Wish Book: Program helps woman recover after brain injury

After she'd emerged from the coma, after she'd survived a severe head injury from which most people never make it back, Kristin McCollum's recovery became a steady stream of humble miracles: the time she first opened her eyes; the time she smiled when her dad walked into the hospital room; the time she uttered her first word, a swear word, to her speech therapist.

"Those were very special moments," says her mother, Paula. "But for a long time, we'd look at her and wonder, 'Is she still in there? Is she still Kristin?'"

Four years later, the one-time pizza-shop manager still is slowly coming back from what her mom calls "ground zero," that Christmas Day in 2010 when McCollum, then 31, for no apparent reason lost control of her Volkswagen Golf on Old Almaden Road.

It took rescue workers 45 minutes to extract her from the mangled vehicle. She suffered a traumatic brain injury from which 90 percent of victims never regain consciousness.

A key to that recovery has been Services for Brain Injury, a nonprofit center and wonder factory tucked into a nondescript business park in North San Jose. For the past year, McCollum has been coming here five hours a day, trying to piece together her new life.

At the center's Independent Living Skills/Pre-Vocational program, she's learning the appropriate behavior and skills she will need to work again and function within a group. Her immediate goal: find a job as a dressing-room attendant and eventually move out of her parents' home, where she's been living. To that end, she works with therapists on speech, physical and occupational rehabilitation.

On a recent morning, speech pathologist Haley Dayel worked with McCollum on her speaking skills, still largely hampered by the long-term effects of her injury. Her mind seems sharp, yet there's a disconnect between what she's thinking and how she verbalizes those thoughts.

"Do you want to practice a telephone conversation or an in-person interview?" Dayel asks.

"In ... ter ... views," McCollum says in a voice still slow and plodding, but dramatically improved from the days she could barely utter a single word.

"What strategies can we use?"

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Wish Book: Program helps woman recover after brain injury