The Stranger Inside of Me

The phenomena of closed head injury have plagued our society since its inception. From the stress and horror of our wars (now Iran and Iraq), with the violent impacts in our most aggressive sports, to the mundane trauma of falling off a bike or getting hit in the head by a swing or a bat or a ball, the effects of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) have become such an accepted way of life, that many do not even know that they have suffered a closed head injury and how dramatically it influences their everyday actions and reactions. Its often frequent companion, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), is now so recognized that public violence and catastrophic natural disasters demand psychologists to minimize the effects of this recognized condition. For twenty-seven years, the author has had to fight his horrible battle with TBI and PTSD alone, with little help from even the most informed. In the last five years, these maladies have become widely recognized. Only recently has the medical profession and the news media discussed TBI and PTSD openly in televised documentaries. The author, in a deeply personal and poignant way, has put into words the gamut of feelings, which so many others who suffer and deal with TBI and PTSD have been unable to articulate.

Randal H. Flutur was born in 1948 in Detroit, Michigan. He received his Bachelors Degree and Masters Degree at Michigan State University. He has worked as a college professor and a psychologist. Since the age of twelve, whenever he was not in school, he was working at every paying job that he could find, building that entrepreneurial spirit-saving, collecting, and investing. By age fourteen, he was playing the piano by ear and has now recorded five CD's. His collecting evolved into buying and selling some of the finest items in existence, and being a consultant to others. His many adventures led him to travel the world by the time that he was thirty years old. He married his first love, Anne, when he was twenty-three. They had seven children together and sadly, only four survived: Heather, Autumn, Crystal, and Matthew. Anne left him fifteen years post-injury, after thirty-three years of marriage. The STRANGER INSIDE took away this life that he knew.