I swear there’s nothing more exhausting than brushing one’s teeth. In the years following my brain injury, I struggled to remember to brush my teeth and to actually do the full monty when I remembered: brush, floss, gargle. In these covid-19 times, when worry about coronavirus hiding in toothbrush bristles, when fatigue worsens, it suddenly…
Category: Personal
Brain Storm, A Play in One Act, An Opportunity in One Year
The opportunity began in 2017 with an ordinary BIST outing to see Brain Storm by Taliesin McEnaney at the Toronto Fringe Festival. I wrote a review. I released my revised book Concussion Is Brain Injury to the world shortly after. Based on my review and my book, Taliesin, a member of the Brain Injury Society…
Chocolate Unexpected
When you wander into a familiar café and see a completely new treat, it’s like the delight one feels when good news drops into your routine, when an out-of-the-blue opportunity disrupts your expectations of what comes next in your day, your week, your year and draws a grin across your face. This croissant was a…
Rest in the Frenzy
Living with brain injury is a never-ending journey of tuning up the brain in the mornings; going to medical appointments to heal the brain, relieve pain, increase mobility; running the gauntlet of public transit that declares itself accessible and is not; navigating sidewalks filled with snow or garbage bins or patio fences that leave a…
Twentieth Anniversary Party, Lawyer Style
I hadn’t realized my lawyer’s firm was established the same year I was injured. Twenty twenty. So when I received the invitation last year for their big bash to celebrate and saw it’d be in Assembly Hall, one of the few places I can navigate reasonably well, I said yes. One of the weird things…
Twentieth Crashiversary
Five and a half years after the car crash that took away myself, the only friend to reach in to me and who’s stuck with me until today, suggested I buy a point ‘n shoot camera. My brain injury had taken away my photography, and I could no longer use my Minolta Maxxum — “unintended…
Remembering Pastor Duke Vipperman
My Pastor, The Rev. Canon Dr. Walter Bryce (Duke) Vipperman, died on Friday, 3 January 2020 from cancer at the age of 69. This is my eulogy of an ordinary, radical man. The sun shone on the church steps as Duke shook hands with congregants emerging through the ornery wood church doors. I hung back…
Reading Reward Among Brain Injury Ruins
Last year after completing 81 hours of intensive reading-comprehension re-learning via Lindamood-Bell’s visualizing and verbalizing program, I promised myself the reward of an e-reader if I finished The Lions of Al-Rassan. I’d begun reading that big book during the application weeks of the visualizing and verbalizing program, but I had to finish it on my…
Amazon, Reliant Cellular: iPhone Buyer Beware
An iPhone Buyer Beware Story: Late last October (2018), my parents bought me an “Apple iPhone 6s 128 GB International Warranty Unlocked Cellphone – Retail Packaging (Rose Gold)” from Reliant Cellular. It came in its retail packaging. Package looked unopened. iPhone and charger looked new. It wasn’t a counterfeit one. But it was only when…