died, and now I ski patrol beside him almost every Sunday in winter. It's a little bit like Chewbacca staying by Han Solo's side for the rest of his life after Han saved him. Just like Chewy, I owe a life debt, except mine isn't paid off by loyalty alone, it's paid off by trying to help others the in ways similar to how I was helped.
People sometimes ask if going back to that hill is hard. If the mountain itself holds some kind of trauma for me. It doesn't. I am very thankful that I have no memory of the crash, and so no trauma to work through. I grew up on that hill, getting back to skiing has only ever felt like coming home.
Somewhere in the middle of relearning how to think, I found out about post-traumatic growth. I discovered all the factors that can help foster the growth and have purposely searched out as many sources of those factors as possible. School. Ski patrol. Music. Family. Friends. A future career built around providing psychotherapy. None of it undoes February 5th, 2023. All of it has made some purpose and meaning to the suffering I endured and still cope with.
Someone told me early on to stay stubborn, because the stubborn ones get better faster. I've held onto that harder than almost anything else. Whatever cognitive ground I've gained back, from speech, executive function, to patience with myself, it's come from refusing to stop looking for new ways to challenge my brain--and doing it again the next day when the first way didn't work.
There are three ways people talk about responding to trauma. The first is resilience — the "bend but don't break" approach, like a skyscraper engineered to sway in an earthquake instead of collapsing. Resiliently is worth cultivating in our lifestyles and communities, but no brain is engineered to resiliently withstand a traumatic brain injury. The second is recovery: doing the hard work of returning to baseline, like repairing the cracks in an earthquake-damaged building. That's not always possible. A lot of neurological damage is irreparable. There is no therapy or rehab that will bring back the coordination I lost in my right arm, or undo the neuropathy in my hand. That damage lives somewhere deep in the left hemisphere of my brain, and it isn't coming back.
The third way is post-traumatic growth. Instead of bending without breaking, or repairing what broke, PTG treats the break itself as a pivot point — through deliberate reflection, trauma becomes the inflection toward something new. To finish the building earthquake analogy: this is the earthquake that levels the building completely, and something different rises from the rubble in its place — a hospital, a school, a church. Not the old building repaired. A new one, built because the old one is gone.
Thriving, for me now, looks like being a full-time student, cooking my own meals, living on my own. The hard part these days isn't the deficits — it's learning when to push and when to rest, since both are necessary and I'm still figuring out which one the moment calls for, for it changes from day to day, moment to moment.
If there's one thing I want this story to say, it's that there is a genuinely massive amount of hope on the other side of a brain injury, if you're willing to put in the work. I'm not the same person who skied that last run before breakfast. I'm not sure I'd want to be. But I like who I've become in the rebuilding, and I'm still stubborn enough to keep going. Stay stubborn, post traumatic growth is possible.