Walking improvement continues in sudden leaps and expected plateaux. After first two weeks of October, I suddenly improved in speed by about 12% to at times 18% in addition to walking smoother, more competently (as in normal gait, firm footfalls, balanced bilaterally most of the time). At some point in first three weeks of October, nausea disappeared entirely (except for during a needed foray into the Eaton Centre – gah!). And dizziness dropped a lot. It helps that I’m wiser in managing my activities so as not to bring it on.
I’ve discovered though that using an SMR audiovisual entrainment session about 4 hours before taking the TTC to my brain biofeedback or an SMR/Beta audiovisual entrainment (AVE) session before my walk makes a huge difference (that is, entrain 14Hz brainwaves or 13.5/18Hz ones). I am smoother in my walking and can walk quicker sans getting dizzy.
I’m working on improving my speed and stamina, and these sessions definitely help me.
This weekend’s walking practice was done sans using a session beforehand. My head felt it. My stamina was better than last week, but I became dizzy at the same speed of walking as last week. And my head pretty much stayed dizzy-fuzzy-fied because, naturally, I didn’t slow down much, except when on a main street and crossing intersections. I haven’t sped up on the latter in several weeks; crossing streets on my own for the first few times is even slower. But everywhere else . . . Faster, faster! So much for being wiser. But I was on a mission: to improve my stamina at a decent speed (which, by the way, is still slower than pre-eye surgery but not by much on familiar streets).
I realize now that my experience on Yonge before my biofeedback treatment was also because that day I hadn’t used an SMR session beforehand. My brain was not as prepared to handle the plethora of visual and auditory stimuli as it usually is. I’ll have to ask the ADD Centre if it’s OK to do an SMR session before or if that could overload my brain with too much work.
After I realized that the medical model doesn’t provide treatment for brain injury (strategies aren’t treatment, people), and I began looking for ways to repair my brain, I have been pretty much overseeing the big picture of my care. No GP, no specialist has done that in the last decade or so. And before that, it was really monitoring and prodding me to go figure it out. After an emotional shock about 3 years ago, I stopped being able to do that. And so between that dropping of the baton and the shock, I haven’t progressed nearly as much as I could have because no one took over overseeing the big picture of my care and guiding me on my non-pill “medications” aka AVE and CES (cranioelectrical stimulation) as my needs changed, not even my neurodoc. When it comes to brain injury, 100% of the doctors I’ve met consider it too much work to read up on, consult, learn about my kind of injury and/or how to use AVE/CES or how to oversee the totality of my care.
I realize now it’s a pipe dream hoping for my neurodoc to understand and oversee my entire brain-injury health care picture (I leave out of the equation my other medical issues, though he is currently looking for a blood pressure specialist [at his rate, he may find one in 2018]). But I’m feeling stronger recently. I was told it takes 3 to 6 months for a person with brain injury to recover from general anesthesia. As of this week, it’s exactly 6 months. It pretty much sucks to have no one to talk to about or rely upon my entire brain injury treatment and PTSD symptom picture, but at least I’m starting to feel like I can take that burden back on and there are still and always have been people I can talk to about bits and pieces of it. I just have to be able to knit all the bits in my mind and not overdo it like I did back in 2006. It helps that I am no longer being plagued by how much work time I’m losing to my injury. At this point, I’ve lost more than half my prime working years to it, so who gives a shit anymore?
