Overview

"BLIND WILLPOWER: TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY: With brain power gone and only willpower left...... Maria grew up in Holland. She was a shy and quiet girl, but at age seven she was independent and already had dreams about cars, airplanes and what the rest of the world looked like. True to her plans, at age 18 she proudly showed off her pilot license, much to her bewildered parents. But that would not be all, a year later in 1955, she announced that she had a visa for Canada and would be booking passage on an old immigration ship and was going to settle in Montreal. Maria returned home to Holland in 1957. She purchased her 1957 VW Beetle. With her love for driving and curiosity about Africa. In December of 1957 she left her family to drive her VW Beetle from Holland to Cape Town, South Africa via the Sahara Desert, the Tanezrouft (a route through the Sahara dessert) . In early 1959, after a five year wait for her green card, her big dream to live and work in America came true and Maria decided to make New York City, New York her home. Fast forward: 1976 and we find Maria in New Orleans. After a failed marriage Maria picked up the pieces of her life and decided to try her hand at being an entrepreneur. In January 1977, she opened the doors of her Mazda dealership. With a little capital, a huge SBA loan, many ups and downs yet never in the red, her business grew year after year and planned to become the most successful Mazda dealer in New Orleans which was her biggest and most important dream. In August 14, 1986, two months after purchasing her dream home in Mandeville, 26 miles North of her dealership in Metairie, suburb of New Orleans, at 5.30 P.M. at a busy 4-way intersection a reckless driver speeding through the red light almost killed her. In one split second everything had changed, her life as she had known it was destroyed, her cognitive and executive functions gone and her personality had changed. The next morning in a major hospital, EJGH, Maria wakes up to find and wonder why was an ""attorney friend"" sitting next to her bed staring at her? Feeling scared, she had many visitors, but after they left, she could not remember who they were, maybe it was the excruciating pain. She did not realize that the vultures already were circling above her. Envy and greed are nasty words around TBI survivors. On the morning of the sixth day after her accident, she remembered her Mazda dealership. Major panic attack. Somehow, she needed to get up. With immeasurable effort she got up and in her bloody cloths, opened the door of her room and shuffled through the hallways trying to find an exit. Nobody stopped her. . . Maria's book shares her life story and her recovery as she has dealt with TBI. There are survivors of severe TBI where recovery seems like a miracle and where determination is near unimaginable. Maria Benton's survival might well be one of those miracles. Writing Blind Willpower was her last effort to survive. It took her the past three years writing about her 35-year long journey."

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