Shaken
Shaken Up
Possibly By Accident, Or Possibly By Design
A few years ago, I was a bit shaken, quite literally, in what turned out to be an unfortunate accident. It is with deliberation that I call a pretty major bicycle accident “unfortunate”. According to multiple doctors, especially the neurologists I have since seen, I should have died. Or, at the very least, I should have been left severely challenged, both mentally and physically.
THE ACCIDENT
It started out as a bike ride, just to get a workout in on vacation. My two small children and I had gone to visit relatives for the summer. Due to my TypeA-personality, I was naturally riding with my Runkeeper-App on – any semi-sedentary but fit-”ish” woman in her 30s likes to know how many calories she’s burning during the weekly exercise she has to undertake in order to keep her girlish figure, no? Notice how I said “weekly exercise”? So, yes, I try to get in a workout at least twice a week. And it’s usually to punish myself for eating too much in the days prior to the workout. In this case, my Aunt had made me her famous shrimp&grits dinner and I had over-indulged.
My cousin, who was riding in front of me, took a turn and – possibly because I was half-listening to music through my iphone – I guess I didn’t catch on quickly enough. Trying to slow down from about 20mph, I hit his rear tire and went down. I remember the braking process, the skidding on the sandy asphalt, seeing my front wheel go in between the spokes of the bike in front of me, and the rest is history.
The problem for me was, when I started being fully alert about five days later in the hospital, that it seemed like the rest was mostly someone else’s history. You see, I wasn’t wearing a helmet on this bike ride. I wish I could say that I always wore a helmet before, or at least since they started making the little plastic, foam-lined caps for adults. But that would be a lie. Oh, I made my kids wear helmets on every moving toy they even only sat on! Especially since I now know better. I brought their helmets to Europe with me for the summer, back in 2014. But my own head was never that important to me, because hey!- I never needed a helmet growing up, right? They’re for kids, not for adults, right? Racebikers in Germany are often (not so affectionately) called “Ants”, due to the elongated but flat shape of many bicycle helmets, which are thought to resemble ant heads.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE ACCIDENT – INTENSIVE CARE
Most of the first five days in the hospital are a blur to me; hence me calling it “someone’s else’s history”. This is what I was told upon wakening up in the ICU:
The hospital where the ambulance took me didn’t have a trauma unit, so I was airlifted to another hospital about an hour’s drive away. There, doctors kept waking me up every hour or so to ask me all those fun questions, like “Do you know where you are?”, “Do you know what year it is?”, and “Do you know who our president is?” Evidently, the only way to wake me up enough to answer was to press on my broken collar bone – ouch! Luckily, with my mother by my side to translate, I very narrowly escaped brain surgery. From what I’ve been told, I understood English well enough to answer the questions correctly, but for the answers, I only used one of my first two languages, confusing the doctors profoundly.
HEALING
Just this multi-lingualism may have been my lucky ticket or guardian angel in the ICU. For someone who has repeatedly been told that she “should have died” and that “more than 8,000 people die from this type of brain injury every year in this country”, I’ve recovered really well and really fast. Actually, the latter quote above comes straight from the wall in the rehab center at the hospital I woke up in. Nothing like a little positive reinforcement, I’d say…
But all kidding aside, the side of my brain that got smashed to pieces first in the coup-contre-coup TBI that I was dealt back then, was the left temporal lobe. This one, in case you weren’t aware, is your Math, Language, Speech, and part of Memory center.
And if you weren’t aware, don’t worry about it. It turns out, I had absolutely no clue how the human brain worked until I had to re-train my own! And it wasn’t all that much fun.
RE-TRAINING MY BRAIN
The first problem doctors ran into was my stubbornness. I was simply unwilling to yield to their expectations. Evidently, someone with a traumatic brain injury to the left temporal lobe has memory issues. I was asked repeatedly what I remembered and, upon recounting piece by piece what I ate that morning for breakfast, as well as the morning before that bike ride, told that “that’s impossible. You need to have lost some of your memory.”
“Ummm, no. I remember. But believe me; there are quite a few memories from 6th grade that I would have liked to have lost…” Apparently, a full memory bank with some European sarcasm peppered in was not at all what these doctors were looking for.
Obviously, my speech center was not affected much either. While there was blood running out of my ear from the internal hemorrhaging, I was able to give my cousin the code to my iphone at the scene of the accident AND translate the directions on the screen from French (my second language) to English (the language my cousins and I speak, especially in family settings where everyone else speaks German, because we’ve just always been cool like that).
The language part of my brain suffered only temporarily; neurologists assume because it was already so pliable due to all the different languages going on in there; therefore, my brain just kind of started over and created new connections and pathways.
This was true for the math part just the same. I remember being given a few arithmetic problems during my second week as a hospital “inmate”. [Seriously, they wouldn’t allow me to go anywhere by myself, for fear of me falling or having a seizure, I guess.] I was appalled by those 2nd grade-level math problems and, a little aggressively, told them to “just bring me something that’s actually challenging.” I got more than I had bargained for with some fun algebra questions that, I am ashamed to admit, I could not solve at the time.
What these doctors did get with me was the aggression. Evidently, right after going through a TBI, patients experience elevated levels of aggression. Or should I say, people around the patient experience higher levels of aggression? Aggression and “no-filter talk” seem to be the most common “side effects” of this TBI-thing that can stop your life-path in its tracks. All the literature the hospital staff armed my husband with seems to suggest to “be on the lookout for aggressive and irrational behaviour.”
While the TBI was certainly a factor in making me “snap” faster than usual, it was not any behaviour that the people in my life who were close to me experienced. I only snapped at my mother (we have been snappy with each other since I was – uh – about ten years old, because mothers and daughters often are, or so I’m told) and at my husband, to whom I had (incidentally) suggested five months prior to “the unfortunate accident” that maybe we should just get a divorce. The same guy who, while being a great person and a good father to our two children, prohibited me from taking our kids to visit my family in Europe for more that two weeks that summer. Which is why the kids and I ended up on the East Coast at my Aunt and Uncle’s house that year in the first place. Anyone still questioning any aggression on my part that was directed at my husband? I was so depressed and homesick, unhappy in my marriage, and too cheap to spend $4,500 to fly three people to Europe for only two weeks. Two weeks was going to be the maximum time he allowed and, according to him, I was “selfish and every other woman would be so grateful that her husband was willing to spend this much money so she could go and see her family, even for only a short time.” So, yes, I was incredibly mad at him, and I’m sure I blamed him for waking up in the hospital from the start. Even though I could have got hit by a truck back at home and woken up in the hospital there just the same. I probably would have because I very clearly needed to be shaken.
By contrast, I was apparently, sweet as can be to my Aunt, Uncle, and certainly my children when my father-in-law and husband finally allowed them to come to the hospital to visit me.
HOW TBI RELATES TO BEING DRUNK
Reflecting on everything I went through leading up to the “unfortunate accident” and everything my family went through immediately after and during my healing process, it seems to me that sustaining a traumatic brain injury and getting out-of-your-mind-wasted, practically amounts to the same thing. You get drunk (or high on drugs, if that’s your “calming technique of choice”) when you are happy and it intensifies those feelings et voilà – you’re now having the time of your life. Everything around you is even more rosy-red/rainbow-y than ever before. By contrast, any amount of alcohol you consume that would lower your inhibitions when you are already mad at life and the world can be a recipe for disaster. There is a reason some people turn to alcohol and/or drugs when they are happily celebrating something (think champagne toast at graduations or weddings), as well as when they feel depressed and lonely. It’s mind-altering AND lowers inhibitions to bring out more of what was already there to begin with. Like that friend we all have who gets all lovey-dovey when she’s drunk? Or the family member who gets all in-your-face-argumentative when he imbibes?
As you are currently putting your friends and family into categories to maybe include or exclude them from your next party, let me give you some help.
|
Name of friend/family member |
Over-the-moon Happy |
Content |
Angry |
Sad |
Depressed |
|
Ashley |
:o) |
||||
|
Bobby |
:o) |
You see? I know I am in the “over-the-moon-happy”-category because I have wonderful, well-behaved but curious and outgoing children and a sweet, intelligent, caring, and good-looking man in my life, who would do anything for me and our children. What more could I ask for?
Bobby is in the “content”-category because, while he has wonderful children and a great, caring, and beautiful woman in his life, he is not particularly fond of his work life, mainly because it keeps him too busy travelling to be able to enjoy his babies. Taking this guy out drinking right now would result in a good time overall, with even more benefits to Bobby as he can feel like he’s enjoying life even more fully now. Now, he can have fun going out with friends and family and be content with the lowered inhibitions – go ahead and show us those baby pictures of your little ones, my friend Bobby! 🙂
Any of your friends up there in the sad or depressed categories? Don’t take them out drinking! They might get even sadder and start crying. Forget about it if they are in an angry state! Having grown up in a family with plenty of arguments that started because someone had imbibed a little much, I beg you to please please please do yourself a favour:
Do NOT invite them out to drink!
THE AGGRESSIVE ME – BRAIN-INJURED/DRUNK
I am so very thankful to find myself in the “over-the-moon-happy”-category most days. At the time of the accident, I was transitioning easily from the “angry”-category to the “depressed”-category on any given day. As a matter-of-fact, I had been dealing with tension headaches for months before the fall that shook me up. My brain was trained to respond so negatively to my husband that when I was in the midst of my brain injury-induced stupor, all I could do was hurl aggressive comments at him and generally blame him for all that was wrong with the world.
That re-training part of my brain, by the way, took a lot longer. It also included coming to terms with the fact that my husband and I were not made for each after all and the resulting marriage/separation counseling and divorce mediation.
SHAKEN, THEN STIRRED
So, apparently, my brain and body had to be shaken enough to become broken, just to be stirred into mending itself by wanting to change my circumstances instead of continuing to be depressed about everything in my life. It taught me to never wait for that shake again; to just stir awake what is holding me back and to TAKE THE LEAP AND MAKE IT HAPPEN!
Ashley@Shakenstirredandblended
Hi, I'm Ashley and I am a freelance writer and editor for one local and one national publication. In my spare time, I teach foreign languages and manage two households. Oh, and raise four children. It's a crazy life that I chose and I love every second of it :o)
