Against the Current: Advocating for Change in Hydrocephalus Care
by Rev. Jason Carson Wilson, M.Div.
The room is always sterile. The lights are always too bright. The doctor uses too many syllables. You do not hear half of what is said, and the half you do hear will not make sense for weeks.
Rev. Jason Carson Wilson knows that room. He has lived with hydrocephalus since he was 18 months old. He has undergone five brain surgeries. He has sat in the hospital chair as a patient, a chaplain, a son, and an advocate. Against the Current is the book he needed at 12, at 22, and at 32—the resource that refuses to flinch from the pain and refuses to pretend the system works.
This is not a medical textbook written from the operating theater. It is a guide, a testimony, and a protest written from inside the condition. In clear, plain language—grounded in journalism, pastoral care, and the lived experience of disability—Wilson walks readers through the realities most literature skips: the shock of diagnosis, the long road of shunts and revisions, the invisible weight of trauma and mental health, the exhaustion of caregivers (especially mothers), the complicated intersections of faith and a body that will not be “fixed,” the practical battles of school, work, dating, insurance, and advocacy, and the stubborn insistence on thriving rather than merely surviving.
You will hear three voices at once: the reporter who checks facts, the minister who refuses to let you be alone, and the patient who has felt the spinal tap needle go in. When they disagree, he says so. When they agree, the sentence lands like a hammer.
Hydrocephalus affects roughly one million Americans. It is the leading reason children undergo brain surgery in the United States. There is no cure. The treatment can fail. Yet the stories of the people who live with it—especially those shaped by race, queerness, poverty, or faith communities that still treat disability as a problem to be solved—are too often reduced to medical charts or inspirational soundbites.
Against the Current refuses that reduction. It treats knowledge as a justice issue. It treats the body as sacred, not defective. It treats anger at a fragmented, underfunded, biased system as appropriate theology and necessary politics. And it insists on three final truths: You are not your diagnosis. The system is broken—and you are not. You are not alone.
Whether you are newly diagnosed, a lifelong warrior, a parent keeping watch at 3 a.m., a partner learning how to love through uncertainty, a clinician ready to listen better, or a faith leader seeking language that does not abandon disabled bodies, this book is for you.
It is written in the tradition of Black liberation, womanist, queer, and disability theologies—and in the tradition of the unnamed hydrocephalus warriors who taught the author, over a lifetime, how to stay alive and how to preach.
You are more than a diagnosis.
Your body is not a problem.
You deserve more than survival.
Get the book. Join the current. Refuse the silence.