TBI survivor cannot be placed for lack of services
“‘I can’t hear. I can’t walk. I can’t speak.’” Lindsay Young’s arm shakes slightly as her fingers come to rest on her lips while her father interprets her gestures.”That’s usually what she says when she meets someone for the first
time," Richard Young, 58, said on Wednesday. The 29-year-old woman lies on her father’s bed at his Nova Scotia home, her head lolling slightly to one side. She gives Richard a thumbs-up sign when he sits down but then points to her ears with her left hand. "She’ll do that 30 or 40 times a day," her father said, adding that Lindsay has no short-term memory. When Lindsay sees the date on a newspaper, she makes an angry motion with her hand; she thinks it’s still 2004. On Feb. 22, 2004, the car Lindsay was traveling in crossed into oncoming traffic on a Sydney highway. A pickup truck smashed into the passenger side of the car where Lindsay wa s sitt ing. She suffered a traumatic brain injury and was in a coma for months. The accident left her deaf and unable to speak, feed or care
for herself. The right side of her body is immobile. Richard says Lindsay continues to become more alert but that without proper therapy, she will stop improving. In almost four years his daughter has received no extensive
rehabilitation. She has visited the Nova Scotia Rehabilitation Centre in Halifax, where she received some speech therapy, but has now spent more than two years at the hospital. She lives on a transitional ward where seniors wait to get into nursing homes. Her father thinks that Lindsay may be shipped off to a home herself.
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