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Insistent
When you mix systemic bias, discrimination, and neuroscience academia with a determined, brain-injured woman and a service dog, you get a powerhouse team of science influencers.
Insistent chronicles a woman’s fight to find meaning and regain her life after a horrific accident where she broke twenty-three bones and suffered a traumatic brain injury. In constant pain, unable to filter environmental stimuli or comprehend spoken language, and having lost the ability to speak, she isolated herself, living in an abyss of darkness and hopelessness. The darkness laughed at her, feeding on her pain and confusion, telling her she was a burden to everyone.
Faced with immeasurable adversity—and the decision whether to live or end it all—she chose to fight and find meaning in her life, but first, she must find hope. Hope she found in the eyes of a fluffy white Golden retriever with soft brown eyes, named Sampson.
Wanting to understand what was happening in her brain and rebuild her life, she embarked on an educational journey in neuroscience. Doing so after a traumatic brain injury was ambitious. Doing so with a service dog was unprecedented as service dogs were not allowed in science laboratories.
Refusing to allow an academic system to break her spirit and make her “just go away,” as many hoped she would, she used their resistance and opposition to fuel an entire movement, changing policy and culture in science education across the globe with Sampson the Service Dog in Science by her side.
Insistent chronicles a woman’s fight to find meaning and regain her life after a horrific accident where she broke twenty-three bones and suffered a traumatic brain injury. In constant pain, unable to filter environmental stimuli or comprehend spoken language, and having lost the ability to speak, she isolated herself, living in an abyss of darkness and hopelessness. The darkness laughed at her, feeding on her pain and confusion, telling her she was a burden to everyone.
Faced with immeasurable adversity—and the decision whether to live or end it all—she chose to fight and find meaning in her life, but first, she must find hope. Hope she found in the eyes of a fluffy white Golden retriever with soft brown eyes, named Sampson.
Wanting to understand what was happening in her brain and rebuild her life, she embarked on an educational journey in neuroscience. Doing so after a traumatic brain injury was ambitious. Doing so with a service dog was unprecedented as service dogs were not allowed in science laboratories.
Refusing to allow an academic system to break her spirit and make her “just go away,” as many hoped she would, she used their resistance and opposition to fuel an entire movement, changing policy and culture in science education across the globe with Sampson the Service Dog in Science by her side.
260 pages, Paperback
Published August 26, 2025
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August 15, 2025
I will first state I have been a follower of Sampson the Service Dog for many years and am part of the service dog world. I was very excited for this book for many reasons, and I wasn’t disappointed. The short of the review is this: anyone who is thinking of becoming a service dog team should read this. Anyone with a family member or friend with PTSD or a TBI, or trauma in general if not a diagnosed one, should read this book. Each person’s manifestation of their disability is different, but this book touches on so many things that it will reach out to you and help.
And everyone else should read this, to see that even when it feels like the demons are winning, there are still trinkets of hope to find. To see that smiling at a stranger is a throw away to you, but may just be that trinket of hope for the other person. That you never know how you can impact someone’s life with a smile, or a poor choice of a few words that seem harmless.
Right from the start, this book grabs your attention and keeps it, making you feel. I felt the anger and frustration that the disability advocate felt; the heat of the wood on her palms in Pueblo; the outrage that adults would think it allowable to feed a SD under the table, literally, and the embarrassment all handlers go through when their SD has a biological incident. Each chapter takes you on a high and low, much like the author must have felt during those times in her life.
I did struggle a little with the timeline and “time in between” from accident to school. The chapters and book are chronological, but within each chapter the author would span the gap between then and now, so many times I got stuck trying to figure out her age or timeframe and it took me out of the story, but could easily fall back in it.
The “I can do it attitude with, well, maybe a dash of stupidity” is my new motto. I’ve said many times that Mrs. Ramp-Adams is making a difference, and this book is just one more way of doing that. Good job, and thank you for being a voice for other teams and the disabled community.
And everyone else should read this, to see that even when it feels like the demons are winning, there are still trinkets of hope to find. To see that smiling at a stranger is a throw away to you, but may just be that trinket of hope for the other person. That you never know how you can impact someone’s life with a smile, or a poor choice of a few words that seem harmless.
Right from the start, this book grabs your attention and keeps it, making you feel. I felt the anger and frustration that the disability advocate felt; the heat of the wood on her palms in Pueblo; the outrage that adults would think it allowable to feed a SD under the table, literally, and the embarrassment all handlers go through when their SD has a biological incident. Each chapter takes you on a high and low, much like the author must have felt during those times in her life.
I did struggle a little with the timeline and “time in between” from accident to school. The chapters and book are chronological, but within each chapter the author would span the gap between then and now, so many times I got stuck trying to figure out her age or timeframe and it took me out of the story, but could easily fall back in it.
The “I can do it attitude with, well, maybe a dash of stupidity” is my new motto. I’ve said many times that Mrs. Ramp-Adams is making a difference, and this book is just one more way of doing that. Good job, and thank you for being a voice for other teams and the disabled community.
Displaying 1 of 1 review