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User profile: Patrick Jones – Living with Traumatic Brain Injury with help from Evernote

Tips and Stories | By Megan Soto
53 comments
 
Name: Patrick Jones
Location: Colorado, USA
Website: Brain Injury Chaplain
Uses: Evernote for Mac and Evernote for iPhone


We hear many interesting and unique stories from our users who tell us how Evernote helps them remember everything, but we never realized how important that could be until we got a note from Deacon Patrick Jones who uses Evernote to, literally, remember everything.

Deacon Patrick Jones of the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs has sustained eight concussions since age 12 and as a result suffers from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which causes severe short-term memory loss. In recent years, Traumatic Brain Injury has received some attention because it is among the most prevalent injuries sustained by veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

How Patrick Jones uses Evernote

In his day-to-day life, Patrick uses Evernote to help him piece together the basic memory flows we take for granted.

In a Psychology Today story published last year, Patrick tells of the process he went through to remember his connection to the article’s author who was calling to interview him:

“First, I got your email and had no idea who you were or why [we] were talking. The history in the email didn’t help much. So I searched “Gary Marcus” in my Mac’s Spotlight, which turned up an Evernote [note] on who you are and why we’re interacting, who put us in touch with each other, a log of our interactions, etc.”

The smallest memory connection becomes an active mapping exercise, helping Patrick to refresh his thought process in order to make daily decisions and engage with people in his life. This process includes taking notes, clipping articles, saving emails and images all into Evernote. When recalling the details of everyday situations, Patrick searches his Evernote account for keywords, tags, and text in images to solidify the memory. The resulting collection of notes help him trace and pull together the pieces of whatever task or connection he might be recalling.

“While I am able to handle various concepts, details disappear in a matter of days. Evernote is where I keep the details I need to reference later, linked to the concepts they belong to so they’re easy to find whenever and wherever I need.”

Aside from Evernote, Patrick also uses Curio on the Mac (an Evernote integration partner) and an iPhone which allows him to create diagrams of interconnected thoughts, replicating the way the mind normally wanders from thought to thought.

Patrick’s story is truly an inspiration. With the help of Evernote and other tools and skills, Patrick leads a rich life with his wife of 19 years and three children in Colorado where he is an author and carries out his ministry at Our Lady of the Woods parish in Teller County. You can learn more about his story on his site, which raises awareness about TBI. Also, take a look at his iPhone donation project that provides iPhones to individuals with severe memory loss.

Patrick’s latest project

With help from a community of volunteers, Deacon Patrick’s latest project, Mind Your Head Co-op, is launching in the coming months to provide support for other TBI-afflicted individuals. ‘Mind Your Head Co-op’ is a continuation of Deacon Patrick’s current TBI awareness campaign, Shoot The Moon For Brain Injury, which documents a collective effort to run 1.4 million miles with the goal to raise $100 Million for brain injury research and additionally fund Mind Your head.

“Every brain injury is different and what worked for me might not work for others,” Patrick says. “Medical science is somewhat baffled in terms of treating TBI. ‘Mind Your Head’ will be a resource for people to share their guinea-pig treatments and coping mechanisms with the greater TBI community.”

Through this forum, members can contribute their memory-retrieving techniques and methods, rate and comment on each others’ treatments and ultimately find an approach that works for them – like Evernote did for Deacon Patrick – so that they can, as he puts it, “Enter life as fully as possible.”

Donating Evernote Premium accounts

We’d like to do our small part to help Patrick in his efforts and will be donating 50 Evernote Premium accounts to the Mind Your Head Co-op.

To find out more, please visit: mindyourheadcoop.org

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  • Gordon Gaines

    I also have memory problems from a bicycle accident I had with a car when I was 10 or 12 years old, I have always had to have some way to keep my life together. I’m still learning to use Evernote but I’m working on it and learning everything I can through articles like this one.

  • http://fishingjustbcause.com Amanda

    Wow, great post. I am going to pass this along to my dad who is starting to “forget” things. He isn’t too techy, but I am sure with a bit of help, this would be very useful to him.

  • Barbara Ames

    I had a stroke 8 years ago, and have come to rely on my computer (and Evernote) to “replace” the brain cells that were damaged. I am blessed to have recovered so much, but I joke now that I used to have 3 or 4 gigs of RAM in my brain before the stroke, but now I have more like 512MB or less :) It is my best analogy for my stroke: I can still think as well as I used to, but the more things I have to juggle in my mind or the more complicated the task, the slower my brain seems to work, until I “lock up” and have to “reboot”. Thank heavens for my computer and Evernote !

  • Bill Goodwin

    This is INCREDIBLE.

    18 months ago, my father had a devastating heart attack that nearly crippled his short and medium term memory. Fortunately, he’s still improving, albeit slowly. I have, for more than a year, been trying to get him to embrace Evernote, but it’s been a brutal process.

    Recently, he’s really started to adopt it and it’s already had a dramatic impact on his life. He’s just started journaling and doing some basic tagging…if I could only convince him to embrace it entirely, his life would be transformed. I’ll definitely be in touch with Deacon Patrick to learn more about he integrates this day-to-day. Any other members of the Evernote community who know about similar solutions, I’d desperately like to hear from you.

    Damn. I still can’t believe that someone has really proven this method to work. You don’t know how much hope this gives me…yeah, it’s impossible to articulate, so I’ll stop. Thanks, Evernote, and Deacon Patrick. Looking forward to learning from your experience.

  • http://www.twitter.com/buddhkist Ryan

    I’m glad there is a tool such as Evernote that is able to help so many people. :-)

  • http://dodgepodge.wordpress.com Dodge

    What a great story! I only appreciated the use of Evernote yesterday, but after reading this now, I think Evernote is one of the best apps ever.

  • Deen

    Perhaps the most valuable contribution that anyone can make is making life easier for others (not necessarily in terms of finance but other little little things as well) While medical science try to solve the problem people with TBI have to live normal and any tool that helps them to keep organised should be given its due credit, hats off to evernote and now onwards if anyone complain about memory loss this is what I m going to recommend (thats my little contribution to make their life better). I m sure that the premium account donation would put to good use.
    I just realised the value of a product that I never know existed!

  • NB

    Thank you for this blog post!!! My husband has a TBI and we are trying to find ways for memory compensation instead of a antiquated notebook. The ITouch has been a great purchase.

  • macpug

    I usually see the Evernote blog, but somehow I missed this until today. I loved coming across this post. What Deacon Patrick has done is amazing, and I’ll be checking out his blogs.

    I, too, have been affected by TBI as a result of several concussions while playing sports. Over the past couple of years, I’ve developed seizures and memory issues. Sometimes, the medicines that one has to take for the conditions are worse than the conditions themselves. After having surgery for thyroid cancer, I found myself unemployed for the first time after working for 15 years in the medical field, and several years at Apple.

    I discovered Evernote while trying to find something to help me salvage little pieces of my life so I wouldn’t forget everything. I could look at photos I’d taken at a family event, and not remember being there. I could see pictures of a special vacation, and not remember making the trip. Tags are fantastic, because instead of having way too many folders and having no clue which folder I put things into, I just have a few folders but lots of tags. That makes it much easier to find things.

    With Evernote, I can add everything into it. I add business cards and take photos of them with people I meet (I had the pleasure of meeting Phil at MacWorld and added him, too!), I record meds, events, daily schedules, websites, photos, errand notes, sketches, literally everything. Having access to it on my Macs, my iDevices, and the web ensures that I’ll never be away from it when I need it. Evernote is my peripheral brain, and I really don’t know what I would do without it.

    Largely thru using Evernote, and with the encouragement of a good friend, I started working with a software company almost a year ago providing online customer support. There’s no way I would be able to do this without Evernote. It’s quite amazing since my doctors didn’t think I would ever be able to work again.

    Words cannot express the self-worth that I have because I am able to work. There are times when I feel like I have to work ten times harder to produce half as much as a co-worker, but you know what? It’s totally worth it, because it’s one more part of me that I’m still able to hold on to, and one more thing that I can do without relying on someone else. So thanks, Evernote, for helping me to remember everything, and for giving me my life back.

  • http://www.megangreenlee.com Megan Greenlee

    This is so inspiring! I can’t wait to spread the word further about EVERNOTE.
    I am a professional photographer that is recovering from a TBI (traumatic brain injury from a car accident last Spring). I can’t begin to relay the positive effects that photography and the visual arts and visual applications can do in healing the mind and memory. If you or anyone you know is suffering from a TBI, remember to pick-up a camera and it may not only soothe your brain, but soothe your soul while healing!

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