Stroke survivor Sharon Pancho has a message for her fellow brain injury victims — your life is valuable. In order to get her message out, Pancho and Suzie Woolway have started a support group that meets on Mondays. Two Mondays
Stroke survivor Sharon Pancho has a message for her fellow brain injury victims — your life is valuable.
In order to get her message out, Pancho and Suzie Woolway have started a support group that meets on Mondays. Two Mondays every month are dedicated to getting together informally to play board games. The other two Mondays feature speakers.
“I needed a support group,” Pancho said. “I need to be among people who share the same thing that I am going through emotionally, people who understand, people who say, ‘I feel the same way.’”
Pancho said she also needs to meet with people whom she can arm-wrestle with her paralyzed arm.
“She’s totally different (since her stroke),” Paul Pancho, Sharon’s husband, said.
Sharon Pancho said she has found humor she never had before and is no longer afraid of being embarrassed.
“I’m a victim. (My husband) is a victim, too,” Pancho said.
The brain can be injured in a number of ways, through tumors, strokes, head injuries. It causes a wide variety of different things to happen.
“It happens suddenly, and your life is entirely changed,” Woolway said. “There is a ripple effect; everybody is affected by it.”
Woolway is a speech therapist at Ohana Sports Medicine located in the Port Allen Marina Center. It was there that she met Pancho. When Pancho expressed the desire to start a support group, Woolway volunteered to help her.
Woolway said she understood Pancho’s need for a support group. Woolway was working with a young woman who had suffered brain injury in a car accident and felt that the young woman and her family needed to connect with other people.
Marida Dorado was at a recent board game night. Her 26-year-old daughter couldn’t attend. Maren had been air ambulanced to O‘ahu two weeks before because of fluid in her brain.
Dorado said she never thought it could happen to her family. She is the primary caregiver for her daughter who needs constant care. Dorado still works full-time. She also hires help. On occasion, her co-workers volunteer to take care of Maren.
Maren needs social interaction, but too much stimulation could cause her to withdraw.
“It’s tricky,” Dorado said.
Maren was able to attend the first game night held in March.
“She cannot sit still. She cannot focus … yet,” Dorado said. “It’s sad because she is so young, but because she is young there is hope.”
Maren was on the Mainland when she got into the car accident.
“She’s not the same (person),” Dorado said.
Karen Crutcher read about the board game night in the newspaper. She recently moved from the Mainland and had been in support groups there. She is a survivor of brain injuries sustained in bike, diving, car accidents and falling at home.
Crutcher said she lived two years after her first accident without knowing she had suffered brain injury. All she knew was that something was wrong. She was one year away from becoming an attorney, but suddenly she couldn’t do the legal work. She couldn’t handle the stress or the case load. She carried around her law books, but couldn’t read them.
She lost her job and eventually she and her young daughter became homeless.
One day she came across an article about a woman of courage. She saw herself in that story. She noted at the end of the article contact information for the National Brain Injury Association. That led her to be evaluated at the Brain Injury Institute and the discovery that she did, indeed, suffer from a brain injury.
“You don’t ever recover,” Crutcher said. “You learn through rehabilitation to compensate.”
Sharon Pancho said her dream for the support group is to have a well-established organization like the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association so the public will know that there is something for them.
Woolway said they are receiving more phone calls inquiring about the support group. There is a need for someone to facilitate a group on the Eastside of the island.
The next meeting of the Brain Injury Support group will be on May 20 at noon at the Easter Seals conference room. The speaker will be Les Matsumoto from the Neuro Trauma Division of the Department of Health.
The next board game night is scheduled for May 26 from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Ohana Sports Medicine.
Contact Suzie Woolway at 652-0267 or Sharon Pancho at 639-1571 for more information.
• Cynthia Matsuoka is a freelance writer for The Garden Island and former principal of Chiefess Kamakahelei Middle School. She can be reached by e-mail at aharju@kauaipubco.com
