Tag: Reading

Brain Health

Another Step in Restoring Reading after Brain Injury: Reading Evaluation by Lindamood-Bell

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Concussion Is Brain Injury CoverAs followers of this blog know, reading issues continue to plague me. A couple months ago, Dr. Lynda Thompson of the ADD Centre suggested I do a reading evaluation with Lindamood-Bell as she felt this would show me I don’t stack up too badly against the norms for my age group and gender. Lind-a-what?? Took me at least a week for the letters in this unusual name to make sense in my head. I made an attempt to check out their website.

I usually investigate people or institutions before I spend my money. But in this case, because I’ve been so worn down by the last two years, consumed by brain injury grief, given up on my reading, I went only as far as determining that they’re legitimate and seem to have ideas about reading that I’d never heard of — and most importantly Dr. Thompson had recommended them — before calling them to schedule an appointment.

The Toronto office doesn’t have a physical location and the online interaction is handled by their Minnesota office. After a couple of time zone snafus, the centre’s director and I spoke on the phone and arranged for an evaluation to be done over two days. She didn’t want fatigue to interfere with the assessment, and from the beginning of this awful brain-injury-recovery slog, I usually try to divide up assessments so that I can continue to function in daily life or not have to nap for days after and deal with a migraine to boot. Insurance companies aren’t too pleased sometimes with that; people who care about your health are cool with it.

I’ve had no experience with telemedicine. After this evaluation, I’m a fan. I didn’t have to wake up an hour earlier and lose valuable sleep so as to be able to commute to a clinic. I could see and hear the person really well. Not so sure about her me because my computer’s webcam is kind of old. At least she could hear me well.

I had bought a decent-sized display two years ago when after my eye surgery my new vision demanded a better monitor. That display showed both her clearly and the documents conveyed through the document camera or the words on her screen that she shared with me a couple of times. She used Apple earbuds to speak to me, and so I never heard the construction noise in the background that apparently started up midway through the test. Also, my voice didn’t blast all over her office. Privacy!

Best part of the e-evaluation: I was able to be comfortable in my own environment, dress in partly sloppy non-constricting clothes, and not worry about organizing myself to get out the door.

All my energy went to doing the evaluation.

This is huge when you have a brain injury and every single thing takes energy from you.

We launched right in with a vocabulary test unlike any I had experienced before. Usually they give you pages on which words of increasing difficulty are listed and beside which are four other words that you have to decide which one is closest in meaning and circle it. In this test, the assessor spoke the word and I was presented with four illustrations and had to choose which one represented the word.

This test was looonnnnggg. And tiring.

There were a couple of words I couldn’t understand and she spelled them out for me. Apparently, me asking her to spell out a couple of words told them something about how I prop up my reading. More later. There were also a couple of words I’d never heard of before, one of which I couldn’t even begin to parse out to decide which illustration could represent it.

Some of the next tests reminded me of Cogmed exercises I’d done last year and had continued to do in a maintenance form up until early January 2018. I also relied on my cognitive psychology lessons on memory to know how to accomplish the task given me. Chunking and pattern recognition is a great thing.

One test where I was shown for a few seconds . . . let’s say a series of increasingly more letters sometimes in nonsense words, sometimes seemingly random . . . then was asked questions on them, I knew exactly how to do. But my brain had to work SO HARD to do it, my head felt like it had exploded. We had to take a break then she gave me five minutes to put my head down while she turned off the screen. I did extremely well but strained my brain to its max because I have no automaticity in these cognitive skills. Automaticity is what happens when, for example, you learn to walk. At first, you have to focus on every aspect of it. Slowly your brain learns what to do and now, as an adult, you don’t think about starting your legs, moving your legs, you just . . . walk. I guess that’s a metaphor for brain injury. You know HOW, sometimes you can execute HOW but the fatigue cost is enormous because the injury took away all automaticity and/or broke the neural networks to execute a particular skill.

Because it was obvious I was doing well on the vocabulary, spelling, etc. tests, especially that head-exploding one, I commented that this is why people don’t believe I have reading problems. Although I have improved bit by bit, I still struggle enormously with the length of material and acquiring new vocabulary. She said that’s why they have tests for that. They were coming up and would be divided across the two days.

She proceeded to wring out my brain with stories I had to answer multiple-choice questions for. I’ve endured so many neuropsychology tests that include stories that I ace because they’re not new to me and my recall of facts of a story isn’t bad in the short term, that I was skeptical.

I read out loud the first story. She took the story away and put on the screen multiple-choice questions and read them out, one by one, and their answers as I followed along. This seemed like the usual, except that I had to read the story out loud. And she had given me a brief synopsis before showing me the story through the document camera.

The second story dispelled any idea that this was same-old, same-old. Every story was in a solid paragraph. The paragraph stories varied in physical widths, sentence lengths, vocabulary length and difficulty, and other aspects. The questions too were not same-old same-old recitation of facts. They required the kind of comprehension you need in a high school English class aka what is a character feeling or what is their motivation. I needed to be able to create a picture in my mind of what was going on. I can barely do that and hang on to a concept image for my own writing!

After I completed the evaluation, restored my brain with one of my neuromodulation devices, and napped, I thought about how the story test got at the reading skills I learned in high school and university. I remember in one class, our teacher showed us the longest sentence ever written and showed us how to read it. In another class, I was taught how to use an unusual word such that a reader who wouldn’t know it could guess at it from the context.

That test and the story one I did on the second day that had open recall questions spoken to me (not shown me like with the first paragraph test), were the first I recall doing that got at those high school reading skills. Because they jogged my memory of those classes, I can now articulate better one of the skills I’ve lost and haven’t regained all that well.

After a pronounce-these-letters-and-two-letter-combos test, I realized another issue my brain injury created in me. Basic verbal language abilities I had mastered as a young child were gone and I hadn’t noticed. I had also not had any review of those skills during neurorehab in 2000-2001 because I could speak. It didn’t matter how I spoke, the fact I could was good enough, and we focused on communication. Looking back on that, I have to say we barely got started in addressing all the communication issues either that I faced over the years.

After I got the results summary, I looked up some of these tests and, briefly, the origin of Lindamood-Bell, and I have to ask:

Why were these tests not given me in 2000 when I was told I couldn’t read?

They would have teased out where the problems lay and the team would never have advised trying audiobooks. Doing a qEEG would also have told them I have auditory processing difficulties. Failing colossally when I followed their advice to read audiobooks instead of text was probably when my self-confidence began to drop.

I have the results and recommendations from the reading evaluation. Will write on those later. I’m gobsmacked and finding it difficult to process it all. One thing I will say: restoring the brain after brain injury costs A LOT BECAUSE Canada’s universal health care doesn’t cover it. Are you aware?

Books

Moving On From Reading

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People walking away down PATH system.There’s a huge irony in my reading rehab journey: I thought long and hard about what it would take to restore reading after brain injury; I wrote about my theoretical program; I’ve done bits and pieces of that program; I am now receiving the bare minimum of help for reading.

My second and third posts on Psychology Today are about reading loss and restoration after brain injury because it’s the single biggest loss I’ve had of my core identity, because it’s been so very hard to get anyone seriously interested in helping me, and because both experiences are common in others, no matter their gender or race or cause of brain injury.

I wrote in my third post about lack of cognitive empathy for my reading loss. It’s not that people aren’t sympathetic or health care professionals haven’t tried some of this, some of that, it’s that they haven’t been able to put themselves in my shoes and gone, “ohhhh, this is bad, real bad, we really must make reading restoration central to your health care.”

My neurodoc verrryyy gradually over the last three years made a concerted effort to read with me most days out of the week, following a formula that worked — after six years of me begging him — yet still only when he recalled bits of the evolving formula, when he didn’t shunt it aside for “real therapy,” when he wasn’t welded to staying in his box of 20th century psychiatric medicine and trying to shove me again and again into a gendered 20th century DSM model of brain injury. He never really had cognitive empathy for my reading loss even though he’d agreed that, no matter what, he would find at least five minutes to get reading in and, when he’d followed that, he noticed himself that I did substantially better, emotionally and cognitively. Yet because he didn’t have cognitive empathy for my reading loss, he stopped doing that by 2018. He also never discussed with the rest of my health care team how to work together to recover my reading. And he was pretty blunt in early April that he wasn’t interested in helping me with my brain injury grief, which would include dealing with reading loss. I finally decided the emotional toll of having to continually remind and beg to stick to the reading rehab routine that worked and of his 20th century psychiatric thinking wasn’t worth it anymore. Unfortunately, this kind of approach to brain injury rooted in the last century is still the norm today within medical circles.

So I’m moving on. I put him on hiatus and am putting reading in the past where others have decreed through their actions it belongs. It’s really difficult for me to enforce my own reading rehab on myself; it’s one of the few cognitions that can’t be restored on one’s own. My mother reads with me every so often. That’ll have to be enough to maintain my current level unless God decides to answer prayer and bring me a miracle.

Brain Health

Neurodoc Chronicles: Reading Rehab and Unheard Brain Injury Grief

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I emailed my neurodoc a long time ago a tweet about what reading means to me. He’d repeatedly said my emails were important; he understood they were my way of communicating what I needed to talk about during our sessions. He printed, signed, filed it. And he wonders why he isn’t succeeding with me.


As far as my neurodoc seems concerned, drugs and the DSM are the only answers. Using newer communication methods is, well, he’s not going to do it. Learning about 21st-century discoveries of the brain and brain injury aren’t actually to be acted upon. Working in a Toronto teaching hospital, one can’t be too forward thinking, y’know. After all his ABI expert colleague didn’t want to burden his brain with 20+-year-old knowledge of thermoregulation. Better to tell the patient to get on with their life than help them. But I digress.

Let me help my neurodoc figure out what to do.

He could’ve printed out that poster. At our session immediately following me sending that email, he could’ve shown me the poster and read it out to me then asked: “Tell me how you feel or what you’re thinking as I read that out to you?” I probably would’ve bumbled around or resented being asked how I feel since half the time back then I had no clue. So then he could’ve brought up each pictogram, maybe mused about what he thought, and drawn me into a discussion. That at least would’ve started my thinking. It would’ve brought up memories. And memories would’ve dragged up emotions and the grief — over time. Doing that only for one session would’ve stopped the process of my broken brain remembering, reconnecting memories to emotions, processing the grief. Sticking to that topic over the next few sessions would’ve continued that process. But, y’know, email.

My futile attempt at communicating some deep, hidden-to-my-conscious mind emotion I could barely talk about all began with an email. And since the Ontario government won’t pay for emails and Canadian physicians think emails are the devil’s work or way too innovative or something like that, my grief over losing my reading went unheard. This was one of many attempts I made to get reading rehab going, to have my grief over losing the core of my identity being heard. Telling him that being a reader who inhaled books like opium — well, that went unheard, ignored, dismissed, shut down, year in and year out while I dragged him like a dead weight to help me rehab my reading, one agonizing step at a time, with rising hope as I glacially made progress only for him to “forget” the rehab, forcing me to remind, nag, beg to resume again. I’ve put my neurodoc on hiatus. The emotional cost of reading rehab is no longer worth it.

Brain Power

Reading Rehab: Big Picture Begins to Return

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River in Kluane National Park between mountainsLast Monday brought a surprise — in the neverending river of reading rehab, I connected the elements in a chart in the book I was reading with my mother to the succeeding paragraphs. I could see automatically how they connected. Maybe this uptick in reading cognition happened because this is my fifth time reading this book — the second time reading it out loud with another person — but it’s probably also the reason I felt so nauseated last week. Any time I feel nausea and/or dizzy all the time, it’s usually because my brain is making those final neuronal connections (as I see it) to give me back what injury took and produce a sudden leap forward. I never know what the improvement will be until about a week later.

I can’t believe it’s in my reading!

I can’t believe it’s in the stubborn-no-I-won’t-see-the-big-picture area! To see automatically how one chapter flowed out of the previous, how sections tied in together on Monday was . . .

Whoa.

Previously it was either a conscious effort to see it or I just saw sections and chapters as silos, knowing they were connected but unable to see it. This deficit didn’t affect my recall. Instead, it created anxiety over the effort of reading, of perceiving “how does this all tie together‽”, the big picture of it all.

The big picture has always eluded me. I may sound like I see it when I recall what we’ve just read or recall the chapters read so far, in my reading work with my neurodoc, but what I see in my mind, how I understand the book is not as a whole unit, but rather as a series of silos or silos co-existing.

Or to put it another way, imagine building a little lego village. You place a brick on the flat green pad. Then another brick next to it. And another. Pretty soon you have a wall, then a house, then another building. And a tree. As you click in each lego piece, you see all of what you’re building and you can see it growing into a little village. That’s the big picture. Now imagine you can’t see the whole. You can only see part of the first building. Then that fades away as you see the tree you clicked in last. How can you see the village you created if all you can see are the south wall of the first house or the top of the tree or the roof of another building, in succession but not altogether?

Monday, those silos of views connected to each other. Awesome.

Unfortunately, being overwhelmed by events interferes with all my cognitions, especially new improvements like this one. So bit of a setback this week, but that should be temporary.

In a related area and in the weirdness department, that same Monday, I gained energy as I read out loud the last two paragraphs of the two pages we were reading. Gained? Gained‽ Reading makes me feel better but always fatigues me. How did I gain energy‽!!! Was that just a weird blip or a real improvement 18 years, two months, and five days after the crash that obliterated my novel reading like it was so much sand in the wind. I can’t recall how I felt after reading a book in my pre-injury life, it was so long ago now. I only recall disappearing into and becoming one with the world of a mystery novel and surfacing a couple of hours later, wondering where I was. Did I have more energy? Did I feel rested and re-energized afterward to go back to work? My mother tells me I was always full of energy. Hard to believe after almost two decades of unrelenting fatigue and eighteen years of having that reading in flow, reading to escape, reading to re-energize, taken from me. If this is the first spark that it might actually be returning, I know from past experience that it’s just a spark at this moment. Things like this work like a short circuit: old skill/ability sparks on, hope rises, improvement vanishes, hold on to hope, wait and wait, another spark, hold breath that it’ll stay, release as it doesn’t, another spark and one that lasts longer, and so it goes until at last the short circuit is a whole circuit once again.

But this weird 180 of my reading from injured ability to maybe my old normal is so tied in to the grief of my loss, I dare not hope. Yet there it beats like soft feathery wings deep inside me.

Brain Power

Screwtape Teaches Us a Lesson about Reading Rehab

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Tunnel to the light.

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 support brains. When you have a brain injury, you can feel the alleviation of effort when doing a cognitive task with another as opposed to on your own. They not only support you emotionally when they’re encouraging and keeping you on task, but also their neurons are like scaffolds that hold up and activate your own.

This extends to the concept of conversation. Reading rehab can simply be reading and immediate recall, or it can include the give and flow of discussion. Discussion is the human way to express what’s in your mind, hear what’s in the other’s. It leads to clarity and understanding of the text, which straight reading and recall cannot do.

I noticed when reading Don’t Forgive Too Soon that the sections we didn’t discuss were much harder for me to remember later during weekly testing of my long-term recall. I also noticed that it was easier for me to remember those chapters I’d reread with my mother, again especially if we’d discussed them a bit. (I’m reading then rereading text to see if double reading within a relatively short period of time leads to better cognitive processing, remembering, learning. So far, I would say it does.)

But adding discussion was sort of ad hoc.

Just before the holidays, we began reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, which I’d read in my injured way many years ago. I remembered only the basics: Screwtape writes to his young relative about getting a human into Satan’s house. Something about the war. And something about the church. That was the sum total of my memory. Oh, and I enjoy Lewis’s writing.

So my neurodoc and I launched into it in the same way as we’d read Don’t Forgive Too Soon. I had no trouble with immediate recall. He also noted my abstract comprehension was improving. But he forgot to get me to do weekly long-term recall until I reminded him. That’s when I fell flat on my face. Although we’d been reading a couple of paragraphs daily, I couldn’t remember much of the concepts or the story, and we’d read only four short chapters! Not exactly a huge memory task. I also saw in my mind each chapter as a silo. I had no idea while we were reading how each chapter connected to the next, except that Uncle Screwtape was advising Wormwood on his latest issue and the human was a man converting to Christianity and was called “the patient.”

How to get me to see the big picture? How to help me build up the narrative in my mind and retain it so that not only could I see the progression of the story but also what Lewis was teaching?

We started over again at chapter one. We read a paragraph or two. I did a bit of immediate recall as usual. But my neurodoc quickly broke in to launch us into discussion. What was Lewis saying? What did I see? What was the theme that was developing? Sometimes I knew the biblical text being referred to and briefly recollected that. Then we discussed how that tied in.

Before we began reading chapter two, my neurodoc restated the theme of chapter one. When we examined the theme or issue in the first two paragraphs of chapter two, we discussed how they related to chapter one’s theme.

Suddenly I saw how chapter one flowed into chapter two. And I began to see the plot progression and the beginnings of the big picture. Phew!

So now at the end of each chapter, I say what I saw as its theme or issue. Then at the next reading session, before we begin reading the next chapter, I relate the themes and how each chapter flows one into the next starting with chapter one and ending with the chapter we’ve just finished. Needless to say, I have to remind my neurodoc that’s what we agreed on and to stick with the program. Sigh.

As we progress through the book, it’s getting harder and harder; yet this method is letting me see the characters, be aware of the plot not just vaguely the concepts, understand more and better what Lewis is saying.

I could not do this on my own. It takes too much effort to initiate; it’s a tremendous amount of cognitive work to do on one’s own; you need another to prompt you or encourage when memory or abstract processing fails; and the discussion part is key. You can’t really discuss something with yourself. I mean, you can, but it’s kind of limited and devoid of the benefits being a social animal gives us.

I need to add this book to my Goodreads so I can track my progress. Oops. (Having another human remind me would be awesome. Oh well.)

Philosophy

Mind Notes: The Blind Spot

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Photo of eyeWhen you have a lot of trouble reading books, that is, seeing the big picture, absorbing details, able to build up the narrative in your memory, learn and retain the learning, etc., etc., studying philosophy of mind gets a little discouraging. Unbelievably exhausting too. Enter videos. When you can’t read, watch!

Video courses may have been set up for normal, busy people who want to learn in their spare time, but they’re a boon for people with disabilities who would like to go to class but cannot due to various limitations. Financial is a big one, too, because the unemployment rate and medical expenses for people with disabilities, especially brain injury, are rather high. Not much left to pay for courses or ways to compensate for one’s limitations.

One of the perks of winning NaNoWriMo was a discount on Great Courses Plus. When I found out they had a series on Philosophy of Mind, I signed up! I began watching the series right away. Brain injury makes everything slow going. I just finished watching lecture 7 of 24 of Mind-Body Philosophy. It’s the second time I’ve watched it. I couldn’t recall this morning the last lecture I’d viewed before Christmas, this one didn’t seem familiar, loaded it, went, oh yeah, I have seen this, but kept watching because I hadn’t understood what the eye had to do with consciousness. This go round I got it . . . I think.

If consciousness is like a picture, then I guess the point of this lecture is that what the eye sees should be the same as what our conscious mind is aware of. It isn’t. Prof. Grim (no, no typo) showed two card tricks you can do with your vision. One is without seeing what it is first, you hold up a playing card way out to the side while looking straight ahead. Now see if you can tell what colour it is. You won’t be able to tell if it’s black or red until you move your arm closer to the front of your visual field. For whatever reason, with both eyes, I can tell much earlier than he could. The right side was more of a blank white with one playing card until I held the card at a particular angle. Perhaps I have more cones in the periphery than normal . . . ???

But it was the other card trick that made me realize something. On a white card draw an ‘x’ and a black dot, about 2 cm apart. Cover the right eye, hold the card up straight ahead with the ‘x’ on the right side of the card, and bring the card slowly toward you keeping your left eye focused on the ‘x.’ At one point the dot will disappear; as you keep bringing it closer the dot will reappear. If you draw lines around and over the dot, the dot will still disappear but the hatching will not.

The current view of philosophy of mind philosophers is that the brain is the mind. If that is so, then why does the dot disappear? It disappears because of the physiology of the eyeball. But the brain can “see” the hatching that is over the dot. In other words, the brain is very, very good at filling in our blind spot. I have personally experienced how good the brain is at approximating depth perception (which I realized only last year when I acquired true depth perception and what the difference is). But if consciousness is the brain, then when I am conscious that there is a dot on the card, my brain should still be able to see the dot. If brain is consciousness and consciousness knows the dot is there and the brain is really good at “filling in” missing info, then the dot should not disappear.

When I took Philosophy of Mind Oxford short course online, I became convinced of the dualist argument. The mind is not the body. The brain is not the mind. This dot test, is one confirmation of that.

Book Reviews

Fish — A Graphic Novel Review

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Fish! With legs!!

FishFish by Peter Kielland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was given Fish as the next step up in my using graphic novels as part of my reading rehab. A traumatic brain injury — a concussion type — had stolen my ability to read books. I remained literate, just couldn’t read. It’s a too-common problem unaddressed by health care professionals who think the band-aid solution is just fine. It’s not. In discussions with a psychology professor, we thought graphic novels may help my ability to see, conceptualize, and follow a plot. Take the text out and maybe my brain can process ideas. The first one worked well, so on to this one!

Uh, well . . .

Fish was bizarre!

I began each weekly reading session, recalling out loud what I’d read so far. I read four, five, or six pages, recalling each page out loud at the end of it. I tried to motivate myself to handwrite a summary at some point during the week. And I struggled to understand what the heck was happening; then as I began to understand the what, I continued to flail at understanding why and what it all meant. It revealed to me (because health care people taking care of my brain aren’t working with me on this, so it’s just me myself and I figuring this whole thing out) that I have trouble building up the picture of a story not because it’s presented in text but because my brain can’t do it, period. This also means I can’t understand concepts that have depth to them. And Fish ain’t a superficial, silly story about a fish with legs that ends up in a city! Each scene means something. The sequence of the scenes is probably important. Being able to not only recall but also to tie the scenes and dream sequences together, to be able to remember a scene from early on and tie it to something much further on in the book, is necessary to “see” the big picture and understand a concept being built up.

But as I worked at reading four pages at a time, then eventually six pages — always reading to the edge of my fatigue — little bits of what the author meant by the dream sequence of Calvary and other scenes began to populate the big blank in my mind, like filling in a jigsaw puzzle. Mid-October, it was still difficult for me to see the point of the story, the story arc, and the plot. But after a break during most of November while I wrote a novel, I returned to it in November’s last weekend and surprised myself by how much I recalled and how I suddenly understood concepts I hadn’t before. Boggled!

Being able to understand the theme somewhat abruptly changed the book in my mind from being a chore I had to slog through to being slightly curious to see what would happen to Fish next.

The following weekend, as I reread the previous four pages I’d read then read the last five pages of the book, much more of that jigsaw puzzle filled in. I still don’t have a solid feeling of the book. It’s like seeing the author’s ideas through blackened glass with pieces cleared here and there, but it’s enough for me to feel pretty good about my reading progress and to sense the author was making some rather pointed comments.

As for the book . . . it’s strange and disturbing. I’m not a fan of that kind of drawing style. I admit that I could have benefitted from discussing it with someone, in the way that using a new word in conversation three times helps one understand and remember the word. Those kinds of discussions as I progressed through the book may have made me appreciate Fish’s story more. But, again, to be honest, the drawing style kind of repelled me. Only as I’ve digested the book, gotten away from seeing the pictures so that the character of Fish emerges stronger, do I feel sorry for Fish while admiring how he reveals the people around him.

View all my reviews

Brain Power

Don’t Read, Watch to Learn!

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Although I did well in the Oxford online short courses on philosophy of mind and metaphysics, the reading just about broke me because my neurons in the reading-related networks were injured, and so little is known about how the brain reads that treatment had been a series of guesses and so not hugely effective. Plus no one in the health professions grasped that a writer needs to be able to read for hours, not a few minutes.

In my book Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me, I write about my ongoing reading rehab adventures and draw up a theoretical program to recover reading.

Since I took the Oxford courses, I no longer need a two-hour nap after reading a newspaper article or couple pages of a book; my abstract processing has improved; my cognitive skills have improved; and my emotions are beginning to connect. But I still cannot read philosophy.

Thank God for the YouTube revolution and NaNoWriMo winner goodie of a discount to The Great Courses Plus. The GCP site has a course on mind-body or philosophy of mind. After getting help to sign up, I’ve happily begun watching Prof. Patrick Grim’s series of half hour video lectures with graphics. OK, I needed a nap after the first one, and I can feel my brain straining to grasp the concepts in the second one even though I’ve studied the Greeks back in high school and studied much of the first two videos in the Oxford Short Course. But it’s still a lot easier than reading!

Brain Power

Returning to the Graphic Novel for Reading Rehab

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It took about a month to recover after the insane CCAC-bureaucratic-rules-of-can-only-get-help-in-4-weeks-tough-shit-if-can't-keep-it-up mandate. Now that I'm feeling more my usual self, I'm sitting up and looking around at life outside of writing and am getting back to reading a graphic novel weekly as part of reading rehab. I set myself a ten-minute goal and multiple alarms so that I will keep it up. I hope! With brain injury, with no human resource help, sustaining a draining cognitive activity is more about failure than success. Alarms and apps help!

I was given Fish by Peter Kielland to read quite awhile ago. Unlike the first graphic novel I read last year, this one has a bit of text, but so far not much, so it is like it's a graphic wordless novel. Strange, primordial tale so far. Four pages, and I was all done in. Almost got to 10 minutes, but if not for that goal, would've happily quit at 8 minutes and three pages as fatigue hit and a concentration headache began. That's reading after brain injury for you, though.