BWF in the News

March 01, 2009

From EP Global Communications Their New Normal: The Woodruff Family’s Recovery From Traumatic Brain Injury

Countless families across the country recognize Bob Woodruff as one of the faces of ABC News. We know him from his in-depth reporting, his position as the replacement for the late Peter Jennings as co-anchor of World News Tonight, and, unfortunately, from his near-death experience when his tank was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED) while he was on assignment covering the war in Iraq. Lee Woodruff knows Bob as her husband of 20 years, the father of her four children, and her partner in life. In the hours and days following the attack on Bob, his cameraman, and the military personnel who were assigned as their escorts, America watched as news came in of his serious condition (he suffered a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and his chances of recovering. Lee immediately rushed to his side, determined to do anything she could to get him healthy and bring him home to his family. For Lee, the entire journey—from panic when the call came in that he was injured to caregiving during the long recovery process—taught her many things about the power of hope, the strength of the human spirit, and her own ability to overcome fear and remain strong for her family. For both Bob and Lee, the experience also gave them a profound appreciation of the courage and selflessness of the men and women of the U.S. military, whom they credit for saving Bob’s life.

It was January 29, 2006, and Bob was reporting on U.S. and Iraqi security forces when a roadside bomb struck his vehicle near Taji, Iraq. At the time of the attack, he was embedded with the U.S. 4th Infantry Division, traveling in an Iraqi MT-LB. Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, were standing with their heads above a hatch, apparently filming a stand-up. Both men were wearing body armor and protective helmets at the time. Woodruff sustained serious shrapnel wounds and a massive head injury and underwent surgery performed by a joint Army and Air Force neurosurgical team at the U.S. Air Force hospital south of Balad, located in Camp Anaconda. A portion of his skull was removed to reduce the damage from brain swelling, and he was evacuated to the United States Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. He was kept in a medically induced coma to assist his recovery.

Lee was on vacation at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL with their four children when ABC News president, David Westin, called her with the news that Bob had been injured. Naturally, not but in serious condition due to an IED attack on his unit, she was terrified. After the initial shock began to subside, Lee—a public relations executive and freelance writer—searched within herself for strength and hope and then embraced her role as the leader and caregiver of her family. She called Bob’s family, her own parents, and then told Westin to release the news to the public and arrange for her to get to Bob’s side. The hardest task came next—she needed to tell her four children, whose ages at the time ranged from 5 to 15, that their father had been seriously injured. She was careful in her approach of delivering the news to them. “I think initially, during the initial terror—before we knew where it was going—one of the things I found the most helpful was to determine that balance between insulating my kids from a lot of the facts and the gory details and the what ifs and the desire to never lie to them,” Lee remembers. “My daughter would come to me and say, ‘Is Daddy going to be the same? Will he be the same person?’ And I would think, You know, I don’t know the answer to that, and if I told her, I’d be lying to her—and I never want to lie to her because I always want her to believe me. I always want to be her source for information. So what I would say to her was, ‘I believe in my heart that your dad is going to get better, and he’s going to be as back to himself as he can possibly be.’ And that was enough for all of them.”

As information began to come in about the attack, Lee learned that, after the bombing, helicopter medics were ordered to turn around because of a complex gunfight that was taking place around the tank that Bob was in. The military personnel sent to the rescue chose to ignore the order, however, land their helicopter, and get Bob the medical attention that he would have died without. The servicemembers told Lee they were just doing their job—her immediate thought was a hope that she was raising her children with the kind of “stuff” that those men were made of.

Bob’s initial prognosis upon his evacuation was that he was not expected to live. Lee credits the doctors and nurses, who took mortar fire while operating on him, for bringing him back. She admits that her first instinct when she got the news was to get her husband back to the U.S. as soon as possible so that he could get the proper care, but she later realized that he was in the best place he could have been where, as she explains, “They just acted, when every second counted.” She now understands that U.S. military physicians are some of the best in the world at treating traumatic brain injuries, because they have seen so many of them over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lee first saw Bob at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and it was a waiting game in terms of when he would recover and how affected he would be from the brain injury. After leaving Germany, Woodruff was treated for weeks at Bethesda Naval Hospital (also known as the National Naval Medical Center) in Bethesda, MD. Once he came out of his coma, it was his speech and language that were most affected. Lee was told that with an injury like Bob’s it was as if a bomb had gone off in the filing cabinet in his brain that keeps all of his words and memories and now he had to pick them all up and reorganize them. And for Lee, that was the most challenging aspect of dealing with his recovery. “This was Bob. This was the person that I married because of his brain and now here was his brain that was so completely scrambled, and moreover, there was no real certainty on where it would end up.” She didn’t know how functional Bob would be, how much he would improve, or if he would ever be able to hold any real job again. She quickly discovered that patience was key. “That was absolutely the hardest thing, being able to let go and say, ‘I have no control over this so I now need to stay indefinitely positive, and I need to do it for the kids…and for my own psyche.’”

Lee learned that the most valuable tool in helping her family through the experience of dealing with Bob’s injury and his recovery was to always keep them all in the realm of hope and, as he began to recover, to focus on the things that he could do instead of those that he couldn’t do. She worked to maintain an open line of communication with her children and found that—as simple and as basic as it was—it was all they needed.

In her initial conversations with the doctors who were treating Bob in Germany, both prior to her arriving there and during her first days at his side, Lee grew frustrated with their descriptions of his condition. “Sometimes I worry about the caregivers when doctors give such dire pronouncements up front because if an outcome is going to be awful—like the cancer is terminal or Dad’s never going to walk again or talk again—our brains will begin to allow that information in over time,” she explains. “We will begin to understand it. We don’t need it to be frontloaded—we don’t need to be hit over the head with a club. We need to stay strong and in a realm of hope to care for our loved one. I think kids are like that, too. If this is going to be Dad’s new reality, then they will begin to understand that and adjust their world or their expectations to circle around that gradually.”

As a result of his brain injury, Bob experienced aphasia—the loss of the ability to produce and/or comprehend language, especially when fatigued. (The condition has continued to improve and now is barely recognizable.) Lee remembers, “It was so interesting to see my kids deal with that, to just supply the word if he hesitated for one second. To them, it became their ‘new normal,’ which is a brain injury term that I hated for so long, but there really isn’t a better word for life after an injury or illness. And kids understand ‘new normal.’ I think we need to give them a lot more credit than they sometimes get for being able to assimilate and move forward.”

For Lee, her processing of the experience was complicated and trying. She found herself in a position not foreign to the spouses and loved ones of those in the military who put themselves in dangerous situations in the name of their jobs…angry. “I just thought, my God, you’ve got four kids, you’ve been there eight times before, you and your producers had agreed that you already had the story in the can. Why were you going the extra mile here? Why are you such a Boy Scout? All of those thoughts were in my head, and I’m not sure how I stopped the film loop on that one ultimately. … I think you sort of just burn yourself out with all these different emotions.”

From fear, to anger, to determination, Lee always remained hopeful throughout Bob’s path to recovery and from it all emerged deeply grateful to the U.S. military. Together with Bob, they decided to create the Bob Woodruff Family Foundation to become a voice that could be heard in civilian and military cultures, across political lines and throughout the nation, calling for tangible support to assist injured servicemembers and their families. “I know that we felt so lucky, and we saw in the hospital so many families that didn’t have the spotlight on them like we did, who didn’t have the resources of an ABC News behind them,” Lee remembers. “I think we felt so grateful at Bob’s outcome, and we felt like we had to do something.” Through the nonprofit foundation, the Woodruffs, Bob’s brothers included, use their voices to shine light on the families who need help and provide critical resources and support, especially to those affected by the signature hidden injuries of war: traumatic brain injury and combat stress (post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). To date, they have given over $1 million in individual and charitable grants through the foundation. “We feel that we can continue—through speaking and writing and all the things that I do and Bob does—to keep the focus on these vets,” Lee says. They try to cover the gamut of what military families of those injured need, from financial support to access to rehab, and that includes an awareness of the caregiver, evidenced by their recent funding of an organization at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that gives spa and pedicure treatments to the caregiver. “You can say, well how does that help somebody recover from a brain injury?” says Lee. “But I don’t even have to tell you how. It’s pretty obvious.”

Now, three years since the IED that almost took his life in Iraq, Bob is back on ABC News (he returned in February 2007), and Lee is set to release her second book, Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress (her first, In an Instant: A Family’s Journey of Love and Healing, was co-authored with Bob and became a #1 New York Times bestseller). At ABC, Bob is reporting for World News, Good Morning America, and Nightline with the unit, Bob Woodruff Reports. His first on-air report after his injury, “To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports,” was an hour-long, primetime documentary that chronicled his TBI, his painstaking recovery, and the plight of thousands of servicemembers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with similar injuries. Woodruff continues to cover TBI for all ABC News broadcasts and platforms and was honored with a Peabody Award in 2008 for his reporting on the subject. And he is working his way back to live anchoring. “He would say that he’s not as fluid, speech- wise, as he would have been before,” explains Lee. “Before he could sit and look at five pages and memorize them and stand up and spew it out. He can no longer do that; he has to come up with other tricks to keep the facts in his head. But he has found, as so many with brain injuries do, great compensatory strategies for working around those issues. So it’s pretty remarkable.”

That day in Iraq immediately changed the lives of Bob, Lee, and their four children but it has without a doubt made them stronger and forever affected the way they view the men and women of the military and the resilience of all families to overcome great challenges. Lee found that taking things day by day, being as patient as she could be in the face of uncertainty, and never losing hope allowed her to lead her family through their hard times. “I know it sounds like a Hallmark card, but I don’t think anybody should ever be without hope,” says Lee. “I think hope is really the fuel that keeps the patient going, the caregiver going, the whole family going. It’s like gasoline in the engine; no one should ever be afraid to hope.”

For more about The Bob Woodruff Family Foundation, visit remind.org. Lee Woodruff’s new book, Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress, will be released April 21, 2009 from Random House and Bob Woodruff can be seen back on ABC News and as the anchor of Focus Earth, a weekly eco-newscast for Planet Green, Discovery Communications’ 24/7 eco-lifestyle network.

© Copyright 2009 by EP Global Communications

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