What To Do When Concussed Again?

Published Categorised as Brain Health, Health, Treatment, Personal
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This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series May 2021 Brain Injury

Sound waves lift brain, carry it forward in its bath of fluid like it’s a wave itself. No pain. Eerie feeling. Concussed again. But nothing like the car crash, though I’ve been resisting that PTSD flashback for about a week since this out-of-the-blue incident. Guess I now know why I felt such a push to finish and soft launch the brain injury site.

Thankfully I could call my specialists. One benefit of having been through this before – I don’t have to see my GP to get referrals and then wait to see the specialists.

My neurodoc took me through a relaxation exercise. The laser therapy clinic gave me protocols for my home laser therapy device. And I knew what to do with my audiovisual entrainment device.

Concussion is not the initiating event. It’s the initiating event and the processes that unfold in the brain in the days and weeks that follow. So the priority is to halt and reverse the destructive ongoing process and restore balance.

The priority is to calm the brain and tell it it’s safe.

We need to halt the sympathetic nervous system overdrive and rebalance with the parasympathetic system. We need to stop cortisol drowning the brain. And we need to return the microglia from eating up synapses and harming neurons back to their normal state of repair and support. To that end:

  • Use the home Low-Intensity Laser Therapy neck session on the lowest setting. I have three prescribed settings and was on level 2. I went back down to level 1 and was able to tolerate both red and infrared lights.
  • Use the neck session for three days. Take a day off. Return to using it every other day.
  • Use a sedating audiovisual entrainment setting nightly. I find the SMR for Sleep best for me.
  • Continue my hypothalamus fix (see Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me).
  • Use SMR/Beta audiovisual entrainment session as it’s shown to calm an injured brain, that is, to restore the alpha brainwave rhythm in the corticothalamic loop.
  • Use gamma 36-42 Hz audiovisual entrainment sessions. Best in the afternoon to calm down any stress from the morning.
  • Stop exercise, computer, writing, and social media. And keep off the brain injury website because it’s triggering for my PTSD. I didn’t need more reminders of my crash.
  • When I redeveloped a tremor in my right hand and it switched to my left hand, I switched the first neck placement from vertical down the spine to crosswise underneath the occipital bone. I had to also just do the red light for that placement. I’ll phase up to infrared in a couple of days hopefully.

I wasn’t about to let this motherfucking event fuck up my reading again. We discovered it affected my eye tracking, and I’m back to where I was after the eye surgery. Can’t look at computer screens; using dictation when I can; phase up from iPhone to iPad to small laptop screen to computer. Five minutes at a time on the computer, every other day, phasing up to 10 minutes and so on.

Ramryge angels at Gloucester Cathedral, England

Brain injury grief is

extraordinary grief

research proves

needs healing.

The edema in my face went after a couple of days. So the low-intensity laser therapy and audiovisual entrainment did their job pretty quickly to stop the cortisol flooding.

I couldn’t get the apps to read my e-book. So I borrowed an audiobook. Amazingly, the Lindamood-Bell visualizing and verbalizing technique for reading comprehension works just as well for audiobooks. First time I can “read” them. I read daily. But I’ve ceased all other cognitive activity, only wrote this post in 10-minute increments today. Now back to resting, reading, and 5-minute walks outside (which I began yesterday) not in bright sun or near noise or brief rows for rhythmicity and coordination. Fitness is not the goal right now.

Do this most days to help vision: https://youtu.be/AdidMiVEBm4

I thought it would take a day or maybe the weekend to recover. I didn’t realize how damaging sound can be. It’ll be another week to maybe three weeks, I’m hoping.

“Do the best you can, knowing it’s not easy for you being that way.”

Neurodoc
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