When we first came to Canada, my father’s colleague introduced us to the frightening delight of sailing in a tippy boat on a lake with capricious winds in Ontario. Pretty soon, my Dad had his own centreboard sailboat, one that was a little more stable than his colleague’s Albacore. Back then, only rich fat…
Category: Personal
Post Brain Injury and PTSD: What Happens If Re-Traumatized?
What happens if one is re-traumatized? If one witnesses something similar to one’s own trauma, especially after acquiring PTSD and/or a brain injury? Like anyone who watches a human bounce off a windshield and fly through the air, you gasp, your heart pounds, you freeze or rush to help. But I did something different in…
Hypnotizing Memories
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…
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…
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…