Author updates book about coping with head injury

By Linda Bell
Correspondent

Red Feather Lakes library director and author, Marilyn Colter, has completely revised and re-issued her 1988 book, "Missing Pieces: Mending the Head Injury Family," available now on Amazon.com.

Colter said she'd had a number of requests for the out-of-print book and watched its price climb on various web sites over the past few years. "I was surprised the old edition still seemed relevant and in demand," she said, "but I knew it wasn't up to date in terms of how resources and services have changed for families and head injury patients."

Colter originally wrote the book because she needed basic information on coping with head injury. "It seems people still need that," she said. "That's the most important reason I've reissued a revised edition." The earlier edition continues to be used routinely in some clinical settings, she added.

Colter explained that she came to write such a book after her husband had an aneurism in his brain. During a second surgery to relieve the pressure, he suffered a stroke that left him with no speech, no memory, difficulty in walking and using his hands, and no job as a result.

That was in 1982, she said, and at the time she had two children, 9 and 11, and an adult husband that required constant care. Colter said that while her husband had lots of therapy--physical, speech, occupational --plus access to a social worker, the family was on its own to understand not only her husband's needs, but their own needs as a growing, evolving and changed family.

At the time, Colter said, she was managing editor for the Fort Collins Triangle Review, which was a rather stressful occupation for someone who couldn't relax at home. It was after she left the paper to take a part-time position, she said, that she started to heal her own family and, by extension, others in writing and researching the first edition of the book.

"Missing Pieces" is both a personal, frank account of one family's journey into the chaos of sudden mental disability and a manual for families going through a similar experience. The book is organized somewhat like a workbook, with many chapters concluding with exercises for families to complete on their own. It measures out doses of reality along with hope and resources.

The revised edition includes invaluable links to Internet sites, unavailable at the time of original publication. Colter said new medications on the market today could have dramatically helped her husband had they been available.

In a new endnote to the revised edition, Colter said of her family: "...although we all bear scars, we have healed well and celebrate life."

Colter and her husband were divorced in 1990. He told the family that "he wanted to free us all from brain injury," she said.

In 2003, Colter said, her former husband moved to California to help and be close to his only brother who ironically suffered a similar brain injury during surgery. The book is available for $23.95 (plus $5 shipping and handling) from Colterworks, P.O. Box 500, Red Feather Lakes, CO 80545.