Twenty-two years on this very same day of the week, 1.5 hours ago in 2000, cars damaged my brain, killed the old me off. I seem to blog annually on the anniversary of my death, except that I no longer think of it as me dying that day because I can barely remember who I used to be. Twenty-two years, I guess, is quite awhile. I mean, people in the pandemic think twenty-two months is an obscenely long time to be out of normal life for health reasons. Wait, until they catch COVID-19, develop Long Covid, and be out for years. Twenty-two months will seem like a piece of cake, then!
At twenty-two months, I was only just starting to get a handle on what brain injury actually meant. Oh sure, the experts tell you what it is; you remember what you could do and remain confused and frustrated that you cannot, despite knowing it’s the brain injury that’s fucking you up. But you cannot grasp the idea of living with it forever, even understanding the full losses beyond simple conceptualizing, which is intellectual not actual.
Although my psychologist used audiovisual entrainment on me soon after the car crash, I didn’t find the kind of intense, active treatments I needed to heal my diffuse axonal injury for over five years. Then two years of those. Then five years off. Then a symphony of experimental and well-established neurostimulation therapies for several years. The pandemic stopped the in-person active treatments, but I’ve continued with my own single-subject study and prescribed home treatments. So why am I not fully healed?
Whole brain damage + traditional medicine didn’t assess fully + delayed full assessment from 5.5 years post to 18 years post + inability to pursue effective treatments long enough + deprived of my main stress-releaser-healing-activator of reading novels for 19 years + active criticism of pursuing treatments versus “getting on with my life” + financial issues + ignored grief + worst of all extremely limited social support. We, as a society, just don’t get how much social support can heal a person or allow them to function at greater capacity or how lack of it can damage or, at best, slow down healing.
Oh, I was told recently I’m doing better than 98% of people with brain injury who see a physician. Well…that says a lot about the abysmal state of brain injury care, a state people with Long Covid get to join. Lucky them!
Healing At Twenty-Two Years
According to Maier and Seligman, the way to heal learned helplessness, which I wrote recently was driven into me, is to activate the prefrontal cortex’s future-looking function. Kind of hard to do for someone like me with PTSD. Let me say, instead, that I continue to heal spontaneously.
Writing two posts on Friday was my brain having connected the last neurons in writing and stamina pathways then zipping me along in my new/regained ability to write the second post. Bowled me over.
Managing to keep an air plant and a couple of other plants alive. I last tried growing plants back in 2019, and they like their predecessors drowned to death. I used to grow herbs and tropical plants. I’m so chuffed I’m growing green, leafy things again. Two months so far. But still!
I’ve designed, developed, researched, and written a site on brain injury, an idea I’ve had for ten years, one the pandemic and continuing healing allowed me to finally act on.
I’m reading novels and have recently begun my old adolescent habit of reading at night. It feels naughty and nice.
And despite a new concussion in May setting me back in multiple areas, including working on my brain injury site, I’m walking again and rebuilding my stamina.
I’ve kept my head out of the dumps today by working on ridiculous tech issues and reading another mystery set in first century Rome. Nothing like escaping to a time with no Twitter to make one feel better. Heh.
