The Book: Professor Cromer Learns to Read

About the book

On July 4^th, 1998 my husband Alan and I went to Chicago for a family reunion weekend. But on the flight back to Boston life as we knew it ended. In an instant, my husband Alan had a harrowing heart attack and cardiac arrest. It took almost an hour of resuscitation to bring him back to life. In a terrifying instant, Alan went from being a successful professor of physics to being a brain injury survivor fighting to regain his memory, identity, basic abilities, and skills. Nothing about our marriage or life survived Alan’s cardiac arrest intact except the ferocious love that served as a beacon leading us forward.

Professor Cromer Learns to Read: A Couple’s New Life after Brain Injury is our story. The cardiac arrest left Alan with a severe anoxic brain injury. Our seven year journey to reclaim Alan’s mind, body, and spirit is detailed in this dramatic memoir.

The extent of his medical problems meant that Alan could not recover completely and return to being the same person he was before the brain injury. However, over time, with enormous courage and intensive rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital , Alan did regain his abilities to varying degrees. He made an even more valuable “Best Choice Recovery” by living fully, contributing to others, and having fun.

We went on to reinvent our identities, our marriage, and a life with new measures of meaning and accomplishment. It is my hope that sharing our path through grief and loss toward coping and rebuilding can be an example of what may be possible for other families living with brain injury.

With honesty and encouragement, Professor Cromer Learns to Read gives readers an inside view of the ravages of brain injury and how a person’s life can improve for years with the right treatments. Most of all, the book is a love story and testament to a marriage that emerges transformed and triumphant when confronted by severe brain injury.

My intention is that my book will offer encouragement and information to people who have a traumatic or acquired brain injury, their family caregivers, medical professionals, and readers who are curious about how the brain makes us who we are.

I am truly honored that Professor Cromer Learns to Read: A Couple’s New Life after Brain Injury won a 2010 Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Communication and the Neal Duane Award for Distinction from the American Medical Writers Association-NE Chapter.