Part 3 - Techno-Medical Mumbo-Jumbo
This entry was posted on 4/20/2007 11:48 PM and is filed under Recovery.
What all the Techno-Medical Mumbo-Jumbo of my brain injury actually means to my life:
(Written in the Spring of 2005)
Problems with planning, sequencing, focusing, problem solving, organizing, controlling my emotions and The Animal Brain (I’m hungry—eat it now; I’m scared—run away; I’m threatened—kill it!), motivation, multi-tasking, harping-harping-harping and hammering away at a single thought that just constantly bugs me and won’t let me go and I can’t shut up about it because my stop mechanism is broken and I just keep on harping-harping-harping on it and forgetting that I’ve already said that and losing track of just how much time has passed since I started talking about it…
Heh. I was passionate and sensitive to begin with. Losing access to a chunk of higher cerebral function made dealing with this devastating trauma, and the others I still carried from the past, a nightmare.
Problems with ringing in the ears, short-term memory, missing chunks of long-term memory, difficulty with verbal conversations (speaking in ordered formats, remembering a list of things I need to say, understanding and remembering what is said to me) especially when I can’t augment it with reading lips, difficulty processing audio input in general although my ears are just fine, categorization, aggressiveness, talking-talking-talking where nobody can get a word in edgewise to save their lives because I just can’t quit talking to save my own life and one of these days it’ll kill me cuz I’m gonna forget to breathe…
Ahem.
Problems with retrieving the correct vocabulary (“You know, that sitty-downy thing in there with the shhhht and the whhhhooo…”—a horizontal hand swipe and a vertical gesture. “Er, chair. Yeah. That’s it.”) Trouble remembering people’s names, learning new languages, learning new phone numbers or addresses, reading comprehension, distinguishing left from right, doing even the most simple math, hand-eye coordination.
Problems with balance, depth perception, right-side motor functions, insomnia, fatigue, dizziness, light-sensitivity, mood swings, processing speed, spatial orientation especially when I don’t have access to the visual realm.
Yeah. All that from a few bumps on the head. To look at me and speak with me, I seem like a perfectly normal, healthy person. No one truly knows the extent of compensation, advance calculation and calm grinning that I do. Some things have healed with time; others have developed a re-routed trek through different parts of my brain; and then there are the things that are just as bad as that first week.
I have to sit in the back of the movie theatre because the more I have to pan & scan, the harder it is for me to track the goings-on. I have to see long, complicated movies more than once to really comprehend them, or ask people to repeat themselves a lot, or re-read paragraphs over and over. I also have a hard time realizing just how LOUD I’M TALKING—a bad thing with a voice as resonant as mine. Commercials or programs that flash through a rapid series of shots will put me under the table in a few seconds. Situations in which there is a lot of audio input and I am also required to do cerebral tasks will make me twitch & drool in the corner. I often avoid taking phone calls after about 4:00 p.m. unless I am really UP, because it comes in solely through the audio channel. If I close my eyes and try to discern the origin of a certain sound or which direction I am facing, I almost always get it wrong.
I have a normal time bracket of about 4 hours for heavy concentration tasks. I can do up to six hours as long as I have a good rest for a few days afterwards. I need a nap almost every day in addition to 8-10 hours of sleep at night (much better than the former two naps and 12-14 hours of sleep). If I don’t stop, sleep, eat, rest when I get the warning signs, things can get very bad—breakdowns, rages, convulsions, disorientation, lapse in concentration, massive increase in all symptoms. When it is really bad, I have had minor seizures and sometimes look catatonic. Strobe lights are evil. Bright flashes into my eyes will flip my brain switch into OFF in a heartbeat. When I perform, I have to give very specific instructions to my light techs, because the wrong sort of cue can really be detrimental--not only to my performance, but also to my functioning capacity when I come off the stage.
I need lots of time alone, in complete silence. Holidays, parties, large groups, and special occasions can be very rough. I actually avoid many social situations because I’m just not up for that much going on all at the same time. I often have a choice--I can drive to a function OR I can attend it. I like to sit facing the wall in restaurants—sitting in the middle of a crowded room is also evil. So are places like Wal-mart, Lowes, the mall, the grocery store, the freeway…any place where there are a lot of people, a lot of products, numerous brands to have to decipher or multiple things going on at once. Hiss! Snarl! On the several occasions I have tried to do the grocery trip by myself, I have either failed miserably and practically murdered the cart on my way out or almost killed the groceries as I literally threw them into the refrigerator—still bagged—and immediately face-planted for several hours.
In the beginning, I was incapable of holding a conversation while the TV was on. My brain couldn’t handle hearing the tube at the same time as listening to someone else or speaking. I couldn’t sing on key anymore. I couldn’t hear music in real-time—I was always a fraction of a beat off, trying to play catch-up. It was the same with conversations. Sometimes it still is. People who know me well understand that sometimes it takes a few beats for me to get their jokes or to fully comprehend what they’ve said. They just wait for my eyes to quit glazing or darting from side to side—Beat…Beat…Beat… “Oh! Hahahaha!” People who don’t understand often think I’m ditzy, flakey or uninterested in what they’re saying. They couldn’t be more wrong.
When I was given clearance to start driving again, I would find myself unable to focus on more than one thing at a time. I would get fixated on the bumper moving closer, closer, closer—whoa! Or on passing a tree, a tree, a tree—whoa! I shouldn’t have been allowed to drive as soon as I was.
I also should never have been sent back to my office job. They were so tolerant and really tried to keep me on, bless their hearts, but the injuries had left me incapable of doing that kind of work. The phones were the first thing to be taken away from me. I couldn’t resume my work after the interruption without a really long period of racking my brains for what I had been doing. I had to call in sick day after day due to feeling like I’d been run over by a truck or the ice pick through my eyeballs and Magnito’s Helmet. The final straw was when the company accounts were $1000 overdrawn due to my messing it up so badly that we couldn’t figure out what on earth I had done. After nine months of struggle and misery, my doctors finally removed me from the job.
I also had to move, because I couldn’t handle driving in Colorado Springs traffic anymore. After my lost wages from the insurance company ended, I tried to work part-time at a New Age store in Florence CO —I figured I would be safe in a store like that in a town of 3000 people. I was, until I had to run the cash register, and as long as the customers were all standing in the same spot. The moment they moved to where I had to keep track of them in more than one place, I would practically need a nap by the time that they left.
I think my physiatrist's prognosis was the most devastating though. When I kept on complaining about symptoms that just weren’t getting better, he said, “You may have to face the fact that you’ll never be a dancer again.”
(Written in the Spring of 2005)
Problems with planning, sequencing, focusing, problem solving, organizing, controlling my emotions and The Animal Brain (I’m hungry—eat it now; I’m scared—run away; I’m threatened—kill it!), motivation, multi-tasking, harping-harping-harping and hammering away at a single thought that just constantly bugs me and won’t let me go and I can’t shut up about it because my stop mechanism is broken and I just keep on harping-harping-harping on it and forgetting that I’ve already said that and losing track of just how much time has passed since I started talking about it…
Heh. I was passionate and sensitive to begin with. Losing access to a chunk of higher cerebral function made dealing with this devastating trauma, and the others I still carried from the past, a nightmare.
Problems with ringing in the ears, short-term memory, missing chunks of long-term memory, difficulty with verbal conversations (speaking in ordered formats, remembering a list of things I need to say, understanding and remembering what is said to me) especially when I can’t augment it with reading lips, difficulty processing audio input in general although my ears are just fine, categorization, aggressiveness, talking-talking-talking where nobody can get a word in edgewise to save their lives because I just can’t quit talking to save my own life and one of these days it’ll kill me cuz I’m gonna forget to breathe…
Ahem.
Problems with retrieving the correct vocabulary (“You know, that sitty-downy thing in there with the shhhht and the whhhhooo…”—a horizontal hand swipe and a vertical gesture. “Er, chair. Yeah. That’s it.”) Trouble remembering people’s names, learning new languages, learning new phone numbers or addresses, reading comprehension, distinguishing left from right, doing even the most simple math, hand-eye coordination.
Problems with balance, depth perception, right-side motor functions, insomnia, fatigue, dizziness, light-sensitivity, mood swings, processing speed, spatial orientation especially when I don’t have access to the visual realm.
Yeah. All that from a few bumps on the head. To look at me and speak with me, I seem like a perfectly normal, healthy person. No one truly knows the extent of compensation, advance calculation and calm grinning that I do. Some things have healed with time; others have developed a re-routed trek through different parts of my brain; and then there are the things that are just as bad as that first week.
I have to sit in the back of the movie theatre because the more I have to pan & scan, the harder it is for me to track the goings-on. I have to see long, complicated movies more than once to really comprehend them, or ask people to repeat themselves a lot, or re-read paragraphs over and over. I also have a hard time realizing just how LOUD I’M TALKING—a bad thing with a voice as resonant as mine. Commercials or programs that flash through a rapid series of shots will put me under the table in a few seconds. Situations in which there is a lot of audio input and I am also required to do cerebral tasks will make me twitch & drool in the corner. I often avoid taking phone calls after about 4:00 p.m. unless I am really UP, because it comes in solely through the audio channel. If I close my eyes and try to discern the origin of a certain sound or which direction I am facing, I almost always get it wrong.
I have a normal time bracket of about 4 hours for heavy concentration tasks. I can do up to six hours as long as I have a good rest for a few days afterwards. I need a nap almost every day in addition to 8-10 hours of sleep at night (much better than the former two naps and 12-14 hours of sleep). If I don’t stop, sleep, eat, rest when I get the warning signs, things can get very bad—breakdowns, rages, convulsions, disorientation, lapse in concentration, massive increase in all symptoms. When it is really bad, I have had minor seizures and sometimes look catatonic. Strobe lights are evil. Bright flashes into my eyes will flip my brain switch into OFF in a heartbeat. When I perform, I have to give very specific instructions to my light techs, because the wrong sort of cue can really be detrimental--not only to my performance, but also to my functioning capacity when I come off the stage.
I need lots of time alone, in complete silence. Holidays, parties, large groups, and special occasions can be very rough. I actually avoid many social situations because I’m just not up for that much going on all at the same time. I often have a choice--I can drive to a function OR I can attend it. I like to sit facing the wall in restaurants—sitting in the middle of a crowded room is also evil. So are places like Wal-mart, Lowes, the mall, the grocery store, the freeway…any place where there are a lot of people, a lot of products, numerous brands to have to decipher or multiple things going on at once. Hiss! Snarl! On the several occasions I have tried to do the grocery trip by myself, I have either failed miserably and practically murdered the cart on my way out or almost killed the groceries as I literally threw them into the refrigerator—still bagged—and immediately face-planted for several hours.
In the beginning, I was incapable of holding a conversation while the TV was on. My brain couldn’t handle hearing the tube at the same time as listening to someone else or speaking. I couldn’t sing on key anymore. I couldn’t hear music in real-time—I was always a fraction of a beat off, trying to play catch-up. It was the same with conversations. Sometimes it still is. People who know me well understand that sometimes it takes a few beats for me to get their jokes or to fully comprehend what they’ve said. They just wait for my eyes to quit glazing or darting from side to side—Beat…Beat…Beat… “Oh! Hahahaha!” People who don’t understand often think I’m ditzy, flakey or uninterested in what they’re saying. They couldn’t be more wrong.
When I was given clearance to start driving again, I would find myself unable to focus on more than one thing at a time. I would get fixated on the bumper moving closer, closer, closer—whoa! Or on passing a tree, a tree, a tree—whoa! I shouldn’t have been allowed to drive as soon as I was.
I also should never have been sent back to my office job. They were so tolerant and really tried to keep me on, bless their hearts, but the injuries had left me incapable of doing that kind of work. The phones were the first thing to be taken away from me. I couldn’t resume my work after the interruption without a really long period of racking my brains for what I had been doing. I had to call in sick day after day due to feeling like I’d been run over by a truck or the ice pick through my eyeballs and Magnito’s Helmet. The final straw was when the company accounts were $1000 overdrawn due to my messing it up so badly that we couldn’t figure out what on earth I had done. After nine months of struggle and misery, my doctors finally removed me from the job.
I also had to move, because I couldn’t handle driving in Colorado Springs traffic anymore. After my lost wages from the insurance company ended, I tried to work part-time at a New Age store in Florence CO —I figured I would be safe in a store like that in a town of 3000 people. I was, until I had to run the cash register, and as long as the customers were all standing in the same spot. The moment they moved to where I had to keep track of them in more than one place, I would practically need a nap by the time that they left.
I think my physiatrist's prognosis was the most devastating though. When I kept on complaining about symptoms that just weren’t getting better, he said, “You may have to face the fact that you’ll never be a dancer again.”
Comments
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5/18/2007 3:30 PM
Gail wrote:
Hoooooooooooollllllllllyyyyy COW! You had have a helluva lot to deal with. :\ I hope you're still on that recovery road!
However... at least it looks like you proved that physiatrist wrong.
Reply to this -
3/27/2008 7:20 PM
Urvashi (Heidi) wrote:
Izzy, you have completely freaked me out. In an enlightening way. All the things you speak of post accident sound so much like how I am and I have been in 3 car accidents. 1 where I was about 15 and we were rear ended on our way home from the beach, 1 where I was run off the road late at night and into a phone pole (the driver kept on going) and the last where I was rear ended by a drunk driver. All of which caused me to have serious whiplash and vertebral issues, one where I ate the steeringwheel.. funny thing ..never had a head scan.. thanks for sharing and thank you for you...
Reply to this-
10/28/2008 2:58 PM
Izzy wrote:
Yay! You know, this is one of the many reasons why I put all this out there--because without all the accounts I read by other people who had head injuries, and the people in my life who knew about these sorts of things and urged me to get it checked out, I would have been wandering around in the tooley bushes wondering what the heck was wrong with me. "The Hidden Injury." There is a reason it is called that. It has been forever since I was on here--haven't been receiving my comment notifications--did you ever get it checked out? Or has enough time passed and now you just know how you are affected?
Many well wishes and continued healing!!!
~Iz
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10/28/2008 2:58 PM
Izzy wrote:
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6/1/2009 2:00 PM
Gail wrote:
Hey, Iz.
How much of this has improved greatly over the years? How much are you still coping with? How do you deal with the dancing aspects: the music, the lights, the audience, etc? I see it's been four years since you originally wrote this. ... Just curious.
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