This captivating and clinically illuminating title presents the story of Dr. Michele Pato’s personal experience with traumatic brain injury (TBI).  With profound candor and humor, Dr. Pato chronicles her journey through the enormous physical, psychological, and emotional challenges encountered following her accident, treatment, and recovery.  

After years of rehabilitation and reflection, Pato relays her extraordinary story through an engrossing narrative that simultaneously pedagogically serves clinicians who treat TBI, while also offering important insights for patients and caregivers affected by TBI.  Across 18 chapters, Pato addresses each physiological aspect of her treatment and recovery, including her battles with aphasia, neuromuscular and memory issues, tinnitus, and vertigo – to name just several of the setbacks she had to overcome.  The book also details Pato’s struggle to recover while negotiating a multitude of roles: maintaining a physician-researcher leadership position in academic medicine; managing relationships with her husband (a prominent physician-scientist as well), interacting with family and friends; and, most of all, overcoming the emotional frustrations associated with long-term physical recovery, such as relearning what were once innate motor and speech skills.  

A riveting account of personal injury that was met with extraordinary determination, patience, grace, and commitment to recovery, Nerve is a unique and valuable resource for clinicians, patients, caregivers and anyone else whose life has been touched by TBI

Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

Center for Genomics of Psychiatric Health and Addictions

New Brunswick, NJ