For more information contact:

                                                                Lee Staniland  --  805.985.6854

                                                              or David Wilk  --  649.5206

                                                          or Joan Moore --  650.5993

Lee Staniland, Brain Injury Survivor

          Oxnard Resident Devotes Her Life to

      Helping Other People with Brain Injuries

     Oxnard, CA  --  She is one of Ventura’s County’s leading advocates for helping people with a brain injury try to resume a “normal” life.  She is bright, personable and energetic and has been working for this cause for over 20 years.   Her name is Lee Staniland and she, too, has a brain injury.

     Lee is a 5’1” dynamo who serves on the Board of Directors of the Brain Injury Center, the non-profit organization that works to help Ventura County’s estimated 16,000 people with brain injury and their families.   She recently completed a two-year term as BIC’s president, founded and continues to edit its newsletter, speaks at group meetings all around the Ventura County community and assists with the organization’s weekly support group meetings and other activities.

     She is the single person with a brain injury to serve on BIC’s Board.  When Lee’s term as president expired, she stayed on as a board director.  “I want to make sure the brain injury survivor view is represented among all those ‘normies,’” she said.

     It was June 11, 1978 when Lee’s life changed permanently.  She was 25 and shared a ranch home in Somis with her husband, Bill Clounch.  Bill came home that day to find Lee’s horse wandering unattended, then found Lee unconscious under a walnut tree.  She had apparently hit her head on a branch.

     After six weeks in a coma, Lee finally awakened in a bed at Ventura Community Hospital.  She spent several months at Santa Barbara Rehab trying to relearn how to walk and talk.  Finally she got to go home, facing the daunting challenge of coping with everyday life and learning to live with a brain injury.  It was a tremendous struggle and continues to this day.

     The purpose of the Brain Injury Center is to help people readjust to the rest of their lives after suffering a brain injury -- and to help their families adjust to a life that will never be the same.  Medical procedures continue to progress in the ability to save the life of a person with a brain injury.  Immediate rehabilitation can do much to re-instill the rudimentary abilities to walk, talk and perform basic functions.  But the day comes when the available therapies are completed, insurance or state funding runs out and a brain injury survivor must go home to live the rest of his or her life.      

     These days Lee is working on the Brain Injury Center’s annual fund raiser, which takes place at 11 a.m. November 9 at Saticoy Country Club.  The event, titled “Cornucopia,” is a brunch featuring speakers from the brain injured community, an auction and a silent auction.  It is the main source of funding for the non-profit organization.  Tickets can be purchased by calling 650.5993.

      Lee now resides in Oxnard with her new husband, Buster Staniland.  Buster is a longtime college baseball coach in the area and currently serves as the pitching coach for Ventura College.  He played major league baseball for 11 years and coached and scouted in professional baseball before returning permanently to Ventura County.  He met Lee outside the steam room at the C Street gym where she says “things got kind of steamy in a hurry.”

    “Lee is a wonderful wife and my best friend,” says Buster.  “She makes me happy to be alive.  She is a warm and loving human being and is very passionate about the problems of brain injury.  Lee’s dealing with her own brain injury is a real inspiration to me.”

      Aside from her volunteer work with the Brain Injury Center, Lee stays plenty busy, taking care of her Oxnard home and her cats, working out at the gym, cooking, sewing, working on crafts and pursuing her latest hobby, photography.

     “I’m very satisfied with my life right now,” says Lee, “and maybe that is because I have been given most of my old self back.  When people say to me, ‘oh, your head injury must not have been very serious,’ I would like to shake them.  I had to work very hard to get where I am.”

     “You  never know what a head injury is like until you have one.  And just pray you never do.”