Clare Mantelman of Barrington Hills couldn’t do simple math, forgot words and was so confused that she couldn’t ride her horse. A pair of “brain glasses” has her riding Blue again. (Brian Hill | Staff Photographer)
While driving in April 2019, Clare Mantelman of Barrington Hills was rear-ended by a car that drove her vehicle into the car in front of her. “My head hit the steering, and I bounced back,” she says.
“You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine,” Mantelman says she was told by her doctor and a neurologist, who assured her time would cure any effects of a concussion. Weeks later, she still had difficulty.
“I couldn’t add, subtract or divide. I was skipping words. I couldn’t spell. I’d lose my balance,” says Mantelman, 57, who couldn’t drive, needed husband to do everything for her, and even forgot how to ride her horse, Blue. “My whole personality was gone. The surroundings were just too much for me. Nobody could tell me where to get help.”
A special pair of “brain glasses” changed all that. Realizing how odd that might sound, Mantelman simply says, “It’s real.”
Her path to recovery began when a friend gave her the 2015 book, “The Ghost in My Brain,” by Clark Elliot, an Evanston musician and associate professor of artificial intelligence at DePaul University who suffered a very similar injury and recovered, in part, by wearing brain glasses.
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