माय स्टरोके ओं इन्सिघ्त

Funny- if I enable Hindi- it comes and goes- where it lands- nobody knows.

Title: My Stroke of Insight


The book is a neuroanatomist's take on her own stroke which has been %ing 4 me because I can know just what part of my brain was/is having trouble directing traffic/ routing information/ accessing or unable to access files- though the worst is when the routing results in a narrower and narrower amount of active to files to engage. On a particularly trying day I'll still wind up saying "drain bramage" instead of brain damage but by the time I'm at that place I tend to keep my mouth shut.


Essentially a TBI is a diffused stroke and Jill's suggestions for dealing with a stroke or brain damaged person- they should be standard issue.


I rememeber standing and talking to Linda Page- well trying to get information and I had these big delays between what she said, processing it, (I hadn't yet developed the really bad habit of saying whatever came into my head - so as to avoid) the look of impatience, 'what's wrong with you". Reading that on someone's face when u're struggling realy sucks - so try not to do it to anyone:)bcuz being slow really does suck enough that one doesn't need help on it sucking further


One of the things that has seriously bitten, (have I mentioned how nice it is not to be homeless anymore?)-


But back to what bites and has bitten: being without someone to explain things about the world that I no longer knew or understood. Plus visual information can be very difficult to navigate (visual cortex damage)


Having to relearn the world- which by the way is a truly brutal place far too much of the time. Sorry but people lie near constantly and it's not like I always thought "the most prevalent lies people tell are the ones they tell themselves".


Total Bullshit, mostly people seem to lie near constantly and though there are certainly subroutines of lies to self running... strsight in the eyes falseness in my experience since the TBI seems the rule. That, and running games. Lots of gaming behavior. For instance (and I freeely admit I have had all kinds of trouble with this sort of thing) but could someone explain to me how the second quote winds up on a search of beholdtherelish:


youtube? "%ing the 1st time I commmented on 21st century kid my comment wound up here: "Florida Hurricane News Videos Safety Tipsbeholdtherelish (December 31, 1969 at 6:59 pm). This song gave me chills when I first heard it and still does. cutie51595 (December 31, 1969 at 6:59 pm) ...
www.floridahurricane.net/videos/video/BUJiMBgvD1c"
-granted I was a highly verbal child...
- and my middle name is for hurricane...
* anybody know what all the john/tom foolery with dating is about?
- just curious."


The thing about exposing one's jugular - you get to see what people do with it.


Lastly for this month: FB crowd- sorry regaining memory is taxing, the pixels refreshing on a monitor - well it took a couple years for it not through me into an altered state of consciousness, unbelievable nuasea and waves of "is the ground moving or is it just me?". TBIs, Strokes, etc.- our visual cortexes can register light cycling- fluorescnt lights. I was at Best Buy visiting an old neighbor- smart kid- fabulous and just interested in anything interesting, in other words: a learner. he took me aruond the store and said look in that monitor/tv screen because -


I did, and my stomach slid the way it does on a rollercoaster. I promptly looked away. Lateef was spotting me- just in case. He finds my visual neural weirdness an interesting lab to run at work.


Anyway thanks for the messages ( I hope) and though - well okay I'm willing to offend.


-Anyone with Wiccan beliefs, practices, etc. please defriend me asap as you're not welcome here, there or anywhere.


(bummer- google has changed the parameter- there4 I can no longer colorcode my entries- providing me with more negative space when I log into this site)


Twerps.


2.12.10
It’s been one heck of a month, though that’s not strictly accurate.


TBI, amnesia etc.- so at least on that particular aspect what do you do? Research, and that’s what lead me to remember what was easily the greatest ethical failure of my life: Aarron.


Whom like so much I completely forgot about and had not even the vaguest inkling of his existence and then, and then I did and then I remembered and then I decided to get out in front of that, this and pretty much ever since then, every three weeks or so (if I’m lucky) a bomb goes off in my life. It’s been fielding a constant a barrage since August. A barrage of distractions so now- after the latest, greatest and I’m sure not the last I’m back on track?


Maybe. These last few months have been off the charts and scales. More than once - maybe enough for some meaningful alteration to take place? Trouble, the most upsetting kind for me has taken form after I do what I do, what I’ve always done but got so much worse after the TBI and can I even stop?


I remember six months ago, still living at CM, finally qualifying for unemployment, SC’s one of those states where if you aleave a job for another job and then lose that job there is a penalty: you can’t get unemployment for ? Well for me it was 3 business quarters, almost a year which meant, among other things, parking my car, turning in the tags and bus and biking for a year. As a TBI it meant having to learn the bus system- always such fun for a brain injury. But once I started getting unemployment it meant getting the car back into working order to sell? But of course when VW repaired eight recalls at once something got screwed up which if course will apparently take either a) and act of congress or b) $85 an hour for them to figure out. And then of course three nights ago I got slammed in a parking lot, though I wasn’t there someone left a note saying that a car tagged AA(1/L) 848 hit my lovely tank and left. So - one more thing and the fact is I’m still three months behind- so more fun for me.


But before all that , before my ‘in’ box had a good twelve matters for me to negotiate I stood in line at the DMV wanting to check if there was anything outstanding, trying to find any bumps in the road ahead of time . My first rep was a gay guy- and I love the gay man- a difficult to path to be on anywhere but in the southeastern United States- a really difficult road. He mentioned how surprised he was that the DMV had let me wear my glasses in my driver’s license photo and we just got to talking. The south’s a talky place.


At one point I said “I’ve always given people the benefit of belief,” in that wide eyed smiley way I’ve had about me ever since the TBI gave me a second childhood. But that, that chronic naiveté, that wasn’t new, that was just something that got worse became more acute and pronounced following the TBI. The consequences seem to be higher stakes, or thicker now with my 25% drop in IQ, more difficult to manage. All that’s standard issue for TBI’s as well as something called: judgment errors.


Those errors of course manifest in very base terms now, particularly if I’m tired and life or me+life equals my pushing past my limits and then I’m bumping into door jams, unable to judge the distance of myself in relationship to the physical space. Aahhh-there’s nothing quite like visual cortex damage. But those are the judgment calls easily spotted because hey I’m bouncing off walls as if I’m inside a pinball machine. Predictably that’s when the bruises of unknown origin start. I hurt myself but I can’t really feel it which - hmmm.


I don’t feel the physical knocks like I would if it weren’t for that cervical sprain so in a way that’s an advantage. A few months ago I went to a yoga class where something rather illuminating occurred: I got back the feeling in the right side of my face, from my ear to my jaw. I could feel the tendons moving and had tactile sensitivity like I haven’t had in almost nine years now. It was awesome


and short lived


lasting only three days.


After the thrill and sensation was gone I wondered: if I were to get that level of sensory awareness back could I even handle it? Would my synapses become so overwhelmed that simply managing that data would be a full time job?


But too I’d feel a little less like a ghost wandering the earth…


and too, it made me appreciate that for me I’ve been in and continued to live, walk around in and be conscious in what amounts to a sensory deprivation pool.


A limited pool I grant you, I can still technically hear though my relationship with those particles and waves has completely changed. As I listened to a rebroadcast of an interview with a an autistic woman whom Claire Danes will undoubtedly be nominated for a prize or two for portraying- as I listened to this woman, and this interview that I’d heard years before I related, I related all too well on the topic of sound. How something as small as a bell ringing, a buzzer, something errant or simply too many sources at once can go straight into your spinal column and you, she, the cow whoever panics or so it seems but mostly it’s just one’s nervous system exploding and all you want to do is get as far away as possible as quickly as possible because it feels like an animal’s tearing you apart.


I was never what one would call an outdoorsy type except for the beach where I‘d ever be amazed by people would bring music? Why ? Surf and wind- what exactly tops that? They‘re a form of white noise within a organic chaos construct. I‘d always liked those sounds but now, now it’s the only place sound and I aren’t at war with each other. Well that and white noise, the lower range. The hum of a fan or freezer, an air-conditioning unit , the signal-less static of an older television, the wind in your ears - better yet the wind and the surf and I’m temporarily rebooted as if some virus in the living computer of my brain has been stunned into dormancy. But under water, a bathtub, the ocean, I could spend hours, days there. Though I was like that as a kid too spending most of time at the community pool underwater, diving for pennies like some Polynesian in search of pearls.


Yeah if I had my druthers I’d be under water 24-7 and except for reminders like sound or seeing things in flashing triplicate that’s what it feels like in my body as if I’m a water creature forced to land. Physically it probably feels like that too, that other worldliness of an altered physical experience as though surrounded by something insulating. So when I bounce/d off doors, don’t quite get the distance right between me or a another person I don’t feel it, just a pressure, no pain- well embarrassment, frustration, etc as well.


People- well do people still pay to go into and spend time in sensory deprivation pools? Late 70’s and early eighties there was a thing wasn’t there? I seem to remember something about that, a womb pre-birth experience baby boomer phase?


On the rare occasions I went to a TBI support group sponsored by the state there were fluorescent light bulbs.


Fluorescent light bulbs!


It’s still amazing to me because TBI’s our brains tend to register the cycling and can’t handle the input . Kind of like if someone were to put you in a small room, invite a brass band and have them all start playing different and totally unrelated pieces. That’s what it feels like. So where better to have a TBI meeting room than a room with Fluorescent lights and - oh yeah computer monitors. Those screens cycle too.


For the first few years following the accident I couldn’t hardly be on computers and even now I try not to look- just type , access, retrieve and get he hell out of there. I don’t lose my physical balance anymore- I’ll get a little unsteady but the nausea- that was the worst. And not one of those not so brilliant minds attending my case never mentioned that would or could be a problem.


I suspect my first neurologist was a creationist. Never got me any kind of therapy while I still had insurance, he let that first critical year just tick- tock by.


Once I said “Isn’t there something because people weren’t designed for this kind impact”.


“YES they were!”


No they weren’t 0-45mph-0-45-0. Inside two seconds no, and not with all the force going to your head and neck which in my case, at my angels meant a force equivalent of not one- but two baby grand pianos landing on my head.


A pox upon anyone driving one of those ton plus SUVs and talking on the phone at the same time. That’s what happened to me: sitting at a red light and Shawn How()- who still probably bemoans the hike in his insurance hit me at about 45 miles an hour…which eventually led to my becoming homeless.


Yeah - and Angela this one’s for you because people really don’t get it: Healthcare IS rationed NOW . Has been since before the Nixon administration.


Think this can’t happen to you- maybe you’re right but as the number one cause of homelessness is becoming lack of healthcare- ya‘ sure about that?


Greed is not the most efficient deliverer of anything. And greed has pervaded our system long enough?


Or maybe not. Maybe when it’s your neighbor (gee what did that book everyone’s so fond of swearing on say about that?)- …okay so maybe not your neighbor. But what about your child or your grandchild then maybe you’ll think:


“ya’ know- other people have access to healthcare…but some people don’t…Gee that sounds kinda’ like rationing don’t it?…and I‘s did heard themz people overseas git thar drugs f’ah cheaper than wez do here…hmm wonder why that kids a dyin‘ fur what theyz git elsewheres fur h‘rdly nothin’a bottle‘ ?”