On March 3rd, 2008, my future was left in doubt when I flipped my car into a tree at 95 miles per hour. This book is about how I rebuilt a life worth living: from a month-long coma to living across three continents.
Keep Moving Forward: A memoir of recovery, resilience, and reclaiming a life worth living after traumatic brain injury. Paperback edition.
The memoir the doctors said might never get written.
On March 3rd, 2008, an eighteen-year-old high school senior drove into a tree at ninety-five miles per hour and woke up in a hospital bed after surviving through a Glasgow Coma Score of three. His name was Christopher Dittrich, and the doctors told his family he might not survive the first night. If he did, he might never walk, speak, or recognize them again.
Seventeen years later, that same Chris runs businesses across three continents, lives in Bangkok with a wife who chose him because of the recovery and not despite it, and has spent every one of those years building a life he was never supposed to have. Keep Moving Forward is his memoir. It is a story about a traumatic brain injury, but it is really a story about the small daily habits that let a person rebuild anything: a body, a career, a marriage, or a life.
What you will find inside:
The hospital months, told from inside the standing frame
The unlikely college years and the disinhibition that became a superpower
Career chapters across Beijing, Hong Kong, Miami, and Bangkok
Meeting Takki, and the marriage that grew from a single Instagram message
The wedding in Sri Racha and the walk down the aisle seventeen years in the making
The four habits that carried a recovery across two decades
Reflections from Chris's father, mother, and wife on what the years actually cost, and what they gave
Who this book is for: anyone rebuilding after a brain injury, stroke, illness, or accident. Parents, spouses, and siblings of someone in recovery. Partners of disabled loved ones. Anyone in the middle of a hard chapter, whatever shape it takes.
This is what recovery actually looks like: not the version they tell you about at the hospital, but the version you build across seventeen years of small mornings.
Paperback edition. Ships worldwide.
Keep Moving Forward.
