GROWING UP WITH `THE STRONGEST DAD IN THE WORLD'

Reporter Anita Sue Meyer recounts her father's struggle with traumatic brain injury.

As he sat on a bus headed for St. Louis, he remembered what his dad told him that morning, "Son, you go up there and do your best."

It was Tuesday, Sept. 13, 1966. Leo was on his way to his Selective Service classification examination.

He remembers the blood test. He can even see his cousin, Bob, sitting two people ahead, being pricked with the needle. But most vividly, he recalls the line of young men filing in front of the officer giving the examination results.

As he got closer to the officer, he could hear the men give their name. The officer looked down at his list, looked up and said, "You passed," without so much as a blink.

Then it was his turn: "Leo Joseph Meyer," he said.

The officer looked down, looked up, looked down again and shook his head.

"Young man, you passed with flying colors," the officer finally said. "A-1, first-class, perfect specimen -- you are the kind of individual we need in the military."

At that point, my dad thought to himself, "This was the beginning."

As a child, I always felt a twinge of pride each time dad told me this story. But pride was always eaten away by sorrow and anger. In some ways, that week was the end for my dad, not the beginning.

Three days after his Selective Service classification, he was in a car accident that put him in a coma for five and half days, the hospital for seven weeks and a body cast for 12.

Dad doesn't remember the accident. All he knows is what he was told. My dad, three of his sisters, a cousin and some friends were on their way to the SEMO District Fair when they met a car passing on a hill.

Both the driver of the other car and Bernie, the cousin who drove the car my dad was in, took the right shoulder to avoid the crash. At the last minute, both automobiles cut back in and struck at a 45-degree angle on the passenger door where my dad was sitting.

Growing up, I never noticed my dad's physical scars.

His built-up shoe never kept him from showing me how to switch hit in the front yard or do a one-handed push-up on the living room floor. And I giggled when I stuck my finger in the indentation in his neck where a tracheotomy tube had sucked blood from his lungs.

The scars on his lower lip and chest were cat scratches next to his muscular, farmer-tanned arms. I believed I had the strongest dad in the world.

But as I got older, I recognized scarring that went deeper, which wasn't as easy to overlook.

During the accident, my dad suffered a traumatic brain injury. In the past 10 years or so, mental and emotional scars have begun to surface.

His reasoning skills have become skewed. Making simple decisions is a hard task, such as whether to buy one or two bottles of insect spray for the house.

At times, his mind becomes jumbled. Approaching the Jackson intersection of highways 25, 61 and 34 is disorienting.

I ask myself how this is possible. I watched dad go through Ranken Technical Institute with a 96 percent average. He taught me to manipulate sine, cosine and tangent in trigonometry and physics before I was in high school. And now the smartest man I know can't decide which road to take?

He wears ear plugs constantly. Loud noises are uncomfortable for him. He says it sounds like jet planes are flying through his head.

If his ears pick up a certain tone, his temper will snap. He'll even admit afterward that his temper is explosive, but at the time he feels his anger is understandable.

Now, the kids can't wrestle around and the volume on the television and radio is kept so low nobody can hear it.

When we go to grandma and grandpa's for Christmas, dad heads straight for a bedroom to avoid the sound of my cousins and uncles playing pitch on the kitchen table and my aunts talking in the kitchen.

My mom says she can see the pain and anguish on dad's face and in his eyes when his ears start hurting. The way he squints his eyes makes him look years older and troubled.

What hurts the most is not knowing how to help him, especially since he always has been there for me.

When I needed somebody to proofread my valedictorian speech, he was the one who stayed up till 4 in the morning.

He was the one who rooted me on in football. He yelled "Go Ozzie!" every time I stepped up to the plate in softball so I would remember my idol for good luck. He fixed my hair when I broke my hand tagging a runner out at home.

And I can't return any of that. I don't know how.

The closest thing to relief my dad has experienced is going to meetings for the Brain Injury Resource Group of Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois.

The brain injury support group has given him an understanding. Hearing others share their stories, dad realizes that what he thought was normal behavior all these years was symptomatic of brain trauma.

My mom has benefited as well. She doesn't feel as alone. She might not know how to take away the pain, but now she can understand it.

As for myself, I still feel helpless. But knowing the challenges my dad has faced in life, I realize I was right.

I do have the strongest dad in the world.