When I first met a person who’d lived with brain injury for twenty years, it seemed so far into the future for me. I could barely comprehend living with brain injury that long. I expected to be fully recovered by that point, myself. Roll eyes here. I was working hard on improving my health, pursuing treatments I could afford, and with the help of a therapist from Community Care Access Centre (CCAC), increasing my functionality more and more.
Eighteen years, eleven months, and three weeks after my injury, I’ve lost the CCAC help due to government cutting back on health care for brain injury to pay for administrators. I’ve suddenly regained reading comprehension and am practicing most days to keep progressing back to my old reading ability (one of my health care providers doesn’t think that’s possible). I’ve lost all the gains I made in my functionality — I’m still hanging on by sheer willpower to writing a novel every November. And I’m trying hard to keep up Psychology Today blogging even while I can’t remain consistent in writing here or on my political blog. I’m facing the horribly unbelievable fact that I won’t have fully recovered by twenty years. The grief is real.
