March 26, 2026
A Car Crash That Became A Roadmap For Brain Injury Recovery with Kelly Tuttle
Send us Fan Mail A car crash can be over in seconds, but a concussion can rewrite your life for years. We sit down with Kelly Tuttle, a former cardiology nurse practitioner who later moved into neurology, to tell the truth about traumatic brain injury recovery, especially the kind that doesn’t show up on a “normal” CT or MRI. Kelly shares the moment she realized something was truly wrong, the fear of not knowing if she’d ever feel like herself again, and the slow, stubborn work of rebuilding ...
A car crash can be over in seconds, but a concussion can rewrite your life for years. We sit down with Kelly Tuttle, a former cardiology nurse practitioner who later moved into neurology, to tell the truth about traumatic brain injury recovery, especially the kind that doesn’t show up on a “normal” CT or MRI. Kelly shares the moment she realized something was truly wrong, the fear of not knowing if she’d ever feel like herself again, and the slow, stubborn work of rebuilding a life around a healing brain.
We get specific about the tools that made a measurable difference: seeing the right kind of specialist, learning why functional MRI can reveal changes standard imaging misses, and addressing sensory issues that frontline care often overlooks. Kelly explains how a behavioral optometrist diagnosed binocular vision dysfunction, why light and screen time became draining, and how sound sensitivity and sensory overload can hijack focus, mood, and energy. If you’ve been searching for answers about post-concussion symptoms, neurofatigue, headaches, and brain fog, this conversation puts language to what you may be living.
We also talk about returning to work after brain injury with real-world strategies and boundaries, including accommodations, the ADA, FMLA, and the hidden cost of “looking fine” while struggling. Kelly connects her recovery journal to the resources she now shares through her award-winning book: "After the Crash: How to Keep Your Job, Stay in School, and Live Life After a Brain Injury." Substack, YouTube, and her podcast After the Crash.
Subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs proof they’re not alone. What invisible symptom do you wish other people understood?
To learn more about Kelly Tuttle, please go to https://kellytuttle.org
You can purchase Kelly Tuttle's book at this link: https://www.amazon.com/After-Crash-School-Brain-Injury
01:38 - Welcome And Guest Introduction
03:00 - The Crash And Pushing Through
05:44 - When A Brain Scan Is Normal
07:27 - Functional MRI Vision And Sound
11:58 - Fear Uncertainty And Identity Shift
14:50 - Neurofatigue And The Energy Budget
24:11 - Return-To-Work Tools And Accommodations
28:32 - Writing The Book And Sharing Online
32:10 - Brain Injury As A Lifelong Health Issue
39:27 - Early Retirement And Final Takeaways
WEBVTT
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Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of On the Spectrum with Sonia.
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Today we are going to be talking about a post-traumatic brain injury and recovery.
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Our guest today, Kelly Tuttle, was in a car accident that changed everything about how she went from going about her daily life to after.
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And now, for many people, hearing that would be like, oh, something horrible must have come all about this.
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And, you know, her life was just never the same.
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But in actuality, the accident was like a rebirth for her in many ways.
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It allowed her to not only become an author of an award-winning book after the crash, she has a program, Road to Recovery, and she posts about her program often on Substack.
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She has a YouTube channel and she just started a podcast, The Mindful Return from Brain Injury Back to Work.
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And to celebrate the third anniversary of that book publishing was her podcast as a way to celebrate the rebirth of her life post-accident.
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So without further ado, let's please welcome Kelly.
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Thank you so much for being here today, Kelly.
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Well, thank you for having me.
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I'm happy to be here.
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Talk to your listeners.
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Well, we are super excited to have you on here today.
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So, Kelly, tell us about that fateful day of the accident, what had happened, what was happening that day.
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Sure.
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So um my story starts with a thunderous clap of metal and the shattering of glass and uh traffic stopping, people coming out of their houses to see what happened.
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And I had been driving home from work uh to uh karate class, and um another driver pulled out in front of me on a rural road and I was unable to stop in time.
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So I T-boomed her car, and I thought I would just shake off the accident and get back to life.
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And I even went to work the next day, and my colleagues noticed that I wasn't acting right or my speech wasn't coming out right.
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So they impressed upon me to see my general practitioner the next day, which I did, and I was diagnosed with a concussion, and I was taken off work for two weeks, and I thought after that I'll be okay.
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And uh, I went back to my regular schedule, being a mom, working 40 plus hours a week with an hour commute.
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And then about two to three months into my recovery, I fell asleep at the wheel.
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And I woke up just in time before my car crashed into a tree.
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And this is how well my brain was working.
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I thought, okay, well, I'll just take a nap between work and home.
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And I don't recommend that to any of your listeners to sleep on the side of the road.
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But this is how well I was thinking and just the drive to keep getting back to work and and back to life.
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Unfortunately, shortly after that, I had lunch with a colleague.
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At the time, I was a cardiology nurse practitioner.
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She was a neurology nurse practitioner, and she was asking me how my recovery was going.
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And I mentioned that I fell asleep at the wheel, but it was okay because I was taking that nap in between home and and work.
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And she said, no, Kelly, that is not okay.
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And you need to see a physical medicine and rehab doctor.
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They're also known as physiatrists, and they treat brain and spinal injuries.
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And then you need to get a brain scan.
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I hadn't had that done either.
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Well, it took me a little while.
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I had to jump through some hoops with my health care insurance.
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And eventually I did get to see the physical medicine and rehab doctor.
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She recognized right away there was something wrong, and she took me off work for three months.
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And that's when I started to get on the right road recovery, seeing the speech therapist, neurotherapist, um, being able to rest and sleep, get the things that I needed to recover.
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So when you had the brain scan, what did it show?
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So this great question.
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It was quote unquote normal.
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And what I have discovered as I've tried to heal from my brain injury is that a lot of people who have mild concussions don't have any abnormal changes on their brain CTs or their brain MRIs.
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So those tests are great for finding large abnormalities such as skull fractures, bleeds, and tumors, but they're not going to show you how well the neurons of brain cells function.
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And that's where your symptoms come from.
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So even if you are told that your brain scan is negative, that does not mean you do not have a concussion and brain injury symptoms that can make a huge impact on your life.
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So was there another exam that you had to undergo after the brain scan for them to get down to the nitty and gritty of it?
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Or was there or did they do any other kind of just physical exams?
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So the after if you suspect that you might have a concussion, it's best to see either be evaluated in the emergency room, urgent care, or your uh primary care physician.
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And they should do a neuro exam and a history of uh your accident and then monitor you over time to see if symptoms persist, get worse, change, that that sort of thing.
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And my traditional healthcare system only covered the brain scan, the therapies, and uh the physicians.
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And I did see a neurologist at one point, but they didn't cover the specialists who really made a big impact on my recovery.
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And one of them was a behavioral uh neuro neurologist, a behavioral neurologist who specialized in brain injuries with uh hockey players and football players, and he was able to do a functional MRI, which is not used in frontline healthcare at this time, and it did show changes.
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And I also saw a behavioral optometrist.
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So I had I'd seen an regular optometrist, they check your eyes for clarity, how clear is your vision, but they don't see how well your eyes work together and then how your brain processes your vision.
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So I was referred to a behavioral optometrist, and they do just that.
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This I paid out of pocket for.
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And I was diagnosed what is called binocular vision dysfunction, and that's just a little bit of a misalignment of your vision, which can be collect corrected with glasses, but I had not realized that I had been tilting my head to the right to be able to see or to visualize the world, and I couldn't walk without stumbling, without watching the ground most of the time.
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Once I got my vision corrected, a lot of my symptoms resolved or they were minimized.
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And I was able to I had light sensitivity, so I was able to tolerate lights better.
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I had uh neurofatigue.
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I ended up with the glasses, helped me maintain a little bit more energy at the end of the day.
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And I had difficulty with um attention and focus, and that really the glasses helped with increasing my tolerance of screen time.
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So that was one of the things outside my traditional healthcare insurance that helped with with um my recovery.
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It was huge.
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And the specialists, when I saw them, also noticed that I had they t they screened me for sound sensitivity and educated me about my sound sensitivity and how to use noise counseling technology to create an external filter for my brain, because my brain didn't have the energy to power those filters as it was healing.
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And that made another huge impact.
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I was able to walk more straighter, I had more energy, more focus, um, was able to maintain my energy, a lot less irritability.
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It was just a big impact, the visual and the hearing, uh sensory issues being addressed.
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And when you were going through that treatment, what um well, first and foremost, what exactly is a functional MRI and how is that different than from another from It's more sensitive and more detailed.
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So you still would go under the same kind of machine, but what with how they're administering it and the tools they're using are a little different?
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It's yeah, it's more of an intense scan, and you get a little bit more information that you wouldn't get from a regular uh MRI.
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So they're expensive.
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The equip the scanning machine's expensive, and the expertise to hire to evaluate those results is higher than you would for a general m MRI.
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And is that covered by insurance for people, or is it something they most people will have to trying to find a way to pay out of pocket?
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I had to pay out of pocket.
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Okay.
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So yeah.
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And I I actually had to travel out of state to see this specialist.
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They were in Detroit and I was living in I'm living in Sacramento, California.
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Okay.
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So yeah.
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So to add it up.
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Um Yeah.
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And for your behavioral optometrist, did you have weekly appointments, you know, to learn how to walk without bumping into things, to learn how to take in uh the noise sensitivities so that you can filter.
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Did you have once-a-week appointments, or how did that work?
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So they were also in Detroit.
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Wow.
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And so it was a one-time visit, but fortunately they knew somebody who was in California, and I was able to transfer my care to them.
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Some people do need therapy to help um get their eyes to work together again after a head trauma, but I didn't.
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I just had that misalignment, and I had huge improvement after the vision was addressed and then using the sound counseling headphones.
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So I didn't have to go back weekly, fortunately, um, to uh get that treatment.
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But some people do.
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When you were going through these treatments, what was running through your mind?
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Like, how were you feeling at that time about yourself?
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Did you, you know, what did you see your future to be?
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Like, did you have any fear?
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Oh, yes.
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Um, there was a lot of things that were going through my mind at the time.
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One of them was having to learn to be comfortable with uncertainty and just not knowing what to expect.
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You know, I kept expecting to be better every week.
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And then it was like, you know, every month I would expect to be better or back to myself.
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And it wasn't um, it wasn't happening that fast.
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And after about a year, I sat down and decided to kind of come to terms with the deficits I had.
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And kind of, I wasn't sure if they would ever go away.
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I wasn't really thinking that.
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I was thinking, I'm just gonna learn how to live with these issues, and maybe in the future I'll get better, even better, because I did have some improvements.
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And I wrote on one side, I went outside, I took my journal, I journaled my entire recovery, which I do recommend people to do.
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And I wrote on the left side all the things that I was passionate about, my goals and plans before the car accident.
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And then I wrote down all the things on the right side that I had gained from my concussion.
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And on the left side, it was I was goal-driven, I uh wanted to uh go to law school, I was constantly traveling.
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I loved to travel out of the house, on the go, volunteering with a community.
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And then on the right side, I listed that I was now living more of a simple life, more intentional, a slower pace of life.
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I had more empathy and compassion and understanding.
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And when I compared the two, I was like, I like the person I'm becoming.
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And I think what that helped with me was to not necessarily let go of the old, but to take the old Kelly and move forward with the new Kelly and getting to know my new self and redefining my values and my passions, and then using that as my North Star when I made decisions on what I was gonna do next with my next chapter in life.
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So it seems like before the accident, you were all about your career, you were all about you were always on the go, you loved to travel, you were always out of the house, you're volunteering with communities, and it seems like after the accident, it was like it was more of a grounding thing for you in that sense of you weren't always everywhere at all times as much.
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Right.
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Uh, because one of the things I was living with was neurofatigue, and this is different for your listeners.
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Neurofatigue is different from regular fatigue because it's brought on with minimal activity and it's not resolved with rest.
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So even though someone who has neurofatigue sleeps nine hours at night, they may wake up with uh their cell battery charged only 25% for the day, and that's all they have for the day is 25%.
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And um so it's really uh impacts your life, and you have to make decisions on, well, do I do this or do I do that?
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Uh, because I only have so much energy.
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So that's how my life just suddenly just shut down.
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And I really just had to learn to rest and be patient and be still.
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And what was that like for you to have to make that kind of a change in your life?
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It was really depressing at first, and I was either if I wasn't awake, I was asleep, or I was just sitting on my couch, just staring because I was too tired to do anything, too tired to read, too tired to watch television or be on the screen.
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So just a lot of staring, and then that morphed into mindful practice and being more mindful of my surroundings and so forth.
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But it was hard.
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I was on my couch, I was watching my f um other friends continue on with their life, and here I was stuck on the couch, not um moving forward or progressing as fast as I thought.
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And so it was very depressing.
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I was very angry at times, and I struggled also at points in my recovery with not feeling like I was enough.
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Because I was like kind of raised that your value is defined by your productivity.
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And I wasn't as productive as I had been before my car accident.
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And so I had to really learn that no, I have value whether I'm productive or not, and I have the right to rest when I need to.
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And that's huge because here in the US, we're really we push ourselves to be so productive.
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And so that's a really ch big change in your mindset.
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Absolutely.
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You know, it's interesting you bring this up because in my work as a therapist, you know, I have worked with clients on self-esteem building.
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And one of the exercises I've done with people was based off a self-esteem book that was written back in 1991, I believe.
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And the premise of it is the author talks about like the European crystal and about how when you look at a European crystal, it has the core, but there are different facets of the crystal that just help the light shine on it differently, but it doesn't take away from the core of the crystal.
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So even if those facets are taken out, the core will still shine on its own.
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And it basically goes into self-worth.
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And one of the things that chapter said is unfortunately, you know, people got warped up into believing their self-worth is based off everything, like you mentioned, the whole idea of productivity.
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So that whole idea of, okay, what's your marital status, your bank account status, how many friends do you have, what associations are you part of, right?
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All that other stuff.
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And you also see this now, especially with in the social media culture, right?
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Where it's so easy to compare your life to other people.
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You see all these people perhaps maybe going on vacations or celebrating anniversaries with significant others, or going to brunch every weekend with a group of girls or whoever, you know.
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And it's easy to look at your life and be like, damn, my life actually sucks in comparison, right?
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But truth of the matter is we focus so much on those things.
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And I think the biggest lesson for people to learn is, you know what, you've always been valuable, you've always been worthy, whether you were productive or not, right?
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Right.
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That was always in you.
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It doesn't, you know, all that other stuff that only helps your light shine differently, like the European crystal.
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It doesn't take away from who you are.
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Right.
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And that that is a hard task to do because that's not how we're culturally raised here in the US.
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It's based on productivity.
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And if you are not working, then you don't deserve health care.
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You know, those kinds of under uh those types of undertones that kind of sweep through our culture.
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So yeah, and the, you know, the belief of you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, these are all so harmful to the mental um health.
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And um, you really have to get in touch with your own values and your passions and understand that you are worthy of the air you breathe and the time you take to rest.
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You take the time to rest, then it it allows you to build your mental uh resilience.
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Um it helps you to get in touch with, like I said, your true passions and goals, and then define your next steps into the future better.
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And so to speak towards like seeing things on social media, if you're really grounded in yourself and have allowed yourself to become in touch of what's important to you, you'll see those things and realize that they're sparkly distractions and they're not on the road that you're on.
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They're nice to see, and I'm happy for my friends, but that's not the road I'm on.
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This is the road I'm on.
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Absolutely.
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And two things can exist at the same time, right?
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You could be happy for other people and you could be celebrating with them their successes and their moments while at the same time also longing for some things for yourself.
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You realize when you are on your own path, I think that's what's gonna give you that resilience and that power to push through and you align yourself with the values and you stay true to those, then will you be fulfilling your life purpose?
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You know, and speaking of that, then you know, too, you know, it seemed like for you it was like a full circle moment in your life when we look at just after the accident and how you were going through the treatments.
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Now, not only did you have an issue like where you were fatigued, your eyes were misaligned, um, you had to train yourself to walk without bumping into things, you would get sleepy during the day.
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So recovering from all that, and you talk about neurofatigue in that aspect, what were some of the ways then that you were um healing?
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Like what were some things you were doing to heal from even that neurofatigue piece?
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Right.
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So the first two years after my car crash, my husband ended up leaving his job to stay home with the kids and do the house to maintain the house while I went to work because I was the main income earner and benefit holder.
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And that's why it was so important for me to get back to work.
00:21:14.060 --> 00:21:29.820
And in order to do that, what people didn't see was that I would get up in the morning and I would use some compensatory tools, whatever I could, to minimize my decision making, wasting brain and energy on decision making and get to work.
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And then when I was at work on my lunch break, which I used to spend with colleagues and running errands and making phone calls, I had to take a nap.
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And then uh I would get through the second half of the day and I would get home and I would sleep for two hours, and then I would get up for an hour to get ready for the next day, and then I would go back to sleep, and I would do that five days a week, and then on the weekend I would sleep 12 to 14 hours a day, sometimes with a two-hour nap.
00:21:57.259 --> 00:21:58.779
So tons of sleeping.
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And in order to do that, I missed time with my children growing up and time with my friends and family.
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So it was a huge sacrifice.
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People didn't see it, they would see me look like this at work, but once I was off, I was out like a terminated turn uh uh terminated robot.
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And then the third year, I was um able to do more and have more energy and start walking on the weekends, and then in the fourth year was uh by the fourth year, my headaches had resolved.
00:22:32.220 --> 00:22:37.500
And prior to that, I had a headache most days of of the week, the month.
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So my headaches went away.
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It took four years, and and then by the fifth year, I was able to start to um write my book.
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So it was very, very hard to recover.
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It wasn't over weeks, it was actually over years.
00:22:52.299 --> 00:23:06.700
And it came with a lot of sacrifice, a lot of self-compassion and patience, patience, and embracing uncertainty, not knowing what the next year would look like, but hopefully because every year was getting better and better.
00:23:06.940 --> 00:23:21.660
So it took a lot of time uh off work to just recover, allow yourself to fully rest, a full, you know, step by step, day by day, going, you know, each day, how do you make it just even a little bit better?
00:23:21.900 --> 00:23:22.140
Right.
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And I I slowly painfully put together my toolbox to support my brain while I was at work.
00:23:29.420 --> 00:23:42.140
Um when uh and when I was taken off for three months after seeing the physical medicine rehab doctor, the two weeks before I was supposed to return to work, I was freaking out.
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I was like, what does my brain need to support it so that I can be an efficient, safe employee?
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And it was really hard for me to find that information.
00:23:50.140 --> 00:23:51.580
It was super spread out.
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So when I wrote my book, I really wanted it to be focused on strategies and tools to help someone continue to work and study while their brain was healing.
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And in that in my book, I share these tools that I learned painfully over time.
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The use of the noise counseling headphones, dark glasses to cut the fluorescent lighting, which is common in in work buildings, and just horrible on people's brains.
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People will it exacerbates um migraine headaches and sleep disorders.
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It's it's really terrible.
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And then learning how to write things down.
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One of the things I didn't want people to know was that I had difficulty with my speech.
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I had difficulty saying words that I normally would say.
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And I had learned that if I wrote the word down before I went to go talk to someone, like say it was um one of my patients' names, they had a for some reason my pa my brain would not struggled with pronouncing their name or it was a medical term.
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I would write the word down, I would practice it saying it out loud at my desk.
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And then when I went to go talk to the person, when that word or that name was coming up, I would glance at my paper.
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And for some reason that visual aid helped me say that word.
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And then I also got, and the other thing I learned was I would slow down my speech so that I was able to articulate, because I would blend words or I would slur words.
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And I didn't want people to think there was something wrong with me.
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So I would really slow down my speech.
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And for many years I stopped talking.
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I don't know if anybody noticed at work, but I just listened and just didn't talk in front of people as to kind of hike that uh difficulty.
00:25:35.820 --> 00:25:48.060
And if I did get caught in where I had a brain glitch or a speech issue, I would just laugh it off and say, you know, you're talking to a blonde, or I must not have had enough coffee.
00:25:48.140 --> 00:25:54.700
And then that humor deflected from that, you know, kind of awkward period of me not being able to get that word out.
00:25:54.940 --> 00:26:01.820
So I learned a lot of uh techniques and support tools to help with these various symptoms.
00:26:01.980 --> 00:26:09.500
And and that's what I want to do is to share those with other people who may be struggling with the same symptoms as I was.
00:26:09.740 --> 00:26:13.660
What words did you find that you were struggling with in particular?
00:26:13.980 --> 00:26:15.019
Exacerbation.
00:26:15.500 --> 00:26:15.820
Okay.
00:26:20.539 --> 00:26:24.860
There are some other ones I can't think of off top my head, but yeah, that one.
00:26:25.180 --> 00:26:29.259
After your accident, like how long would you say that you had been struggling with that?
00:26:29.580 --> 00:26:34.940
Well, I still struggle it with it today, and but it's a lot better.
00:26:35.420 --> 00:26:49.900
And I I don't know if it's just that I've rebuilt those, rewired my brain with neuroplasticity, with all the things I've done to support my brain health or practice or the therapies that I did, or I just got better compensating for it.
00:26:49.980 --> 00:26:58.380
But I I do know for me, if I'm really tired or I've had a bad night of sleep, I'm gonna struggle with my speech the next day.
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And so I just try to slow things down and do the minimum to get through the day.
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Um, especially when I was at work, I would just only focus on work, nothing else.
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I wouldn't pick up my phone to check out Facebook or anything like that.
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And I rested quietly on on my breaks.
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Um, so yeah, and it's it's like it's it comes and goes.
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