Connor Martin's brother, veteran and athlete Kevin Ash, received a series of traumatic brain injuries over his life, one of which put him in a coma. Once he came out of it, though, he didn't seem able to communicate with Connor, yet had no problem talking to his mom and sister. It took some investigating for Connor to find out why.
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It was very difficult for me to communicate with him after the injury. It was hard for me to come to grips with this for a long time, I struggled knowing why the communication was hard when he was succeeding in communicating with my mom or my sister or even my dad when he’d go up there the few times. It was hard on me because he never really opened up to me and there were glimpses where he would flash back to a time when he was in high school or he would ask about his first deployment or ask about friends from that time in his life and slowly I started to piece together that at that time in his life, I was an eight to ten year old kid and now I’m talking to him as a 18, 19, 20 year old man. And I have this deep voice, he can’t see me, he can’t recognize me. And it was, I didn’t get it until there was one day I went to visit him on my own and we were talking and we played chess a little bit, he had this chess board that he could, or checkers I guess that he could feel the squares to know where to move. And then we went and sat in his room a little bit and we were just talking and I was like Kevin, why aren’t you talking back to me and he wouldn’t respond and finally it dawned on me to ask if he knew who I was and he said no. And at that moment it kind of clicked for me that you know this whole time he didn’t remember me as an adult so whenever I was around he would kind of be quiet, not really talk as much as he would maybe with my mom. And that kind of cleared things up to me as why I wasn’t necessarily seeing these signs of hope or all these things and I was, it was very difficult for me to grasp because you know he recognized everybody else because everybody else at that time like my mom, our sister, my dad, his dad, all these people had the same voice to him so he could hear that voice and he could remember it. But then there was me who he couldn’t, so it was a difficult thing to go through on my own. Especially we had no understanding of why. This video was produced by BrainLine thanks to the generous support of the Infinite Hero Foundation.
This video was produced by BrainLine thanks to generous support from the Infinite Hero Foundation.
About the author: Connor Martin
