My 90-year-old mother recently fell and broke her hip. Never very pain tolerant, she was miserable and sometimes over-medicated to the point that she couldn’t get a spoon to her lips without falling asleep. As you can imagine, some of her mental responses were much like those of a brain–injured person.

Our family took turns passing information back and forth from our hospital visits. It wasn’t the most reliable way to communicate since each of us altered our responses based on our reactions to seeing a loved one whose brain wasn’t working quite right.

Answers to a question like “How’s mom?” ranged from panic to laughter. Would she recover at her age from this trauma or would she continue to babble seemingly meaningless syllables while we struggled to interpret what she was trying to say? If you could have heard each of my siblings’ and my responses, you would think we had visited different people.

Just like the four blind men who, when asked to describe an elephant, touched different parts of the elephant and came to different conclusions about how it was shaped, we each had different ideas of what was going on in mom’s treatment. It took me back in time to when my brain-injured husband Dale first began the challenge of rehabilitation, and we the family tried to communicate with one another and medical staff.

Family communication when emotions and fears run high

Communication is remarkably complicated among people under stress. We have so many questions, so many fears running around in our heads that everything is colored by emotion.

If one member of the family is a glass-half-full person and one is a glass-half-empty person, they will argue over what a report from the nurse really meant. If one of us talks in generalities and the other uses medical terminology, we won’t understand what each other means. The tension becomes painful and we just assume the other person doesn’t understand or is wrong.

The other day I walked into my mother’s room while she and my sister were talking about her being “kicked out” of the rehabilitation hospital. A nurse had told them that mom would be released in two weeks. Mom was sure she wasn’t going to be able to be mobile by then and so she and my sister worried about how they would pay for someone to care for her while my sister was at work. I asked if they had checked with the case coordinator about their concerns and they said they hadn’t.

When I asked the case coordinator to meet with us we learned there was indeed a clear plan for handling the situation if mom wasn’t mobile enough to go home: She would be transferred to another facility, and, yes, Medicare would pay for it. Mom and sis relaxed and were able to turn their attention to getting mom well.

Family meetings with hospital staff and your brain-injured family member save time and worry

I think it’s important that as families, we try hard to make sure that we’re all on the same page concerning our brain injury family member’s condition, treatment and rehabilitation. It’s worth the extra time and effort to call a family meeting to listen to a report from the case manager or the case coordinator at the hospital.

Whenever possible, we should include the patient. I can’t tell you how often I thought I knew what Dale thought about an issue, only to hear his input was radically different. We should prompt each other by asking questions such as, “What was it you asked me the other night about pain medication, dad?”

Most important, it’s necessary to get the whole picture in mind before you try to “report” to a sibling or other family member. Family conferences with a case coordinator will save both the coordinator’s time and yours because each individual in the family won’t be calling the coordinator to ask questions. And you won’t be confused, worried or losing sleep over something that was just a miscommunication.

Believe me, you’ll have other things to worry about during your brain-injured family member’s recovery. Don’t add to your worry with something that can be prevented through clear communication.

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