As I was reading your post I felt like I was reading something I wrote because of many similarities in the way you are and were feeling. Just a little intro about me, I was in a drunk driving accident 12 years ago, when I was 19 and my friend that was driving and a girl I was with at the time were both killed, and I was as close to death as you could get without dying. I had to be flown on flight for life to the nearest high level trauma center, after they had wrapped me up and put me on an ambulance and then realized there was no way I would live to see the hospital if I didn't get there quicker.

After I arrived at the hospital and began examining me they found plenty wrong. I, like yourself, had severe brain damage, and most doctors thought I would have severe problems with my brain for the rest of my life. Obviously since I am writing this today they were wrong. I also had my left leg below the knee completely amputated at the scene of the accident, and as time went on they bone and tissue at the end of the leg kept dying until they discovered a major artery had been damaged and no blood was getting to the lower part of the limb, so they ended up amputating the leg above the knee. I had also broken my left femur, my right ankle bones and bones in my right foot (they were broken so much that in order to repair it they needed to take a muscle from my stomach to do a muscle graft onto it, and skin from my thigh for a skin graft over it, so it wouldn't need to be amputated as well), my right tibia and fibula were broken, my right femur, my right clavicle, my right scapula was shattered in multiple places, my left upper arm was broken, my jaw, and my skull was cracked open. I spent about 3 months in the hospital spending most of my time relearning how to do just about everything, especially walking.

Like yourself for the first months, and even years, I was OK with things. Well maybe OK is overstating it, but it really didn't bother me. But as time went on I began to get more and more irritated and annoyed (for lack of a better way to describe it), especially from the pain I continued to be in, especially the phantom pain. I was rarely sleeping and most of the time the only way I could sleep was by drinking a few beers. I didn't want to say anything to the doctors about the pain I was in because I felt they would not believe me, or think I was nuts, since when it came to the phantom pain there was nothing there to hurt. So as the pain got worse so did I emotionally. Finally after about 4 or so years I talked to the doctor about it and got on pain meds and Zoloft, which they said helps with nerve pain as well, and finally got the pain down, so I could begin to sleep and actually function mostly normal during the day. Like yourself at first I didn't want to take the meds and was afraid since you always hear about the bad side to them, but trust me there is also a very big good side to them as well. I highly recommend at least giving the meds a try, I know my life has done a full 180 because I can now sleep and get up in the morning not wishing I was dead because I used to think that was the only way I could get out of the pain, both physical and mental. I hope this helps, but you have to be the one to make the decision, since everyone has there own opinion and feelings towards how to deal with different life events.