Dr. Lynda Thompson told me in 2007 that the ADD Centre believed spontaneous healing would continue in the months and years following my brain biofeedback treatments for brain injury. Five years later, when I returned for gamma brainwave biofeedback, they both observed and objectively measured I had continued to improve.
Despite active treatment ending, it had sparked a continuing positive cascade of improvements.
Since my neurodoc quit medicine due to sickness, one of my docs has been seeing me monthly. Every few months, he makes certain to tell me improvements he sees in me — spontaneous healing plus the ongoing effects of audiovisual entrainment and photobiomodulation therapy at home. To enhance the former, I not only try to pair gamma brainwave entrainment with reading or writing (though sometimes fatigue means watching Netflix for a half hour or so afterwards while I snack), but I also subconsciously work on my brain by watching foreign subtitled shows.
I’ve been maintaining a schedule of SMR/gamma three days a week for many months now, but with my blood pressure issue raising its head again, I may revisit that.
When I attended LORETA neurofeedback at the ADD Centre, I’d watch shows with English subtitles. My theory was that reading the subtitles, while hearing the words as I worked on enhancing brainwaves such as those used during working memory, would help my reading. Although it didn’t help much in the long run, maybe because I had to call an end to the LORETA prematurely, I’ve been watching subtitled foreign shows on Netflix for two years now almost daily.
They say learning another language helps the brain.
So perhaps listening to a foreign language, pairing the English subtitles with sounds that over time turn into recognizable words that convey meaning despite being out of English grammatical order, sparks neuronal and neural network growth that proliferates into other cognitive areas, especially since I entrain thinking and attention brainwaves most mornings.
Home Photobiomodulation Therapy Supports Brain Injury Healing
Photobiomodulation therapy works on reducing my stress levels, and I believe is mostly responsible for lowering my heart rate into normal territory from triple digits. But some of the protocols I use helps my overall system and blood flow in the brain. Again, direct healing while also supporting spontaneous healing, I’m pretty sure.
Neuronal growth requires good blood flow!
Still, I don’t think much about all this work healing my brain and me, more that it keeps me going, keeps me from having brain-injury-created meltdowns, keeps my pain down and my mobility up, maintains my normal heart rate, helps my heart and muscles to meet my doctor-ordered walking (my latest homework is to “diarize” when walking leads to intense tiredness for hours to see if sleep or something else is implicated).
Doctor-Observed Spontaneous Healing
So, it’s pretty cool when my monitoring doctor tells me the latest improvement he observes.
This month, he said, “You’re holding topics longer and clearer with less dysregulation than a year, 6 months ago.”
In June: “You’re balancing better, experiencing a lot of good adjustments. You’re entering a new phase in your life, and you’re getting used to it. Play with your enhanced empathy but don’t get lost in it.”
In April: “You’re handling more things. And you’re better at accepting things, letting go.” I remember writing that down but not sure if I felt it. This week as I was designing the paperback version of The Soul’s Awakening in Affinity Publisher, I marvelled that I felt relaxed, didn’t care about time or deadlines. I had let go of all that and rather liked taking my time over design elements like the chapter headings. If I couldn’t finish in the time my energy, stamina, and focus let me, for once I had no issue closing my laptop, not setting a schedule to get back to it but instead letting my energy decide.
Liberating!
Once, I thrived on deadlines, but fatigue wears you away over the decades like water drops on granite until one day, you just let it carve your life the way it wills.
In March: “You’re a polymath and a quick learner.” I had to look up ploymath (I’m vocabulary rich but I don’t always trust my memory). I’ll let you go google it.
I’m not as quick a learner as I used to be, which is rather boggling to think of what I used to be 25 years ago before my brain injury (or even before the 1991 car crash that the diagnosing physician in 2000 said had probably resulted in a subclinical concussion) — and what my IQ used to be when my post-initial-brain-biofeedback measured IQ was in 99.7 percentile in 2007 while still struggling to learn in real time. (The treatment had increased it by 15 to 20 points from what it was measured a year or so after my brain injury.)
I do feel all these months later that it’s easier to cook and bake, easier to just see the instructions and know what to do sans conscious thinking. I’ve long since been able to abandon writing each step on a Post-it and having to read them one at a time while taking breaks in between from the physical and cognitive effort. Daily activities are much less stressful as a result!
Effective Brain Injury Treatment Leads to Spontaneous Healing Leads to Life Being Easier
I liked the tangzhong dough so much yesterday – easy to make with whole grain bread flour, soft pillowy rolls – I gave in to impulse and am making cinnamon rolls with it. #BreadSky
— Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy (@shireenj.bsky.social) Sep 18, 2024 at 1:05 p.m.
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When you’ve spent decades seeking treatments, working on your brain and yourself at home without anyone helping you pull all the disparate pieces together — though they teach you and help you with their piece — and trying to find solutions to brain-injury-created problems, you tend not to notice improvements after awhile.
Noticing Slower Improvements
I used to notice them because I’d get nauseous and dizzy; then I knew about a week later I’d experience a jump in some aspect of my brain function, maybe I spoke faster, maybe I could read better, maybe my walking would be more automatic, stuff like that. But now, the improvements ramp up subtly over long periods of time. I only noticed baking was easier because I hadn’t baked in weeks, and I felt the difference. The comfort level; the automaticity in following and remembering the recipe instructions while being able to incorporate my own ideas.
This is why anyone with a chronic illness, but particularly a person undergoing treatment for brain injury, needs at least one health care professional who spontaneously tells them the improvements they observe. It lets you know the work works. The hard, long work is worth it.
