By Jessica Spoto

“The life that I had and loved was gone forever, and that ‘me’ was dead. I had to rebuild my life and learn how to live again, and have been doing this for 13 years. Now every day is a challenge!”

Scott Pelletier is a very kind person, and he lives every day with a traumatic brain injury. He walks, talks and acts like someone who is 100 percent mentally and physically healthy. He jokes and laughs like everyone else, but what hides within him would surprise many. He hopes his story will help people understand traumatic brain injuries better, and how it’s a hidden epidemic. Here are his words:

“I went to school in Florida to become a certified factory-trained Harley Davidson motorcycle technician. When I graduated, I had a job in Manchester, N.H. — where I am from — before I even left Orlando, Fla. to come home.

“I worked for eight years at a job that I completely loved and excelled at. I loved my job, progressed at my job so well and so quickly that I had customers that started asking for me to start working on their motorcycles. I did everything from the smallest, simplest jobs to a complete motorcycle rebuild. As well as that, it is where all my friends were.

“Everything was going great — life was great. But then on July 12, 2003, I was riding on the highway to go home … my motorcycle’s front tire got into a high-speed shimmy. I was going too fast, and then I got caught up in traffic where I had to slow down. The high-speed shimmy turned into a slow-speed wobble. Where my entire motorcycle was jolting side to side — and that led to me going off the highway, into the woods and down into a ditch.

“When my front tire hit the ground, it catapulted me straight out in a superman position, and as I was over five feet off the ground I flew head first into a tree. When my head hit the tree, it snapped my head back and fractured my C1 vertebrae. My spine compressed, and I have a protruded disc next to my sciatic nerve. Because of this, in winter and in certain times of the year the disc gets inflamed and actually rubs against my sciatic nerve, causing severe pain in my back.

“When my head hit the tree, my brain jolted to the front of my skull, then to the rear, smashing it into my skull itself — causing my brain to swell and to bleed. This affected my frontal lobe, occipital lobe, causing me the need to wear glasses. The damage to my frontal lobe caused me to have severe short-term memory loss and some long-term memory loss, too.

“I ended up in the emergency room for almost a month, where I had to be induced into coma because I kept moving around and trying to get out of my bed every time a friend or family member came to visit me. I would tell them to bring me home, and I would even joke with them the whole time they were there!

“From the emergency room, I was then transported to a rehabilitation center in Salem, N.H., where I had to learn how to walk and talk all over again. In a humorous way, my right vocal cord was also paralyzed, and when I talked I sounded like a frog. After almost three months in rehab I was then allowed to go home, but I had to live with someone because I couldn’t get around easily or drive. So I moved in with my father, who lives alone.

“I had a neck brace that went from the rear of my head to the underside of my chin and went all the way down almost to my waist, so I couldn’t take showers. I had to take sponge-baths, and to wash my hair I had to have my father use the sprayer in the sink to rinse my hair. At this point I was starting to realize all of the things that I lost. I could not go back to work on motorcycles because of my short-term memory, so therefore I basically lost most of my friends, because my life stopped and theirs kept going.”