This story includes a graphic description of Tim’s traumatic brain injury. If you are squeamish or faint of heart, you may wish to close this file and turn to a different story of hope.

Tim was outdoors doing what he liked best, working with equipment and with his hands. It was a pleasant July afternoon. The family had just installed an above-ground swimming pool, and Tim was hooking up electricity for the pool filter and lighting.

“I had to put a ground rod into the ground,” Tim recalled. “It was probably four or five feet long, and I was using a post driver to drive it into the ground at an angle.”

In a fleeting but critical moment of misjudgment, Tim pulled the post driver up too high, shifting it off of the copper rod. When he came back down, his face slammed into the rod. The impact pushed the rod, which was about half an inch in diameter, into Tim’s right eye, between the eyelid and orbital bone, and then into his brain.

Tim doesn’t remember anything else, but somehow he was able to pull himself off of the rod before falling onto the ground. He lay there for quite a while, until his wife, Pam, saw him out in the yard on his back.

“I didn’t know what had happened because his eye was blue, bloody and swollen,” Pam recalled. “I thought the rod had hit him in the eye and he had lost his eye. I called 9-1-1, and the ambulance came. We live in a rural area, and Aircare landed in a field across the way.”

Tim does remember the paramedics and the helicopter ride. He also remembers that he felt no pain.

After Tim had undergone a CT scan at Cincinnati’s University Hospital, a doctor asked Pam what kind of instrument had penetrated her husband’s brain. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” she told him. “My husband had an eye injury.”

When the doctor told Pam about the CT scan, which clearly showed evidence of a penetrating injury to the brain, she gasped. “The only thing I could think of was the grounding iron,” she said.

Tim was moved to University Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, a state-of-the-art facility with round-the-clock care provided by a team of doctors and highly skilled nurses. There, unconscious, his body waged a dramatic fight for life.

“The copper pipe caused severe brain injury, with damage to both frontal lobes and the deep pathways that connect the two sides of the brain,” said Dr. Lori Shutter, a neurointensivist with the Mayfield Clinic and The Neuroscience Institute. “In addition, the introduction of a foreign object into the brain contributed to the development of a severe infection involving the brain and its surrounding structures.”

“It was horrible,” Pam recalled. “The first week the main concern was survival, and it was touch and go. Our family lived here from morning till night. We came in and visited him whenever they had visiting hours.”

Tim developed an infection in his brain and was unable to fight it off. The situation presented no sign of hope. Eventually Dr. Shutter gathered the family together to discuss the possibility of withdrawing all antibiotic treatment and allowing Tim to die peacefully. Pam said she needed to think about it.

“I prayed for three straight days in the chapel,” she said. “And as I was sitting in the chapel, praying and crying, it hit me: it wasn’t up to me. If he was to die, it was in God’s hands. I came upstairs and asked them to keep doing what they were doing.”

Three days later, Tim began to respond to Pam’s voice and touch. His infection began to abate, and his fever subsided.

Today Tim has no true recollection of the hospital, only a fuzzy memory of hearing someone say something about the brain and realizing that something awful had happened. He also remembers feeling pain and being unable to say “that hurts!” when doctors, trying to determine his level of consciousness, poked his feet with something sharp.

Tim left the hospital in August and spent several weeks at Cincinnati’s Drake Center, which specializes in long-term rehabilitation. It was during his time at Drake that he was able to ask a family member what had happened.

Following his discharge from Drake, Tim went to a nursing facility. But Pam wasn’t happy with the setting and took him home. “On the way home we stopped at a grocery store,” Pam said. “I told him, ‘We’re on our own. It’s you and me.’ I left the house three times in 30 days.”

Nurtured by Pam and an at-home therapist, who visited three times a week, Tim made his comeback. A year after the accident, he is able to read, write, talk, walk with a cane and do most everything on his own. His IQ has been measured at 101, and his memory is intact. He still has some disability in his right leg, but he has learned to drive with a left-pedal adapter.

“I get frustrated sometimes because some of the things I used to do I can’t do now,” Tim said. “But I try anyway. Just the physical stuff is holding me back, mainly mobility and strength.”

Tim and Pam decided to share their story to inspire others who also face the challenges of recovering from neurotrauma. “Tim and I want to help people because he has done so well and we really feel we’ve received a miracle and blessing,” Pam said.

Dr. Shutter and other members of the team who treated Tim marvel at his recovery.

“You’ve just proven to us that we’re still in the infancy of knowing what the brain can do,” Dr. Scott Bresler, a neuro-psychologist at Drake Center, told him.

Said Dr. Shutter: “This case reaffirms the amazing capabilities of the brain when expert post-injury care provided and the neurotrauma team focuses on optimizing the potential for maximal recovery.”

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