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,…
Category: Personal
To Soar, Olympics Style
As anyone who’s followed me for awhile knows, I’m a diehard Olympics fan. But going into 2018, I didn’t remember the Olympics were this year. And last week I was barely aware of them and only realized five days before the Opening Ceremony that they were about to begin! I don’t think I’ve been this…
Concussion Recovery is a Series of What are my Priorities?
As I come out of the narrow, tortuous pass that is a life focused on treating brain injury and the subsequent PTSD, I’m faced with the big question: what are my priorities? The first time I said bye to focusing on treating my injured neurons, I hunted for the supports I needed to be functional.…
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…
Crash Anniversary 2018 Style
You never know when you enter a new year what the crash anniversary will be like. Sometimes you think you’ll skate through it, then the day dawns and wham: you might as well have stayed in bed. This year, things went south early on in 2018, which to me, boded ill for today. Last night…
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…
Happy Christmas to All the Hurting
It’s Christmas Day, the snow lays on the ground glistening and white. Sparkly icy flakes blow in crowds off roofs as the wind gusts into the face of walkers hurrying to get their Starbucks or Timmies. Cars hiss on the snow-wet roads, waiting alongside each other at red lights, impatient to get to Christmas breakfast…
The Presbyopic Lens of the DSM Mutes this Patient with Brain Injury
The main character in my new novel has no voice. She’s not me, yet, too, I am muted, most recently, in the relationship with my neurodoc. It’s come to an impasse. He is clinging on with rigid ferocity to the DSM and, though he’s interested in the new ideas of neuroplasticity, he continues to adhere…
Adventures in Brain Injury: Training Vision in the Winter Light
Winter light is not the same as summer sunlight. You’d think after practicing walking — seeing, perceiving with both eyes and feet together, learning where I am in space — during strong and long summer sunlight hours, I’d have no trouble in the winter. Nope. It isn’t just the snow. The sunlight is sharp, throwing…