so you ask me these questions i don't
know
okay i don't know i don't have the
answer
there's something wrong with my brain
i can't put two and two together i can't
understand
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well matt was our only child he was
introspective
he had strong emotional intelligence he
could from a very early age tell us
how he was feeling if he was sad if he
was happy if he was excited
he always seemed to have a good idea of
who he was to us
he was he was everything
i remember the first day that i met bob
and linda and
how just seeing how
how much they loved matthew and how much
they
yearned to have answers
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it was a really pretty june day matthew
was playing
upstairs with a friend and i heard his
friend say
mrs dahl matt fell i ran up the
stairs and his friend said no
he fell out the window i didn't know
whether we had lost him
his doctor came in and said we don't
know if he'll
survive and if he does survive
you have to be prepared because he might
not be matthew anymore
we heard mom
and his first question was will i still
be smart
i thought oh man
you know it's like we had him back he
was checked out by
children's hospital and it's like he's
good to go
and it never circled back for the next
14 years he it had happened and
he had recovered and aren't we lucky
right we won the lottery
these injuries certainly disrupt the
structure but they also can disrupt the
function
and everybody who has a traumatic brain
injury their brain does
its best to respond and react
unfortunately the brain isn't very good
at healing itself
it was the fall of his sophomore year
and i got a call at work he said i i
something's happening i can't make sense
of things and it's scaring me
so we went to the doctor and they
diagnosed him with
depression a major depression and
started treating that that was the
beginning of
a five-year struggle and he had ups and
downs
tried many therapies was
hospitalized changed doctors several
times
all sorts of medications and
just seemed to be slipping
further and further away from himself
depression and different psychiatric
changes happen in people with traumatic
brain injury that's something that we
are all trying to understand
but with matthew he is a very unusual
case in a person who had an injury very
early in life and had
two decades for that injury to progress
in his brain and yet he died at such an
early age
i think matthew held on to hope until
almost the very end
he was still working still living on
beacon hill with his friends and you
know still
having a reasonably normal life until
the fall of 2018
and at that point he just went into one
of these sort of downward spirals
it's almost a guarantee that matt's
brain was compensating for his injury
there's no question about that but part
of his injury was not going to get
better
and i said to him you're my boy and i'll
never stop fighting and he said
mom i'm not your boy anymore
that boy is gone
and i think he just knew in his head
that he wasn't the same person
and he felt he wasn't going to get back
to being that same person again
i don't mean that my life is destroyed i
mean my my way of living is destroyed
what does that mean whatever
connects yourself together in your mind
is gone
bob walked into the condo with otto
under his
his arm bob just looked at me and he
shook his head like that
and then the two guys walked in
after him and i said i
don't want you here
and they said
i have to say the words
your son matthew died today
and he was gone
but i'm gonna keep my promise i'm gonna
keep fighting for him
because we think that that is what he
would want
when we first saw matt's brain you could
clearly see the injury
to the back right of his head back here
several times
he would point to his head and he would
say
but my brain is dying but it was only
after we were able
to get an mri from dr christine mcdonald
you could see injury deep into the white
matter up to the front of the brain
injury in a lot more areas of the brain
than we ever would have detected as a
pathologist
we're not getting matt back but what
would the best possible thing be we
agreed that it would be to validate matt
at the end of the meeting i said derek
we didn't know what we were going to
hear today
but what we wanted to hear was
something that would validate matt and
he said well you've got that
to be able to tell bob and linda that
wasn't wrong
right he knew there was something that
was happening to his brain
you know it all makes sense now he
wasn't getting better
and thanks to the hard work of my team
and everything coming together we were
able to show linda and bob
all of the damage that we found in
matthew's brain
because of the work that dirk and his
team have done
it's now not nearly so mysterious
but there's a whole journey that we have
to go through until we get there
traumatic brain injury research
is in the earlier stages but that's
another reason that matthew is such an
important donor because we lack the
fundamental knowledge of how the brain
is structured and how it works we got a
lot of work
to do we had so much work to do we can't
solve any diseases until we really
understand the normal brain and then
what's happening
with a traumatic brain injury but we're
getting there we're seeing early results
that are really encouraging
one of matt's friends distilled it down
and said
so someday some little kids
gonna hurt his head and he's not going
to have to suffer
like matt did and that's what we're
hopeful for
and that's what we feel
is matt's legacy i am so hopeful it gets
me up in the morning thinking you know
we're going to make a difference today
we're going to understand something
we're going to make that discovery
and that's the hope that's where the
hope lies
do you feel our love it feels
great i love you too
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i always love you
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you