Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief: How to Heal When You Are Alone

Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy is an award-winning author. Shireen writes novels and non-fiction, blogs about Toronto and brain injury, and creates visual art under both Shireen Jeejeebhoy and Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy. Shireen's first book, Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story (2007), was an award-winning biography about a patient and her pioneering doctor whose ground-breaking work made it possible to live without eating.
A Canadian innovation, this artificial life support saves tens of thousands of lives every year around the globe. She, Shireen's first novel, was a finalist for the 2012 The Word Guild Awards, Novel - Futuristic Category, Shireen's memoir Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me (2017) was short-listed for the 2018 Word Awards and garnered seven five-star reviews and an invitation to blog on Psychology Today.
Using this memoir as a launch pad, Shireen created a website on brain injury, how to diagnose it, and effective treatments for it at https://concussionisbraininjury.com. Shireen advocates for replacing standard medical care with effective neurostimulation and neuromodulation therapies to restore people's health and return them to their full potential. This advocacy lead her to become the brain injury consultant and dramaturge on Brain Storm (play, 2020).
Brain Storm ran at Dancemakers Studio in Toronto's historic Distillery District just before COVID-19 shut down Toronto. And motivated by the popularity of her Psychology Today post on brain injury grief, she wrote Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief: How to Heal When You Are Alone, a self-help book to help people learn about and recover from this devastating grief. Shireen has written several novels that feature Toronto as a character and star women finding their way without romance giving them the answers.
Women talk to each other about something other than a man, and, drawing on her tri-continent background, diversity emerges naturally in her stories. Dogs and cats cavort in supporting roles. I write a mix of books: novels, biography, short nonfiction under both Shireen Jeejeebhoy and Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy. I set my novels in Toronto, my home for most of my life, a city of contradictions and ripe with conflict possibilities.
My award-winning debut book, Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story, is set in Ontario, but also travels down to New York and across the pond to Sweden. My life is one big question mark, has been ever since I sustained a closed head injury (or mild traumatic brain injury or concussion, whichever moniker is fashionable) in a four-car collision. But my writing keeps me grounded, my photography takes me to other places.
I wrote about it and treatments I discovered in my revised memoir Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me -- shortlisted in the 2018 Word Awards -- and I expanded on the learnings at https://concussionisbraininjury.com. My most recent non-fiction book Brain Injury, Trauma, and Grief: How to Heal When You Are Alone complements these two. When I'm not writing, reading, taking photographs, I'm hunting for good coffee and sensational chocolate.