The Phenomenon of Acquired Brain Injury Recovery

Brain plasticity and resilience in the lived experience of recovery from brain injury.

Reviewed by Kaja Perina

Examining the lived experiences of those recovering from brain injury can further our understanding of the recovery process and provide useful information for others who suffer from acquired brain injury. In this post, I examine qualitative research from the lived recovery experience of a single subject, former World Boxing Champion John Famechon.

John suffered an incapacitating brain injury in August 1991, when a car, estimated to be traveling at 100 kpm (62 mph), hit John as he was crossing a road near Warwick Farm in Sydney.

Since retiring from boxing in 1970 John had, until the car accident, a very successful career actively engaged in all manner of social, media, sports, and business events.

John was a popular sports star and celebrity who often commanded large audiences, as observed by Frank Quill, a highly regarded sports journalist and close friend of John during this time.

Beginning the Journey of Recovery

Upon discharge from hospital in October 1992, John was under the full-time care of his then-fiancée, later wife, Glenys.

Upon discharge, as Glenys and the media of the time described, John seemed as if he had been “poured” into a wheelchair, unable to walk, talk, or feed himself.

The doctors and other medical experts advised that this would now be John’s life, and his discharge condition was as good as he would ever get: severely incapacitated, often bedridden, unable to fend for himself, and wheelchair-bound for the remainder of his life.

However, a serendipitous Melbourne City “street meet” with Frank Quill and myself in December 1993 led to the implementation of an innovative rehabilitation process.

The methodological approach used phenomenology to obtain rich data for analysis. The examination of the facts extended knowledge by scrutinising John’s lived experience of recovery. Along with this came an increased understanding of a new therapeutic technique employed and a clearer knowledge from contemporary literature of the neurological processes involved in acquired brain injury recovery.

This investigation identified a number of significant contributors to John’s neurological recovery. In addition to all of the hospital staff that saved John’s life, the other most significant person identified would be John’s then-fiancée (and later wife), Glenys Famechon.

The inherent neural repair processes and neurophysiological renewal started at the moment that the brain damage occurred in August 1991. These natural internal processes were further supported by subsequent external medical and rehabilitative interventions.

Unfortunately, as the data have shown, these had little or no effect on improving John’s severely incapacitated condition. By November 1993 John’s physical disposition began to deteriorate noticeably and alarmingly.

As John's fiancée Glenys said: “We were very concerned at that time because we saw that John was regressing quite dramatically, and we actually began to think that John was never going to recover.”

An Innovative Intervention

In December 1993, John started an unforeseen new therapy involving what are referred to as “hard goals” and “stretch goals,” including highly challenging complex movements and intense cognitive work that focused on extending what John could do physically and mentally.

As a result of this innovative intervention in late 1993, John’s presenting incapacitated condition changed over the ensuing weeks and months.

In March 1994, John walked for the first time since the accident. Soon after that, he was running. Those who knew John and his condition were amazed at the healing and significant improvements from his formerly incapacitated state—much of which was achieved by late 1994.

The treatment continued on a weekly basis until late 1997. John’s condition progressed from incapacitated to recovering as a result of changes in John’s neurological and neuromuscular condition that appear to have mainly stemmed from late 1993, when the new therapy commenced.

These neurophysiological changes were complex, rich, thick, strong, and fast, and eventually cumulatively powerful enough for John's presenting condition to progress from incapacitated to the point, beginning in March 1994, where John was not only able to walk, talk, and feed himself but was also able to present a holistic mind and body (hólos) condition of ongoing homeostatic ambulatory recovery, which continued for the remainder of his life. (John died in 2022.)

Testament to his improvement, in 2011, John presented to a large, mainly medical audience at The Mind and Its Potential, an international conference in Sydney, ​​​​​​where he received a standing ovation. (Portions of the conference are available on YouTube.)

As Glenys Famechon stated in 2014: “Our lives are pretty much quite normal.…A very near to normal life is how I take it. We, when we go out, sometimes we have to take the wheelchair if we’re in an airport and you’ve got to go for a long, long way, but John walks with the cane, he converses with people…I’m just so confident that John can have a conversation with somebody, and it’s really nice, whereas before it was two words, and then nothing else clicked in…We have a very big social life.”

The findings of this type of phenomenological research can be useful for those affected by an acquired brain injury, including the injured individual, their family, friends, and health practitioners. As well, John's learning and the teaching involved also have very clear implications for learning and teaching in general.