Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and more big names endorse "Jacob Reed And Me"
The Head Case
S1 Ep. 3 Mar 11, 2026

The Head Case

When Jacob discovers another Jacob Reed who suffered a traumatic brain injury the exact same summer he did, the eerie parallels hit too close to home. Is it fate, coincidence, or something stranger? To find out, Jacob tracks down his namesake to discover how one summer—and one moment—can change a life forever.

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The summer between eighth grade and high school is one of those pivotal ones. You’re not a kid anymore, but you’re definitely not a grown-up. In 1999 in San Diego, my biggest concerns were bonfires, the X-Games, an Austin Powers impression I thought was better than it was, and the fact that Craig Kilborn had just been replaced as host of The Daily Show by some guy named Jon Stewart.

Then one Saturday morning, two weeks before summer break, my buddy Eric hit a line drive right at my head during a pick up baseball game. I ducked — not fast enough.

By coincidence, an ambulance was on a lunch break around the corner. They checked my eyes and said I probably didn’t have a concussion, but just in case, I shouldn’t sleep for twelve hours. That afternoon — head swollen and purple — I went with my family to a school fundraiser dinner, where another parent happened to be a neurologist. She said it looked like a bad bruise. Probably nothing serious.

Monday morning, I started having tunnel vision.

My grandma took me to the emergency room. They ran some tests and told me I had a hematoma — and that I might need emergency brain surgery. I was fourteen and terrified. The only thing keeping my mind occupied was a GQ Magazine my mom brought when she arrived — a special comedy issue with a pull-out spread of the 100 best jokes of all time. After a while, a different doctor came back with my CT scan and told me I’d been extremely lucky: a blood clot the size of a baseball, in my left temporal lobe. A millimeter in any direction and I could have been blind, deaf, or in a coma.

Then, to my surprise, they sent me home.

I spent the rest of that summer in bed. I had vertigo, a terrible headache, and ringing in my ears. If I lifted my head off the pillow, the room would spin. I missed my eighth-grade graduation. I missed the dance. The two girls I had a crush on would knock at the door and ask if I wanted to go rollerblading, and I’d listen to my parents say no and watch them skate away through the front window.

By the time freshman year started, I was basically back to normal. But I always had this lingering fear that something was dormant. Like a crack in the sidewalk where a weed might start growing through.

Then, two and a half decades later, I found an article:

“Ivy Tech graduate Jacob Reed faces brain injury, challenges adversity.”

It was about another Jacob Reed who had a brain tumor in his left temporal lobe that was discovered the summer before high school.

Same time in his life. Same part of the brain. Same name.

I had to talk to him.

Before I could find Jacob Reed #79, I had some homework to do. I called Kaiser Permanente to get my records from 1999. I was on hold long enough that I had to make a very consequential decision about whether to risk missing the representative by running to the bathroom. (I went. I sprinted back. I made it.) The rep told me they only had records from 2007 onward. Everything before that had been purged.

So I started hunting for Jacob through other means — the Indiana town mentioned in the article, an improv group, a half-finished website with placeholder text and stock photos. Eventually I tracked down the performance space, which turned out to also be an acupuncture studio. I called every business in the strip mall. A guy at the music store told me he’d tried to attend one of their shows once. Nobody showed up.

Meanwhile, the 59 pages of medical records Kaiser did have for me turned out to contain something I wasn’t expecting. Buried in doctor’s notes from a decade of visits — urgent care, specialists, routine checkups — was the same word, over and over:

Contusion. Contusion. Contusion. Contusion. Young age, resolved.

I thought I hadn’t talked about the brain injury since it happened. The records told a different story: for years afterward, I kept mentioning it to every doctor I saw, as if baiting them into reopening the diagnosis in case they’d find something everyone else had missed.

When I called my mom to dig up anything older, she went to the four-drawer cabinet in the garage — because she keeps everything, from my first gumball machine drawing (were there others?) to a bar mitzvah certificate — and we compared memories of that summer. Her version and mine were almost completely different. She thought the injury happened on a Sunday; I was sure it was Saturday. I was certain I’d spent the whole summer in bed; she thought I went to camp.

One of our producers, Alex, did his PhD at MIT studying memory formation. I asked him how I could know whether my memories of that summer were real.

“You don’t. Memory is such a fickle, finicky thing. Memories are really tidbits and threads that we hold onto and then kind of repaint the picture. Every time you bring it up, you’re actively adding elements to it. And if someone tells you something that feels right and you start saying it, then every time you say it, it becomes embedded in the representation of that memory.”

That was both reassuring and deeply unsettling. I needed the records. And I’d run out of official channels.

Then I nudged my LinkedIn message to Jacob and saw that he had replied — the same day I’d sent it, two months earlier. I just hadn’t seen it. All those phone calls to acupuncture studios and strip mall music stores, and he’d messaged me his number an hour and four minutes after I started looking.

Jacob and I talked on the phone while waiting for a studio to get set up near him. He’d just made coconut shrimp from scratch. When the room was ready, we got into it.

His story started the summer before high school, painting fences on a farm. He came home exhausted on a hot day, picked up a glass of water, and dropped it — he was already unconscious, mid-seizure, before it hit the floor. An MRI revealed a brain tumor in the left temporal lobe. He went into surgery assuming he’d come out the other side and return to normal.

“I’m gonna have surgery and then I’m gonna go back to being normal. Which — was the opposite of that.”

What he thought would happen to him, happened to me. What I feared would happen to me, happened to him.

Post-surgery, his memory scattered. Reading comprehension became difficult. Processing slowed. He described the mental exhaustion as feeling like the day after pulling an all-nighter — but every single day of your life. While his former classmates were starting freshman year, he wasn’t there.

“You have so much mental energy and strain going into your schoolwork, and it takes you considerably longer. So all your time is devoted to school and you don’t have time to be a kid.”

He was still smart. His brain just worked differently now. It had to forge new pathways. Songs helped him retrieve words. He adapted — but his school didn’t.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, schools are supposed to provide reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities. Jacob had a psychiatrist’s report outlining exactly what would help. His school’s response was to pull him out of honors classes and put him in special ed, citing “the integrity of the honors classes.” His history teacher had, in a decade of teaching, never heard the word accommodation.

Jacob eventually left, got his diploma at sixteen through a homeschool program, and enrolled at community college. While his former classmates were graduating high school, he was giving the commencement address at Ivy Tech. Then he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering — the first in his family to complete a four-year degree.

If you or someone you know is experiencing employment discrimination due to a disability, the National Disability Rights Network can help you find your local Protection & Advocacy organization: ndrn.org/about/ndrn-member-agencies. There’s also a wealth of resources at AskJan.org.

Talking to Jacob made me want to get my own medical situation sorted out once and for all. Our neuroscientist producer, Alex, connected me with his childhood best friend, Divakar, a pediatric neurologist, who walked me through what actually happened to my brain in 1999.

The short version: a baseball to the head is one of the scarier kinds of traumatic brain injury. The tunnel vision I’d had two days later was the symptom that warranted the ER visit — it could have indicated a massive bleed pressing on my optic nerve, requiring emergency surgery. The fact that I was sent home meant it wasn’t. And the blood being inside the brain tissue rather than outside it was more concerning than a standard bruise — but not dangerous, as it turned out, because I’m standing here.

He also told me something I’d apparently needed to hear for twenty-five years: traumatic brain injuries are not associated with brain tumors. Whatever happened to Jacob Reed #79 in the same part of his brain at the same age, it wasn’t caused by anything like what happened to me. The coincidence has no medical explanation.

“I think when you get right down to it, there’s no really good explanation for such a coincidence. I guess I’m still kind of a probabilities guy. You could probably hear me rationalizing super hard right now, and I am.”

What got me most was something Divakar said near the end of our conversation. His patients are children. They either age out of his care… or they die. Either way, he never gets to talk to them as adults—but, he’s thought a lot about what happens to them.

“People live their whole lives with this kind of information just kind of percolating in the background, and they don’t know how to process it. And then there you are, twenty-five years later, still thinking about it.”

I didn’t realize until that moment how much I’d been carrying this.

I kept in touch with Jacob over the following year. He seemed to be settling in at his new job — the longest stretch of continuous employment he’d had. Then I reached out and things had changed. He’d taken short-term disability leave when he started feeling overwhelmed, and by the time he was ready to go back, he’d been let go.

“It’s not that I feel like it’s a need to work. It’s that I want to work.”

He’d disclosed his cognitive disability to a previous employer with documentation from his psychologist, outlining recommended accommodations. He was terminated three days later. So with the next job, he didn’t disclose. He was still fired.

“If your disability is black and white — you’re physically handicapped or something like that — ‘oh, we’ll give you a wheelchair ramp.’ If you have a mental disability… well, you’re not supposed to be an engineer. You’re supposed to be working a menial job somewhere.”

What struck me most was that Jacob still didn’t sound bitter. The way he talked about himself was not the way I would talk about myself in his situation.

“Even getting fired three times — I’ve cried about it, I’ve had a lot of depression because of it. But I’ve also moved on. I’m not gonna let that stop me from achieving great things. I get fired five times? You can’t knock me down. I’m only gonna rise up five times as strong.”

He told me he was going to keep pushing. He started talking through his old commencement speech from memory — and I genuinely thought he was reading from notes.

“Are you doing this from memory?”

“I am kind of recapping it.”

“I thought you were reading that.”

“No.”

“Holy smokes, man.”

Some time later, visiting my parents, my mom surprised me. She’d found a box while cleaning out the garage. Medical documents from 1999. And her planners from the late nineties, in which she’d written down everything — a toilet overflow, a family friend’s bar mitzvah, and Jacob’s head injury. Saturday.

Saturday. Just like I’d always said.

We kept looking. 1998 was camp. 1999 was the head injury. They didn’t happen the same summer after all. Two points for my memory.

Then, in the box: Kaiser Permanente neurosurgery discharge paperwork, “head trauma” circled. Doctor’s name, department, telephone number. Armed with those specifics, I was finally able to get the actual records.

“Chief complaint: closed head injury without loss of consciousness. This 14-year-old male was playing baseball last Saturday when he was hit in the left temporal region…”

Everything I remembered was in there. Including the neurosurgery consult. Turns out my brain works pretty well.

And then I found the magazine.

The GQ comedy issue from June 1999 — the one I’d read cover to cover all summer while stuck in bed. I’d always remembered Jon Stewart on the cover. It was actually Mike Myers. But Jon Stewart’s name was on the cover, in a list of comedians. Close enough.

Before that accident, I’d loved comedy, but I never considered making it my life or career. During those months in bed, something shifted. I read and re-read about comedians I loved, and some I’d never heard of. I memorized every joke in the pull-out section. Of the dozens of comedians in that issue, I’ve now met or worked with almost a third of them.

I’d spent decades carrying that summer as a trauma. But it was also what made me who I am. The crack in the sidewalk was where something actually grew… it just wasn’t a tumor.

Alex had told me that every time we access a memory, we rewrite it — we attach whatever we’re currently feeling. Maybe it was time to access that one more time, and attach something different.

Jacob Reed #79 has every reason to tell a darker version of his story. He doesn’t. He tells the one where the guy keeps getting up.

“You always forget how far you’ve come and how much you’ve accomplished. At the end of the day, you gotta be proud for yourself that you put everything into it that you had.”

The stories we hold onto, the ones that lay dormant, the notes in the margins of our parents’ calendars, the random medical entries, the gumball drawings and bar mitzvah certificates in the garage — which version of those is the real us? What Jacob taught me is that we get to choose.

After all — it’s all in our heads.

Jacob Reed and Me releases new episodes every Wednesday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Support the show and get early episodes at Patreon.

Employment rights and protections can vary greatly from state to state. To learn more about your rights under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, check out the links below from the National Disability Rights Network. If you or someone you love is experiencing employment discrimination due to a disability, they should reach out to their local Protection and Advocacy organization to learn more about what supports or resources may be available.

Find your local P&A

NDRN on YouTube: Employment Accommodations Explained

Presentation: ADA Employment Rights for People with Disabilities

Disability Rights In the Workplace: The ADA

You can also find a lot of resources at the Job Access Network at www.AskJan.org