Hypnotism is a strange, scary process. You put your mind under the control of another’s mind. So you gotta really trust that other person. I didn’t. But after an old friend suicided recently, and my fragmented memories wouldn’t let me remember her properly and were also disturbing my body’s humours (such an old term but…
Category: Health
Writings on health and nutrition, the health care system, doctors and therapists, heck, anything to do with health.
Growing Social Media Divide Leads to Bad Advice
I’m not often told it might be good to avoid Twitter or to give it a break, but when I am — and when others with brain injury are — it’s by people not on Twitter or who have a lurking-only account. And who don’t know or understand how I use it. They’re unhelpful. They’re…
Happier (Brain-Injured) Heart
The ADD Centre has various ways to measure my stress levels and how well I’m coping through the biometric data gathered during my brain biofeedback sessions. Software reads my heart, skin temperature, breathing, and EEG sensors and analyzes them to give a measure of how well my brain and heart are functioning. This measure is…
How Much Does Social Isolation Slow Down Recovery from Brain Injury? PTSD?
I had a thought (I know, so odd): how much does social isolation, systemic inaccessibility, and opprobrium from family, friends, lawyers, health care professionals, etc. slow down recovery from brain injury and/or PTSD? We’ve read of studies* showing positive effects on the heart of socially cohesive neighbourhoods, lifelong negative effects on children of lack of…
A Poem Read To Me Reveals My Injury
Ever since I got back from England, my neurodoc has been selecting poems and reading one to me at the end of each session. Although he speaks slowly and enunciates fairly well, I have to concentrate hard, keep my eyes on his face, in order to follow and understand. This week, he read out Because…
Dipping A Toe Back Into The Cold Reading Pool
What do you want me to say to get you reading again, my neurodoc asked me. I don’t know, I shrugged. Reading is tiring. Relearning how to read after a brain injury when you were … Well, reading is a complex cognitive skill – if you think about it, it takes about 20 years from…
Back Behind the Rocks
“It’s like you were in jail, got a taste of freedom, and now you’re back in jail.” Apt description of my relationship and communication headaches in North America, I thought. It’s not like this is solely a North American problem or that all North Americans fear communication or trying something new in order…
Reading Rehab Resumes?
A week after I got back from England, my neurodoc called me up and gave me my new reading homework. Same regimen as before: read two paragraphs after doing the skeleton, read out loud and slowly enough to avoid a headache and to enhance accuracy, and read every two days. I did my homework one…
Endless Saturday, the Day Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday
It’s Endless Saturday. I used to call it Waiting Saturday. Like that day when Jesus’s disciples, particularly the women, waited for the Sabbath to be over so that they could visit his grave; like that day, the day after tragedy struck, and no one knew what to do other than wait, my life was one…