My health care team is not really a team: it’s three parts linked through me, the one with the injured brain, the healing brain, the brain that has suddenly sent them into crisis mode while freaking me out. I have tried for years to get the disparate parts of my team to talk together. I’ve…
Tag: Personal
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…
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…
Poetry: A New Reading Strategy
The English are big readers. When I mentioned my problems with reading while I was over there, instant brainstorming began. It’s interesting seeing how different people react differently to my predicament. All are sympathetic, but most kind of shrug helplessly, speak platitudes, or say information-free positive things. Over there though, it was like I…