KEITH ENRIQUEZ/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Tim
Wright has recovered from aphasia and brain damage to go
on to earn a master’s and pursue a doctorate at UCLA.
By Scott Schultz
Daily Bruin Staff
The diagnosis in March 1995 was grim: Tim Wright, a 37-year-old
former UCLA Fulbright scholar, was still in a coma.
His doctors were amazed he had survived this long.
Wright’s mother, Helene, was shocked when she saw her son
restrained in the hospital bed, babbling incoherently.
“My first words when I saw him, were “˜What have they
done to you, my son?'” Mrs. Wright said. “I could
see the empathy in the nurse’s face as she tried to tell Tim
his mother and brother were there.”
Wright had a major skull fracture, a large subdural hematoma,
artery leakage, fractured lumbar vertebrae with hematoma and three
small bones in his right ear broken and infected.
The doctors were amazed he had survived as long as he had after
being left for dead on the street in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the
victim of a gay bashing assault in which his head was repeatedly
rammed into the asphalt.
His current neurologist at UCLA, Dr. George Sarka, said that
according to Wright’s original medical records, his brain
injuries were about as bad as they come.
“On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the worst kind of
injury, I would put his injury at the high end, a nine or 10,
especially when he was in Bolivia,” Sarka said.
Wright eventually recovered, but soon after coming out of his
coma, he realized he had another problem, which for this life-long
intellectual was the most horrific nightmare imaginable.
He had lost the ability to read.
“Sometimes I would just stare at the mirror, and say
“˜this isn’t me,’ and I would just cry.”
Wright was suffering from the post traumatic conditions known as
aphasia and dual attention deficit syndrome. Aphasia is an acquired
disturbance of language usually resulting from head trauma.
Patients with this form of brain injury often cannot communicate,
obey simple commands or comprehend written or spoken language.
Because Wright also had DADS, it meant that he could only focus
on one thing at a time, as if in an intense trance. If he was
staring at a garden, all he could see would be the green of a
specific leaf. The trauma also left him without a short term
memory.
Prior to his assault, Wright had graduated magna cum laude from
UCLA with a degree in Latin American Studies and later completed a
masters program in public health.
A veteran of the Peace Corps, Wright was also previously a
registered nurse.
From 1993-’95, Wright had been the regional gay
men’s outreach coordinator for HIV/AIDS prevention with the
Proyecto Centra el Sida in Santa Cruz, which is funded by the
United States Agency for International Development. He began the
program as the first diagnosed cases were coming out of neighboring
Brazil.
According to Wright, he was creating a gay outreach center in a
conservative society where people seemed to deny the very existence
of a homosexual population.
Despite his past academic achievements, the injury had left
Wright unable to even read a children’s book.
Recovery from a head trauma of this nature can take anywhere
from months to years, Sarka said.
“The most important thing is that the patients show
progress early. If several months pass without progress, it’s
likely they won’t fully recover,” he said.
Wright’s mother, Helene, is a retired special education
learning disability coordinator for elementary school children who
had worked with children who suffered from aphasia.
“One of the differences between children’s aphasia
and adult aphasia is that Tim knew that he used to be able to read
and converse, which is what made it so sad at the time,”
Helene Wright said.
From her experience, Mrs. Wright knew that her intellectual son
would never fully recover from his injuries unless he could learn
to read again. She sought assistance from a speech and language
therapist to guide her son back to his old self.
They began with the letters of the alphabet individually written
on flash cards. After gradual increases over a four month period,
he was able to read a five- or six-sentence paragraph at the third
grade level.
“One of the important things I learned from my years of
teaching, was the recognition that you can’t skip
anything,” Helene Wright said about the rehabilitation
progress. “When I put the alphabet all out at one time for
him to learn, I could see that wouldn’t work, so I would put
out four or five letters at a time.”
She also used photographs and color codes placed on 3 x 5 note
cards to assist Wright with daily chores that other people take for
granted, like getting dressed or pouring a bowl of cereal.
His therapist fostered his recovery with regular homework
assignments. Sometimes he could write a sentence or two about what
he read, and he could score only around 50 percent on multiple
choice questions.
Wright refused to take any neurological exams that would put a
ceiling on how well he would be expected to recover. He
didn’t want to have a doctor tell him what he could never be
able to do again. Wright was adamant in his resolve to not settle
for anything less than a complete recovery.
“I got mostly negative comments from the professionals,
like neurologists,” Wright said. “They’d say,
“˜You’re going to have to get used to your life being
less than it used to be.’ Now why would I want to accept a
prognosis like that? I was planning on returning to UCLA and
getting my second masters and my Ph.D.”
According to Wright, the progress of his rehabilitation was
arduous, emotionally painful and physically tiring. Although Wright
realized that he could not express his thoughts coherently, he
continued with the intention of recovering fully.
At the advice of his therapist, he started keeping a journal
that he wrote in every day, a practice he still maintains. Wright
credits this exercise with expediting his recovery, especially
coping with short term memory issues.
When Wright decided to return to school to finish his graduate
work, he began by taking a class at Saddleback Community College to
mentally prepare himself for academic life.
Battling fatigue by limiting himself to taking eight units a
quarter, Wright continued on to UCLA. In 1998, he graduated with a
masters degree in Latin American Studies with a 4.0 GPA.
Dr. Sarka is still amazed by the near total recovery from his
injury, and claims he has never seen such a complete recovery from
such a traumatic head injury.
“Tim’s recovery was very dramatic. On neurological
exams now, he will show normal,” he said. “Another
patient, without Tim’s positive outlook, would never have
succeeded to this extent.”
Upon completing his first post-trauma educational goal, Wright
chose to confront his fears and returned to Bolivia to see his old
friends again and find a sense of closure.
Despite having recovered from a majority of his injuries, Wright
still suffers from nightmares, wears a hearing aid in his right
ear, and is at risk for seizures.
“My effects aren’t noticeable to most people, but
they are to me,” Wright said. “I have to be focused on
what I’m doing. I have to pay extra attention. I can’t
do as much as I used to.”
Wright is currently preparing for another visit to Bolivia this
summer before he returns to UCLA to complete his doctorate in
anthropology. He will continue his studies of Bolivia’s gay
population, with his thesis focusing on gay men and their
relationships with their families.
Wright believes his parents were invaluable to his recovery
process.
“It was definitely helpful that my parents both had
backgrounds in education, but it was so important that they were
loving and patient with me,” he said. “It must have
been a horrible time for them. Without their support and patience,
I don’t know if I would have recovered.”