Teri Garr Quotes

I had to learn to walk again, talk again, think again.

In 2009, I fractured my skull in a freak accident at an L.A. restaurant. I suffered a seizure and was rushed into hospital. I was so out of it that I refused to let them scan my brain. My dad rushed to my bedside and talked me into having the CAT scan - he told me that I might die if I didn't go through with it.

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson's. There's no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.

I had internal bleeding with blood clots on the brain. I was completely blind and deaf. I had a heart attack and a stroke.

Different people respond differently to head trauma than others.

After my neurosurgery, part of my brain was missing, and I had to deal with that. It wasn't the grey matter, but it was the gooey part dead center that makes key hormones and neurotransmitters.

The doctors have said that they don't want me in the ring bouncing around or getting picked up and slammed down. They said the old head just can't survive anymore trauma.

Last year I had a stroke. It left me in bad shape. I had to teach myself how to walk and talk all over again. It was a long hard fight. My speech is not perfect but I'm getting there.

People who have had a stroke and are recovering from it love being read to... especially by someone who is a good reader - it does help them to get better.

Being unconscious is the ultimate disability.

Music therapy was so important in the early stages of my recovery because it can help retrain different parts of your brain to form language centers in areas where they weren't before you were injured.

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

If you have a lesion in the hippocampus in both sides, you have short term memory, but you can convert that short term memory into long term memory.

When the doctors showed me an X-ray of my brain, they pointed to a black hole on the upper left side and told me that all memory from that spot was dead. I thought to myself that I hoped that's where I kept 'The Orange Blossom Special.'

It seems to me that unless you or someone very close to you has had a bad head injury, you really can't fathom it. You have no concept of what it is all about. It was so difficult for my whole family, not just me.

I had post-traumatic amnesia, five-second memory, it happens as a result of brain injury.

I was in and out of comas until I was nine and I would lose entire days and weeks. The novelty of being able to really do stuff hasn't worn off - I still feel like I'm making up for lost time.

Very few people run around and get amnesia and have comas and come out of them and do all the silly of people have strokes and have comas and come out of them and do all the silly things we do on soaps.

For somebody who has injured their brain, every single thing they say and think will be the subject of their own questioning.

I was reading this story about these people who suffered from brain injuries, and then their behavior changed kind of drastically afterward, and I just said to myself, 'There's no way that that can possibly be true.'

Sometimes a great wound or concussion of the head, especially which happens by falling headlong from an high place, brings a prejudice and weakness to the animal faculty, dulling the understanding.

I spent three months with a physical therapist understanding what a stroke is. I asked, 'What is a stroke?' I didn't really know. It's okay to mimic something, but I really needed to understand the signs.

Where does personality end and brain damage begin?

Everyone I tell that I had an aneurysm always says, 'Oh, my cousin died from that.' Well, I didn't, so I'm amazed. I was in a wheelchair, and I had to go to rehab. And now I'm walking!