I emailed my neurodoc a long time ago a tweet about what reading means to me. He’d repeatedly said my emails were important; he understood they were my way of communicating what I needed to talk about during our sessions. He printed, signed, filed it. And he wonders why he isn’t succeeding with me. A very…
Category: Brain Power
Musings on what makes for a powerful brain. This category also includes the sub-category Brain Health, which covers all things related to brain injury.
Brain Injury Grief: The Experts Begin to Recognize and Define this Profound Loss
The last time I tried to find some info on grief and brain injury, I found nothing helpful. This past week, I half heartedly looked again. I was surprised and heartened to find that brain injury grief was being recognized at long last. Skimming articles from the US and UK validated my belief that brain…
Eyes Sharpening
It’s a gusty day, clouds billowing up on each other, stretching apart to reveal dark patches of blue sky and let the sunlight through. Once again this week, I’m standing on the sidewalk, against the wind, staring down down down the street, all the way to the third traffic light in the distance. Red red…
Reading Rehab: Big Picture Begins to Return
Last Monday brought a surprise — in the neverending river of reading rehab, I connected the elements in a chart in the book I was reading with my mother to the succeeding paragraphs. I could see automatically how they connected. Maybe this uptick in reading cognition happened because this is my fifth time reading this…
Let Me Eat Cake
There are days when the only remedy is a slice of cake . . . maybe a whole cake. Well, OK, even in my lowest moments, I can’t eat that much! It’s March Break when students get a week or two off from the hard mental work of school. It’s predictable and reliable, that time…
Vision Update: Seeing Farther
Brief vision update here. I don’t want to jinx it, but for the last couple of weeks, my far-distance and panoramic vision seem to have stabilized. Does this mean my brain has stopped trying to shut down the firehose of new visual information that the surgery turned on? Does this mean it has ceded the…
Olympic Trials
It didn’t take me long to get into the Olympic spirit, the trialling spirit. I say trialling because the stories — what some eschew, just get to the events already — is what makes the Olympics meaningful. Imagine working for four years towards one race watched by billions, training to improve, trying to avoid injury,…
Screwtape Teaches Us a Lesson about Reading Rehab
Reading rehab continues. Because people were asleep at the switch when I hit the emotional wall with my impaired reading so that I could no longer read books on my own and because things went rather south with my neurodoc, he’s pulled out the stops and is reading with me most days. Brains really do…
Fatigue Meets Weather Equals . . .
Dry air. Deep cold that penetrates into the tiniest lung cells. Early mornings interrupting fractured sleep. Brain goes pfft, I’m not doing this, regulating the nose, the throat, the heart, and lungs. Let’s go back to bed. But bed wasn’t doing me good. I had to keep my head elevated to keep the drips out…