My Concussion Story, Part 2: The Injury

It was as if some cruel gods had read my blog post about how the pain of the tattoo allowed me to empathize with the pain of my grandfather’s illness.

“HAHAHA!” I imagined them cackling, “She thought a misally 3 hours of pain would help her know his pain?? She does not know pain and she does not know how he felt the last 13 years of his life. She does not know vulnerability. She abuses her body and her mind. She takes her health for granted.

She wants to feel pain? She wants to know her grandfather’s illness? She wants to experience what her grandfather went through? Let’s show her pain.”

And so then, on a day bursting with hope for the future and stress-filled exhaustion, topped with my burning desire to please others, the cruel gods reached down, and set a rock in front of the flowing creek that was my life. As the stream collided with the rock with unexpected force, the creek was set to flow in a different direction.

In the days that followed, I made a series of decisions that coincided with one another just so to make my initial brain injury worsen. I have heard others describe concussions (aka Mild Traumatic Brain Injuries) this way, and it is an apt description: If your brain is a computer, yours is replaced with an old one that is slow and clunky. My brain processed slowly as if through a fog, and the room wobbled as I walked. When I laid in bed, it seemed as if the bed was floating. 

Insomnia is one common symptom of concussions. In a cruel twist of fate, the one thing that I needed the most--sleep--was almost impossible to get as I laid in a bed that was floating, in a room that was spinning, with ears that were ringing, and with a head that was pounding. 

You know when you’ve been working hard on the computer for about 9 hours, and you’re reading but you’re not actually taking in any information? Your eyes glaze the page, and you try to read something, or work on something, but your brain feels like its shutting down for the day? That moment when you say to yourself, “I’m no longer being productive, I should probably go home”? So then you go to happy hour and have a beer, or perhaps a puff of a joint, and you feel a little dizzy and confused and not quite in control of your emotions?

That was me. All the time. It was trippy AF. 

(As I write this 4 months later, I still can’t imagine having a drink and enjoying it. I had enough of that out-of-control, dizzy feeling to last a lifetime, it seems.)

This wasn’t how I imagined it. I thought I was either invincible or dead. I never imagined I would get hit and survive, left to suffer with a brain so unfamiliar and so unlike anything I had ever experienced.

Before this, I had never consciously felt the physical consequences of working too hard. I had always been rewarded for my hard work. Suddenly, my whole world shifted. Now, if I worked too hard, I was left to suffer the consequences with earth-shattering headaches, panic attacks, and exhaustion that would last for days.

The physical pain was the easiest to deal with. I could take pills for that. I happily took the pills prescribed to me for concussion sufferers. But I would have to learn that the path to healing requires so much more than just popping a pill. Concussion recovery requires a new lifestyle, a new way of thinking and a new way of being: taking things slow, taking lots of breaks, and lots of deep breathing exercises to relieve anxiety and stress. 

3 months after the accident, I sat in a theater in Chicago sitting next to my cousins as tears streamed uncontrollably down my face when I listened to the closing line of the play: “Maybe the dead are meant to help the living find their path.”

And I thought of my grandfather then. A football player, and later a workaholic (so my family tells me) professor of chemical engineering at an R-1 institution, the same place where I was now getting treatment for my concussion: the University of Michigan. My dream had always been to be a university professor at an R-1. Was he helping me find my path by showing me, through the only way I would listen, that I was not on the path to fulfillment?

My life as I knew it had ended. But perhaps now I was seeing more clearly. Perhaps now I would be able to find my path.