Maria’s Story: Two Crashes, and the Kitchen Where She Learned Her Hands Again
Before the injury, Maria was pursuing a PhD in Health Behavior at Indiana University. She taught. She served in student leadership. She played sports, kept up her friendships, and collected the kind of academic achievement that takes years to earn.
Then came her fortieth birthday weekend.
Two crashes, and years of being told the wrong thing
There was a car crash. It left Maria with a traumatic brain injury, double vision, aphasia, balance problems, PTSD, and other serious complications. A second crash came later and did worse damage: diffuse axonal injury, post-traumatic hydrocephalus, cerebellar ataxia.
Then came the years that rarely make it into a brain injury story: years of misdiagnoses, which delayed the treatment she needed. This is the part that a list of diagnoses cannot convey. A brain injury is not one bad day followed by a recovery plan. For many survivors it is a long argument with a medical system that cannot quite see what is wrong, conducted by a person whose injury has taken away some of the tools you would need to argue.
Maria has experienced both the very best and the very worst of healthcare — and of people.
“Everything you’ve worked so hard for can be taken away in an instant.”
— Maria
What her mother did
Maria's greatest source of support was her mother, who became her therapist and her advocate. Every day she brought Maria to work at the family restaurant, and every day she handed back a piece of ordinary life: counting money, forming meatballs to rebuild the fine motor control in her fingers, practicing speech in Italian and in English.
It is worth sitting with that for a moment. There was no clinic, no program, no specialist — only a restaurant kitchen, a mother, and a list of small jobs that happened to be exactly the right therapy. Maria relearned how to walk, how to write, how to communicate, and how to live — one small victory at a time.
There were losses along the way that no amount of work could prevent. She lost friendships, because people could not understand the person she had become, and they drifted. "I have learned who my true friends and family are," she says. She refused to let bitterness define her. She believes she is alive today because of her faith in God and the countless prayers of the people who stayed.
What she does with it now
Maria advocates for other survivors. She has taken part in research studies, testified before state leaders, served on advisory committees, spoken to future healthcare professionals, promoted brain injury awareness, and stayed active in adaptive sports and brain injury support groups.
She has also told her story before, in her own words, as part of the Unmasking Brain Injury project. It is worth reading alongside this one.
The survivors who have no one in that role
The lives of TBI survivors are forever changed. They must adjust their lives, compensate for disabilities, and rebuild what was taken from them.
Maria had her mother — a therapist, an advocate, and a restaurant kitchen where she could practice. That is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. Thousands of brain injury survivors across Indiana have no one in that role. When the hospital discharges them and the therapy ends, most face a choice between a nursing home built for someone else's needs, a family member's spare bedroom, or nothing at all.
And the families who do fill that role carry a question they cannot answer: who does this after I am gone?
Villa Licci will be a residential community in Central Indiana built specifically for adult brain injury survivors — roughly fifty one- and two-bedroom apartments across thirteen acres, with a gathering room, a chapel, walking paths, gardens and a pond. It will not be a medical facility. It will be a place to live semi-independently, among neighbors who understand what a "before and after" means because they have one too.
There are no other residences serving this exact population anywhere in the country — not one.
Maria closes her own account with a line that could stand over the whole project: Never let anyone tell you that recovery has an expiration date.
If you are planning your year-end giving
The first residential building will cost $14.5 million, and every dollar of it will come from people who chose to build it. If Villa Licci makes your list this December, Maria's neighbors get a home.
Villa Licci is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Gifts are tax-deductible, and gifts made by December 31 count toward this tax year. EIN 83-0873470.
