Brain injury recovery aided by Kayak therapy
When a soldier sustained a traumatic brain injury that left him unable to communicate or feed himself, he probably did not foresee the sport of kayaking as playing a role in his rehabilitation. Having watched kayak racers, brain injury lawyer Doug Landau understood the physical and mental challenges posed by this rigorous and dangerous sport. The Herndon head trauma attorney noted that it takes extreme coordination, strength, courage and stamina to participate.
Today’s Washington Examiner newspaper had an interesting article in the “Personal Best” section about this army vet who was injured in Afghanistan in 2004 who now kayaks. Don Lange was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for rehabilitation since he needed help completing simple activities of daily living (“ADLs”). The article notes: Brain injuries can result in a problems like memory loss, inattention, depression, distorted judgment and slow thinking. Lange suffered from them all. After a year at Walter Reed, doctors told Lange’s wife that he would never live independently again and she should consider hiring an in-home caregiver. By the end of 2005, Lange had been moved to a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center. He had come a long way in his recovery, but he still couldn’t live independently. Lange then hit a plateau, and his doctors no longer saw improvement in his condition.
“It made it difficult to stay motivated,” he said. “That, coupled with the frustration of everything that had been so easy in the past becoming very difficult because it couldn’t be done the old way or had just been forgotten.” That was when a volunteer from Team River Runner, a nonprofit organization that uses kayaking as an outlet for injured veterans, came to the VA looking for vets to sign up. “Nothing I saw changed my mind that it was a crazy thing to do, but it looked like a hell of a lot of fun,” Lange said.
After that, he was on board. Lange began going to lessons in the VA’s Olympic-size swimming pool. But because learning new things was nearly impossible for him, he had difficulties picking up the sport at first. Lange believes he was successful in learning to kayak because it’s a sensory activity that involves all of the brain’s modules for learning. He also said the sport allowed him to combat the inattention caused by his brain injury, as the fear of drowning forced him to focus. Kayak therapy taught Lange how to learn again, which he said then enabled him to learn other tasks.
Today, Lange does not appear as if he has suffered a brain injury. He walks and speaks normally; he lives and travels on his own. “Kayak therapy has made a huge impact on my recovery,” Lange said. “It’s only one piece of my recovery, but without it I’m not sure I would be independent today.” One commenter to the story online wrote: “Surf kayaking has helped a lot with my PTSD, and it gets out that need for adrenaline I use to crave from combat.”
