In an Instant | Bob and Lee Woodruff | Talks at Google

I had the great pleasure a little over a year ago at 7 o' clock in the morning, roughly to meet Bob. Bob and his colleagues from ABC News came to Mountain View to do something fairly unconventional. The plan was to broadcast the evening news not from a traditional studio, but from here at the Googleplex, Building 43, which was really quite an honor. A number of folks came in early in the morning, started the process of pulling everything together, getting all the cameras set up and sort of outlining the day's newscast. And part of the prearranged agreement was that we'd have Larry and Sergey sit down with Bob and do a quick interview and talk about the insights of Google and sort of expose to ABC viewers. You know, who these people were behind this stark white homepage with the logos that changed every once in a while. And we thought this was going to be a fairly straightforward kind of simple and consumer friendly interview. And little did we know that a little news item dropped out of the sky that day that made things a little spicier. It happened to be the day that Google had refused a request from the US Government to hand over log data revealing search patterns about our users that may have been interested in pornographic content. All five of them that care about porn.

Thank you for that.

And according to the Justice Department, aol, Yahoo and Microsoft had already complied with the request. And why wouldn't Google? So I think Bob probably had a budget of about 12 questions for Larry and Sergey and I'd say close to 60% of them were on this topic about the DOJ request. So the, the interview went a little differently than we expected. That said, it was a great success and as you know, you know the story of Bob's history over the last year and Lee's history. Just nine days later after being here at Google, Bob made his trip out to Baghdad. And the rest you certainly read about. After 36 days in a coma and coming out of that, being joined by Lee, his family, friends, colleagues, et cetera, the recovery is just remarkable. The book is remarkable, currently ranked number one on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction. And we invited Bob and Lee here today to tell us more about this incredible journey, their experiences, as well as some of the efforts that they've embarked on to raise awareness and support for victims of traumatic brain injury. Lee, welcome to Google. Bob, welcome back.

Thanks, Dan. You know the other thing, we just saw Sergei downstairs and he said that he hasn't interviewed with them anybody since than they did with us, which is probably a good idea. I have also Said both to him and, well, having talked to him personally about it. But I had told others that I was blaming him and Larry for what happened to me. Getting hit by this ied, since this is one of the last interviews that I did. But then before that, I should have just stuck here for a few more weeks and not have gone over there to begin with. But I also just wanted to just let you know that, that Lee, my wife, you may not have heard about her before all of this, but she is just an absolutely wonderful wife for me after everything that I went through for this year. It has been very difficult. I mean, it's remarkable to this very day that we've been able to recover the extent that we have.

He's just saying that because I kept telling him to get off his BlackBerry at the airport this morning, so he knows.

But she is a very. Not only is she a good writer, but she's extremely, extremely funny, you know?

Yeah. What was so funny about that?

I don't know.

Okay.

She really is.

One of the things that I want to do is thank all of you guys, because whether or not you know, it any. All of your great thoughts and prayers and notes, everybody played a part in Bob's healing, in our whole family's healing, actually. And we know that you guys were out there pulling for him because we got so many notes. And then about a month or so after Bob was home from the hospital, we got the Google gift bag. Now, the Google gift bag was ripped into by our kids before we could even begin to open it. It was shirts and hats and all kinds of stuff, and those have become the new pajamas in our house, just so you guys know. So Google is now more a part of our lives than what's already on our computers. This was one of those moments that I hope nobody in this room ever has to go through. Life was going okay. I had what I call my little life. I was a mom of four, worked for 15 years for an amazing little cosmetics company in the Bay Area called Benefit Cosmetics. And my boss's wife is sitting right here in the front row. Jim Halging your what? Allison's my boss, Effectively, Yeah. So I got to watch what I say right now. And then I was actually down in Disney World, and out of the blue, the phone rang, and life sort of changed forever. You probably read accounts or. I think most of America's probably sick now, seeing us on television and all the promos for Documentary, which actually was an amazing, amazing piece of tv, and if you guys haven't seen it, it's available on the ABC Web. It's called To a Rock and Back. And it tells the story of Bob's injury, but more importantly, the story of some of the other soldiers and what's not being done for so many of these men and women who are giving so much to us by serving over there. So for the next five weeks, I spent time in Bethesda Naval Hospital. My kids were back up in New York being taken care of by a phalanx of great friends and babysitters. And I waited for Bob to wake up. And his roller coaster ride went from being really out of it and really misshapen. There's a scene in the book where I see him for the first time in Germany, and his head is literally swollen out. His brain is literally swollen out of his head because within an hour they were able to take his skull off and remove a 14 centimeter piece of his skull to save his brain function in the battlefield. And something that I don't write about, but I found so amazingly shocking, which underscores how far battlefield medicine has come, is that the first week I was in Washington, and I was staying with friends that weekend because the kids were down. I walked outside of the front door and across the street on the sidewalk was sort of looked like a shrine. There were little candles, flowers. And I turned to my friend Susan, I said, you know, what is this? What happened? She said, oh, that's a really sad story. She said, this was one of our neighbors. He was probably early 60s. He walked outside after dinner and went to get something in his car. And a bunch of guys drove up in their car, hit him over the head with a baseball bat, took his wallet, got exactly $14 and drove away. They found him on the sidewalk. A few friends from the neighborhood found him maybe 10 or 15 minutes later, called the ambulance. The ambulance took him to a hospital that was not a trauma center. And he waited in the. In the ER room because they thought he was drunk. And he died two hours later. And he had been the bureau chief of the New York Times in Washington. And I remember thinking, wait a second. This guy is in the. The nation's capital, in the richest country in the world, was supposedly the best health care system. My husband was in the middle of a gunfight in the desert in Iraq, and they were able to know immediately what to do and save his life. And it made no sense to me. And Bob battled back in those five weeks. He battled back from pneumonia, from sepsis, and toward the end, before he woke up, he was being becoming agitated if we weren't with him. They had to keep his wrists down and tied down with restraints because he would either try to pull his tubes out, or toward the end, he was punching the corpsman and the nurses and even biting. And they had told me that that was a really bad sign, that biting was really bad, because it meant that he probably was not going to return to, you know, any level of the person that he had been before.

If you really think about what's happening generally with how those soldiers and Marines in this war, they're really two separate issues in terms of those that are injured in this war. First of all, just remember that in this war, compared to previous wars, there are so many more that are injured versus those who have died. You've got slightly over 3,000 that have been killed, and you've got probably at least 16 to 1. If you look at Vietnam, for example, it's really more like 2.2.7 to 1 in terms of those that are injured, but those who died. And one of the things about it is the miracle of what they've been come up with in terms of medically, what they've been able to do to save lives. And some of them is the kind of medicines they've got out there that the medics got when they're trying to save people's lives. Some of it's the helicopters that get you very quickly in my situation, for example, and I'll tell you a story, and one of them is relatively new. What we've known, obviously what's happened, you know, from more than a year ago, was that when we get hit in a spot by the IED that was just about. Just up the. As if we're going along in a tank like this down the road. The IED exploded up here, knocked me out completely. I went down into the tank, and then I woke up about a minute later. And I could see my other guys who was with me, Vinny Malhotra, my producer, looked up at him, also Doug Vogt, my cameraman. And they were now inside the tank. And I asked them if we were alive, and they said, we are. And I don't really remember much after that at all. But what happened at that moment was there was a gunfire that was out around the tank, and all these army guys get out there and fought it back. And then another vehicle got me out of the tank, took me about a mile down the road, and a helicopter came, picked me up, flew me from there down to Baghdad, then from Baghdad up to Balad, which is the place where they ultimately then take 14cm of my skull off and save my brain. But the amazing thing that was told just a short period ago was that I heard from one of the soldiers who was with me said they just heard about a week and a half ago that the two pilots that came to pick me up at that place, as they're flying in, the. The gunfire is going off, and he gets an order from a commander over the radio that's in this helicopter and says, don't go down there. It's too dangerous. So the guy turns down the radio, ignores the order and comes down and saves my life. And also is Doug, which is unbelievable. And that's the kind of things that are going over. These guys are taking the risks over the possibility of death. And they did that. That's one aspect of what's happening in this war, and that's why so many are surviving. The biggest problem is so many are coming through with these kinds of injuries. And some of them are relatively new in this war compared to other ones, like, for example, traumatic brain injury, which is what I've got. Sometimes they're obvious injury like mine because my skull was off, right? And I'm out for coma for 36 days. So the effect on my brain is pretty well known. And they know, they make me what they call a TBI traumatic brain injury. But there's a lot that get hit in these kind of explosions where they may not necessarily be injured in the sense that there's not blood coming out of their skin. They don't get loose, they don't go knocked out. They actually can go back again and continue to fight. But they do have a condition on their brain. It's also a kind of traumatic brain injury, which we're now learning more and more about, which could have significant numbers, although the official number of injured in this war is technically about almost 24,000. But really, there's a great deal of belief that it's probably more above 100,000 if you just start looking at some of these other injuries. So that's one of the aspects we certainly have pointed out over the last few years. But that's the two different things. One is huge saving of lives, but new types of injuries that could last not only just for weeks and months, but for. For decades, probably for the years of their lives of many of them.

And that's sort of where our journey diverged with everybody else's, because, you know, we got amazing care, as most of the soldiers and Marines do when they get to hospitals. Like Bethesda Naval or even Walter Reed, which has been maligned in the press. But in the acute care level, when you're really injured and you need to go through surgeries, that's a great place to be. But then we got out of the hospital and there's a moment in the book where I have to go start shopping for rehab places for Bob because we have to figure out where's next, where's that going to be? And it was a hugely stressful thing for me because the military was obviously pushing the VA system, which now to me, when I think about it, it's like, why was that even an option to me with what I know now? But at the time I was incredibly confused. I had never been in this situation before. I had never known anybody with a brain injury. I had never had to deal with the rehab world. And I walked into the first rehab place and there was a car in the middle of the room. And that was so shocking to me. It was a full life size car. And these rooms all have names like Easy Street, Main street, and over in this corner there might be a fake kitchen. And in this corner there's a, a bedroom. And so there. And at first I'm thinking, this is great, maybe we'll rehab him to make beds. He can be cooking, you know, he can go do shopping with the plastic apples and bananas in the corner. But at the same time I thought, you know, oh my God, what have we sunk to, you know, where are we now? And why is my husband, why is my husband going to be relearning how to get in a car? I didn't think that was an issue. And they said to me, well, when your brain is injured, you have no. Until Bob wakes up, we won't know what function he's left with. And oftentimes your brain is just going to have to simply rewire itself. And the analogy we heard over and over again is the healing is like a computer rebooting that. The wires and the neurons and the connectors that would go to Bob's brain and go to certain words, we're just going to have to find new ways to go. So for example, in you guys who have not had an injury, if you say the word green and they can do sort of scans on your brain to watch this, one area in your brain would light up and that would be you accessing the word green. But for Bob now to access the word green, especially since he was injured on the speech and language side of his brain, on the left side of his brain because he's right handed. They could watch six centers light up in his brain just to get to green. So it will go around the injured area, go over here, go back over here pretty much in almost the same time that your brain would fire. But it will take that much more energy and he will be that much more exhausted by the end of the day. And that's something that will probably never change. He can continue to get all of the words back that he's lost and they do continue to pop into his head. There are some really funny ones though. We've had some great moments with Bob and if you saw in the documentary the kids teaching him how to say belt buckle again. And those were, those were really, those were beautiful moments. They were also frightening moments for me as I'm watching my kindergarten children teach their pretty brilliant, I have to say, even though sometimes he can be a real jerk father, relearn how to talk. But some of my favorites were the Verizon man. We had problems with our phone. So Bob had had it. He was trying to make a phone call and he said when is that Viagra man going to come? Or one of the all time favorites, which I think really should be new Google speak and you guys can start spreading it out. There was, he'd gone back for a high school reunion and he came home and he was really perplexed. He said, I think Laurie, she, you know, he goes, I think she's had a breast explosion. And I said that would be boob job, but I kind of like breast explosion better.

I think that's so, you know, there's a possibility, you know, obviously I've lost this job that I had here about 14 months ago last time I was here at Google. But to be the anchor of abc. But if you guys accept those words as the official words, then I will go back to become the anchor. I will just accept those when I say them. Not a problem.

All right.

We're not going to talk too much longer because I know you guys are working today. But the bottom line was that the families that we saw in the hospital in Bethesda and Bob was, was in a coma for most of this would just break your heart. These were just the most honest, simple families. Young, young, young, 21, 23 maybe the wife had three kids already under the age of four. The children often couldn't fly to see their parents because that wasn't paid for, unlike what ABC was able to do for us and the kind of care that they would get after they left the Acute care situation. And you saw some of this in Bob's documentary, really varied. And it depended on where they lived and the quality of care, because cognitive rehab, to lace that brain back together again, to get you to the word green and to go around the other path. Some of it is the amazing power of the body to heal, but some of it is working and working the brain because it is a muscle. So Bob would sit for hours and come up with synonyms for things, or do crossword puzzles or Sudoku or any of those kinds of things, or cognitive activities. And that's the part that a lot of the wounded vets are missing when they come home, because they're coming home to an isolated life. There was one case that somebody told me which happens regularly when these guys woke up, the father and son were in the room. The son had been in a coma, and he woke up, and he immediately started resuming the fight that he'd had with his father before he'd gotten in the coma. And, you know, you think, okay, that's somewhat of, you know, that's something from South Park. But it's also, what chance does this guy have to heal if he's in an environment that's so combative and not supportive? Or a lot of these guys are just going to go home and cash the check and go out to the bar at night or turn the television on. One interesting nugget that's not in the book that I found out, which I think is fascinating, is that when all of these guys wake up from the coma in the first couple of days, they're fascinated by the Jerry Springer Show. And then when I said, so what happens when they start waking up more? He said, they have no interest. So I think that's important.

I just think, just as a bottom line, just too. Because I don't want to take some of your questions, but just think about, for you guys, for what you do, just how remarkable it could be if you do like the rest of us is just do more stories, more information about how many military guys and women out there. There's something happening with them and what they're doing and what they're going through. And those that are injured, those that come back, you know what their life is like. Because in this war, there's only 1.5 million Americans that are fighting in this war, as opposed to Vietnam, where 12 million were fighting in the war. So everybody knew some of them back even in Vietnam. And not many of us, you know, me even before. I mean, now, lots of. But certainly Probably a lot of you, too. It's probably also true that you just don't know that many of these families. And we just need to tell more of that story, I think, to this country just to show what they're going through, what they're doing, whether that's a huge success or whatever they've done or something, something terrible that may have happened in their life. You know, just what's generally happened to those that are in the war, I think would be something very important to do as a. As a journalistic group like you guys are, too.

And so as a family, we created the Bob Woodruff Family Fund. We were sort of shocked at the disproportionate amount of attention that Bob's story got, and we understand why, but it seems so unfair when you looked at all of these other families. And so Bob, you know, pledged to make his documentary about these other guys. And the fund is gathering. We've had amazing donations from people like yourselves, you know, logging on and pledging, you know, 100 bucks, 50 bucks, whatever. Phase two is going to be to go after corporations, because that's how you make a foundation sustainable. And the goal is to really. Look, we're not going to reinvent any wheels, but we have a board made up of rehab docs, of military experts, of civilian experts, and we're going to look at the organizations that are on the ground that already exist, that are helping the vets receive rehab, but also helping them integrate back into their community. Because for these guys that are wounded, many of them are incredibly isolated and wondering, what am I going to do next? How am I going to work now? I can no longer do the job that I had before. So that's our goal as a family. The website is in the back of the book. It's in a little paragraph about the foundation. We want to thank you for coming out today and being interested in our story.

And I like the new plane or whatever the thing is out there. The last time I did the story out there. Anyway, if anybody has any questions, we'd love to take any from you.

Sorry. I did watch the documentary, and I thought it was quite an eye opener. And I applaud both of you for. For your courage. You talked about the fund that you're going to be working on. Bob, what are you going to be doing next? Are you going to be working with ABC more? Are you going to be doing any more documentaries? Because we miss you. I miss you.

Thank you. Right now, as I'm working through the ability to learn the language A little bit more than I did before. I'm going to be working on that. Being an anchor right now is more difficult than it was for me a year ago, no question. But the good news is that if I was spoken to you, for example, eight months ago, I probably wouldn't even be able to do this kind of talk with you right now. That's how much it's gotten better, and I'm hoping that it will continue to increase. I mean, the word generally on TBI in history has been that it's about 1.5 to 2 years, 1 1/2 years to 2 years of improvement, then it stops. But I think the actual reality is it goes on for probably decades. But what I can do now is I can do journalism. I still understand everything and just getting the word out sometimes. So that cuts down a little bit on my ability to do live reporting, which is a different kind of skill. So I want to just do some longer, more intense stories that I did before and just have a little bit more time to write them, sometimes more than an hour, like I did so many times last time, like when I came here and had to do things pretty quickly. But that's going to be moving along, and I think you'll see improvements again as it goes by. I hope to make it so.

One of the things that wasn't in the book was the fact that your hair looks great. So. So there weren't any details on the surgeries. So I don't want to get. I don't want to gross you out or anything, but. So did they save that tissue when they originally took out your skull, or was it a process of regrowing that skin, or how'd they do it?

Well, what is kind of weird about it is that what they do is they cut your skin down like this. So I've got a cut here, and it goes down like this, and it's basically around like that. So that part of skin was just peeled off of here and down like that with the hair still on top of it. What?

It's like scalping with.

It's like scalping. Yeah. It's the opposite, though, Anyway, so they take the skin down like that and they.

What's the opposite of scalping?

They saved my hair on that. You know, my father's always claimed that we are part Choctaw, my people. So I know more about this maybe than you do. But anyway, so they peel the skin down like that. The hair starts on there, stays on there, and then they cut the skull off inside and Then they put the skin back on and sell it back on.

They staple it on first so the.

Hair continues to just be in that skin and lives like it before it doesn't.

So did the brain then? I mean, because you're the swell. So did the skin then swell with the brain? I mean, did it.

No, the skin, if you saw the picture and the thing, you can see.

She's right, though. Yeah. No, because it was covered back over the brain and then it. Right. And the brain. Right. So if you touched that skin without the scalp, you could touch the brain below it.

Right.

But the skin was bad. The skin was like. It was a cone head, basically.

For anyone that really should be a doctor, you like this. Yeah.

And the other question I had was about. I find the most atrocious thing being the fight over the percentage of how much injury somebody had probably previous to their service in the military. And so you'll have somebody who took maybe a remedial math class. And so they'll say, well, we'll only say that 40% of your disability is from the army, because 20%, obviously you're retarded before you came into the army, but they took them anyway. So all of that doesn't make sense to me. And I'm just sort of wondering, is there somebody that's pushing on that front about those disability numbers? And that's what seems to really devastate these families.

Well, I think there are more private groups that are trying to raise some money to help some of them. That's one part which is, of course, going to be much smaller amounts of money ultimately than if the government, for example, starts to do some of this. And there is a push certainly in trying to change the laws on that. Whether that's going to happen or not, I still have no idea. I hope we're certainly going to push as much as possible.

You know, it's been interesting in the readings that we've been doing around the country, we've met so many amazing people. There's segments of people that have had traumatic brain injury or know someone in their family. A lot of Vietnam vets, interestingly enough, along with families who have know somebody serving now. But the Vietnam vets are so outraged because their point is this was such a broken system back when we were going through it. And it's not that they're shocked that it hasn't been fixed, but they're so dismayed for this next generation of vets. And it really is. It's something we probably all need to push on with Our own, you know, government officials.

Thank you.

Apologies if this was affected by your.

Injury, but could you give an idea of what your impression of Iraq was before, before the injury happened, whether this has changed my view of what's happening in Iraq generally? No, just that I've not been in Iraq. You have. I was just curious what your impression of the situation was, what the country was like. Right. Well, you know, I've had. This was my seventh time I went to Iraq since 2002. I was there twice while Saddam was still around and then five times since the invasion beginning in 2003. And I would say certainly in the beginning of the war. I think everybody especially assumed that this would be a relatively quick victory. There might be some of the chemical issues, which of course turned out to be absolutely not true. And the other thing that people have figured this would be probably a short war and not many people would be killed or injured. Now from 2003 to 2004, in the first, I guess first four times it went over there, I was able to literally travel around the south all the way from Basra, all the way down to Basra. I would be able to walk around, go to the restaurant and into a hotel, interview people on the street, regular Iraqi people. That has now completely changed since 2004, when these IEDs started to be a real threat all over the place. It's been almost impossible as a reporter, as a journalist, journalists to travel around the country and talk to the Iraqi normal people in their lives. So it's hard to see what they're doing, what's going through them. We get, we kind of rely largely on Iraqi reporters to try to help us with that kind of getting together of that information. So it's harder for us to down do it. So therefore a lot of the reporters now have to go out with military guys, you know, in these of kinds, kinds of things. And it's harder to see what's exactly happening. Certainly in the very north part of the country, it's relatively safer up towards Turkey. Then south, which is the largest Shiite area, it's a little bit safer, but just dead center in the middle where the Sunnis area is, where they, the people there only really support this war by about 5% versus 95% think it was a huge mistake. But in the south it's more like 50 to 50. And then in the north it's about 95. They like the fact the United States came and got rid of Saddam, but obviously there's been a huge change since 2004. So you said that you get excellent.

Acute care at Walter Reed.

Were you surprised about the rehabilitative care? The stories that came out in the post. Walter Reed was not the one we were at. We were at Bethel Bethesda Naval. But there is a slight difference. Is that Walter also. A lot of these guys, because they had a different kind of injuries over there, they're not necessarily like the kind of TBI ones.

Like a lot of the amputees go to Walter Reed. They have an amazing facility.

They stay longer, more down to rehabilitation level. And that's where there's a real fall apart. And that's. So that was slightly than what plus. They know they're going to close that in 2011. And that was a huge reason why it was being declining the way that it was. And they're now working on it by here. I haven't had a chance to be there actually. But I understand they're trying to build it back up and help it a little bit more. We'll see. Thank you. Hi, Lee.

Hi, Bob.

My boss's husband.

Quick.

I know you both work outside the home.

Do you have any advice on how.

To strike a healthy work life balance? Do you, honey?

Well, dear, you know, in fact, your wife Allison and I talk about this all the time. And I think that that is probably the issue that anybody with kids struggles with. Although I have to say it would be a heck of a lot easier if I could get my haircuts and my manicures on campus like you guys can. That would be kind of nice. And free food, you know, I think you have to carve time away and I think that's so hard. Today I just buckled and got a BlackBerry for this trip. I'd been resisting and resisting and resisting, even though people told me how great it was. And I think technology can be a plus and a minus sometimes too, because you're never sort of able to leave it. I think you have to just create boundaries and you have to say this is family time. And I can't tell you that I'm so good at different doing that, to be honest. But I mean, David and I have had this conversation about Disney World. You know, you need to create. You just need to have those moments where you say, this is the family and nothing else is going to penetrate. It's easier said than done, but I wish I had a better answer. It's a great question. Whole seminar.

Good luck on that.

Yeah, you know what, if you do get blown up by a bomb, though, you'll have a whole year off together, let me tell you.

Hi, good afternoon. I'm wondering, having gone through what you've gone through, how has that changed your.

View of life, to have gone through the crisis that we went through? Well, Bob has a distinct feeling about death, actually, in life, from his experience.

You know, I feel. I mean, obviously there's some of the things that used to bother me a lot don't really bother me much anymore. You know, having gone through what we went through as a family, I feel much better about it, remarkably. I don't really feel uncomfortable because of this. I mean, there was a lot of pain during all this for me, for the first six months, especially after this. Actually, the first four months, I should say after this happened, I had horrible pain. I could barely sleep more than one hour a night. And then finally, when they put my skull back on, it came back. And since then, I feel much more comfortable. I never had any real bad dreams, any frightening nightmares. Nightmares. Nightmares. See, there you go. There's me forgetting a word again. I haven't really had many of those. In terms of feeling about life generally. More time with my kids. I mean, the idea that I used to go sometimes three months to go to a war. I don't really want to do that very much anymore. I want to be away from them for very short periods of time, time when I can. My time with them is much more important than ever before. I do feel a little bit less afraid of death than I did before. The one that really frightens me about it is leaving behind my family and my kids. That certainly is the fear that I've got about death. For me, I don't feel afraid of it really anymore at all. In terms of rules about me traveling, Lee said I can't go to Iraq anymore.

Don't you guys think that's fair? Right. And I just think that I don't sweat the small stuff anymore. I find myself. If I'm late for something, I'm late. Whereas I used to beat myself up before. It really does reorganize your priorities. And I think the interesting thing is how long does that last? You know, if life gets back to normal, you know, are you still buying the fresh flowers every week because you say you deserve it for yourself? I'll let you know in a couple years.

I'm just curious about your recovery process, how you slip up on words sometimes. Is it the type of thing that if you're speaking for long periods of time like this, it gets harder or as the day goes on?

Well, there's no question When I get fatigue, it gets much harder. Like right now, this is kind of actually the strong part of the day for me. You know, I have what happens. I also gave up alcohol because try to get my brain better. So my only really truly great thing for me now is coffee. So I drink tons of that in the morning and in the afternoon, everything else. But if I have a little bit in the morning and then I still got some sleep and I haven't worn out, my ability to speak is much better. I would say tonight at 9 o', clock, for example, if we were having this instead, I'd probably not be speaking even as clearly as I am now.

And you notice that get better as days and weeks go on. Or is it at this point, I.

Think there's fewer moments during the day where I fall apart in terms of my ability to speak. You know, I still feel, you know, I don't even know why. Certain words I can't remember. I mean, even Google, I couldn't remember probably for four or five months after this happened. Some of my brothers names I couldn't even remember for a month. Even one of my brothers, daughter, daughter and son, I still can't get their names completely. I can't even go right now with them. And all this time, I mean, there's some words like that I couldn't even name. For example, Tony Blair, head of England, I couldn't even name his name even though I knew Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for some reason out of Iran.

That's true.

Now. Why that was, I still don't know to this day. But I mean, certain names were just chosen for different reasons. I started restudying Chinese to try to learn my Chinese but back and that was difficult too because I lost so many of these basic words that it's just really difficult for me. But hopefully someday that'll happen. You know, one thing about language, by the way, is that they say that the language that you learn as you're born is in one part of your brain. And if you learn one later, after you're six years old, that actually develops in a different part of your brain. So I got to figure out which ones are where. But I think my English one is probably, probably the worst one off.

I just want to say thanks for being here. I'm personally affected by your story because my dad has had eight brain surgeries in the last six weeks. So I understand what you are going through or have gone through. So could you walk after the surgery or did you have to learn to re walk or did you Was it more of a mind thing?

Because I got hit on the left side? This is pretty something I know so well because I've seen so many other military guys are hurt this way and other non military ones as well. But hitting in the left part is language and words and names. No question. If you get hit in the right side, it's more physical and sometimes with your vision. So sometimes you limp around, you can barely, sometimes you can't walk. And also with your vision, for example, I can't really see to grab this bottle. I can't really see how far away it is really. Then I get it, you know, and then you can't even put it straight down on the table. That's more of a right side thing. That doesn't mean if you get hit on the left sometimes that can affect your right part of your brain because you got to shake like that. So it really depends on what gets affected. But in terms of my physical stuff, it's remarkably little. In the beginning, I couldn't walk very well and I had to walk around the hospital. But it came back relatively quickly and I got. My shoulder was completely smashed too. And for some reason that didn't go through my heart, but it stopped and completely smashed that and I was able to barely move my arm in the beginning and now it's good. So that's.

He was very. I don't know if your dad has had different parts of his.

Yeah, he's more towards. They had to take out the occipital bone and part of his cerebellum in the back.

He was. He had no. His balance was really off. So anytime he was out of bed, he had to wear a helmet. There are pictures of that in the book. Book just for months. And that was scary for me. Anytime he left the bed.

I don't know if he's got blindness at all because I'm blind up in this corridor right here.

Yeah, he can track and he was able. I sent some pictures down. He was able to decipher that a picture was not a begonia. It was a different picture. So he can see. I don't know how well though. I'm sure probably on the sides, up and down, not too well. I mean, he's just going through a surgery today again, putting a shot.

Good luck to him.

Thank you.

And you. Yeah, the caregivers. Thank you. Hi, thanks for coming.

I was listening to an interview where you were discussing how you communicated with him while he was in the coma.

And also like telling stories and like daily rhymes. I think that you had with your children.

And I was just wondering if you.

Think that communication has accelerated your recuperation.

Or his recuperation and just the importance.

Of keeping that open. Because I think also the way you.

Were talking about the vets kind of, you know, checking out in some ways.

If you think that stimulation is, like, imperative to the. To the recuperation. The nurses and the doctors were the ones that told me that in the hospital. You know, just keep talking to them. Keep. Keep voices coming. Keep familiar voices. We dubbed all of our home videos onto DVDs, and we would play those if we weren't in the room. Music is a huge healer. In fact, Stevie Nicks has this ipod program where she gives ipods to the guys in comas and to. Encourages families to keep playing music for them. And you may have heard our famous Bruce Spring Springsteen story where I told. I lied to Bob and said Bruce was going to come play when he was in the coma if he would only wake up. And bought. Two days after Bob woke up, he said, I need one of those narrower things because he didn't know the word for guitar. And I said, okay, but why? And he said, because I've got to be ready when that boss man comes. Oh, my God. He heard that. He doesn't remember anything else, but he remembered that Bruce Springsteen. Thanks a lot, buddy.

But he hasn't come to play anything for me.

Oh, no. And that is such a big part of it. And touch, too. You know, of course, when you're lying in a bed, you worry about stiffness and blood clots and stuff. So we were constantly massaging him and also had to touch his disgusting feet and rub them. And the Iraqi desert feet, which. Which wasn't a good thing.

I've cleaned them since.

Yeah, but it's huge. Yeah, thanks.

Hi, guys. I was wondering about.

In terms of the damage to the kind of language file in your brain, I know it's hard for you and.

Still sometimes to remember certain words, but.

Was, like, grammatical structure hard for you to reuse? Like, did you start using wrong verb tenses or. Still does. Sometimes if you listen closely, like, when he's tired, he'll drop out an adverb or something. Or if you listen closely to his speech today, there might just be a little word here and there. Most people don't necessarily notice it, but if you're listening, you could notice it. Or one of my favorite ones is he'll say, I still don't have any feels on my face when he means feeling. So sometimes it is verb tenses and it tends to disintegrate more when he's, when he's tired, like you said.

How about anal?

Oh yeah, my favorite one. Which is, it could be another Google anchor word for him if you guys want to hire him. He was cleaning the kitchen in the early days when he couldn't read. He couldn't really watch TV because he didn't have the attention. He was very in a lot of pain. But he would actually clean the kitchen, which I was like, yes. So he would move, he would pick up dishes and, and put them in the sink.

It hasn't lasted very long though.

It didn't last very long. But one day he took the sponge and he was wiping the counter down and he said, I can't believe it, I'm so anus now. He said, I think you mean anal, but I kind of like anus.

So.

It'S little things like that. We're all little anus.

It's a great way to end our story.

Yeah.

On that note, on that note, why don't we wrap. We saved about 10 minutes to talk about anus and book signings. Anything else that's personal that you guys are personal to them. Well, we're going to time out here at 2:00'. Clock. So if we don't fulfill sort of what I anticipate to be quite a bit of demand for signings and follow up conversation, book signings right out here. We're going to go downstairs as well with these guys to Casablanca, which is on the first floor of this building, kind of that side, and pick things up after two o' clock clock. There's, you're invited, please come join us. And these guys have roughly 45 to 60 minutes from now to share with you.

Thanks. Great. Thank you.