Lee Woodruff ’82 shares important information about traumatic brain injury (TBI) and her family’s experience with the issue in a for Parade magazine.
Woodruff’s article, “Can Brains Be Saved?,” appeared in the magazine on Sunday. Parade has a circulation of 33 million and appears in 475 newspapers nationwide.
Most everyone knows how Woodruff’s husband, Bob ’83, was injured by a roadside bomb in January 2006 while covering the Iraq war for ABC News.
Shrapnel was embedded in his face, neck, and back, and his skull was shattered. Doctors did not think he would ever walk or talk again or regain much mental function.
Lee Woodruff writes that today, apart from mild aphasia– difficulty in finding the appropriate word to use — Bob is back as a husband and father and on the air as a journalist at ABC News.
(In fact, Bob is back in Iraq for ABC, the first time he has returned there.)
The Parade article discusses how Bob continues to improve, and how thanks to advances in the treatment of traumatic brain injury, the outlook for patients has dramatically improved.
The Woodruffs continue to raise awareness of the issue and its impact on members of the military and their families through the Bob Woodruff Foundation, which is at .
They also are looking to provide assistance to war veterans through , a fundraising effort using social networking tools.
The Woodruffs co-wrote In an Instant, which was a New York Times bestseller that helped raise awareness about traumatic brain injuries. Lee Woodruff recently published her second book, an essay collection called Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress.