I’m entering the August/September fatigue-drums. Deadlier than the doldrums. Perhaps good timing that my health care professionals are all taking vacations. Sequentially, not simultaneously, of course! Tsk. But at least my schedule will be quieter. Bwahahaha! What am I thinking?! The universe always finds a way to cut into my quiet time.
Anywho, not much to report during week five training: relief the moment I began training gamma brainwaves at CZ. Not sure why. Maybe because the training is something familiar, something I can do, something that reduces emotional stress not increases it, like so much of my life does. And during PZ training to reduce 16-20 Hz, the back of my neck softened. From the first gamma enhancement training, I tried to sit up straight during the training neurofeedback screens and physical pain and rigidity in the back of my neck blared their presence. But the moment I began PZ, I couldn’t feel the tightness. Was I suddenly not able to sit up straight? Perhaps it was the same change in muscle tone I’d begun to experience in previous sessions that had lead to me being able to turn my head easier and more naturally. The last change occurred during the second PZ screen: my visual acuity improved — my vision cleared up. I experienced maybe slight head straightening and the smallest increase in colour intensity. But colours had already stayed pretty bold, to me, from the previous weeks.
My memory has been recovering in the last week or so. I’d felt like I’d lost it just over a couple of weeks ago after one of my other medical appointments. It wasn’t directly correlated to that appointment, but I had to wonder.
On a different memory note, I received the layout for the paperback version of Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me. I experienced a worrying lapse in memory — I thought I had composed and put in the little comments under section titles while I was working on the ebook format. But there they were in the paperback format. Um . . .
My brain trainer, whom I’ve kept updated on my progress reminded me that all I was working on with the ebook was copying the text from WORD into Scrivener and then formatting. No content edits! Phew. But really, this is why when people take a long time to get back to a person with a brain injury, they get a tad anxious. This is why when you’re working with a person with brain injury you can’t let much time lag before you return the work or provide feedback. Try continuing to work on a project you have no memory of and maybe you’ll understand why scheduling and sticking to it is essential. And why memory failure can erode a person’s confidence and lead to having to relearn something that had just been done. And why that is tiring!!!!
Anyway, I had to trust my brain trainer and my own common sense that I wouldn’t muck about with the content. I kept going. And got it done and back to finish the layout.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to use Scrivener for Windows to create the ebook, thinking it would make ePub and mobi publishing easier. Hah! It’s taken me several days, a couple of support requests, endless perusing of old blog pages on how to do images over the past month, until this past weekend, I discovered that Scrivener doesn’t apply an image class style to images but defaults them to body text. Body text has a tab indent on the first line. Guess why my images are all shifted over and cut off on the right side? Uh-huh. Dumb. Bonus part: they don’t know their software does this. I’m going to have to tell them.
So with fatigue crawling up my ass, I went with the quick and dirty workaround: Shift-return to force it on to the second line where there is no tab indent. It adds a line space above, and in iBooks an empty page because iBooks is old and stupid. Yup, I’m frustrated. But just as I’m thinking I’m sailing now, I discover Scrivener for Windows (not Mac) strips out Scrivener links when exporting to ePub. thud
Let me pick myself back up. Another support request. But I’m probably going to have to go into Sigil and hand-code the bloody internal links. At least I sort of know how to create links in HTML and copy and paste the appropriate code so many helpful people have posted. Just gotta google. When I have some energy.
