I came back in 4 weeks. We did not talk about the climbing gym.

"Something hit you in the head hard enough to crush 5 of your vertebrae. How are you surprised that your head was seriously hurt?" -my doctor

It's a valid point.
My last visit to the Dr. was at 9 weeks. I wrote a post about it with lots of pictures and optimism. I was pretty psyched to have some good news. Due to it's length and my shocking lack of attention span, considering the only things on my To Do list in mid-August were sleeping and eating at least once every 24 hours, I did not write about the whole second half of the visit where we talked about my head injury.

So when I got hurt, they told me at the ER that I had a concussion - I had to be observed carefully for 48 hours and they said I'd probably have a headache for a week or two. It was never mentioned again. At my 6 week check-up, I told the neurosurgeon that my headache had never gone away - it wasn't unbearable, but I was concerned it might be a bad sign. You know when you get clonked in the noggin, and the next day your head kinda hurts, enough to make you more or less constantly aware that you were recently clonked in the noggin? That's the kind of headache we're talking about. So the neurosurgeon guy shrugged it off and said "Sure, that's normal - pain 6 months later would be considered normal." I didn't know whether to be relieved that this pain was not an alarming symptom, or dismayed that I could expect it to continue well into the winter.

Back in Cortland 3 weeks later, my headaches had gotten worse - to the point where I just wanted to lay still and no longer cared about the boredom, and had to apply lots of ice packs just to be able to relax or think straight. By the way, a freshly iced eyeball is a weird thing. I woke up once from an inadvertent nap with ice packs still on my face, and instantly panicked that I had some sort of corneal frostbite.

My new Dr. said "hmmmm...." and seemed a bit concerned that my symptoms were worsening. He diagnosed me:

Dr.: "You have Post-Concussion Syndrome."
Me: "Interesting, what is that exactly?"
Dr.: "That's anytime someone has concussion symptoms more than 2 weeks after the injury."
Me: "Well what causes it?"
Dr.: "We don't know."
Me: "How long does it take to get better?"
Dr.: "Oh, anywhere from 2 weeks to never."
Me: "What other symptoms are there?"
Dr.: "They can include any or many or all or none of the symptoms on this 4 page list."

So as you can imagine, I was enormously relieved to know that my headaches were the direct result of a made-up syndrome with a terribly unimaginative name. It was a lot like when I first went to the hospital unable to breathe this summer, and was eventually sent home with an informative printout that said "You have Dyspnea!" For those of you not in the medical profession and who studied a foreign language that is still spoken, "dyspnea" is latin for "difficulty breathing". (apnea is lack of breathing - like sleep apnea)
Ok, people, that's not a diagnosis. You just repeated my symptoms back to me. I know I have difficulty breathing, that's why I came to the hospital. It's the equivalent of going to the hospital with severe abdominal pains and having them tell you "AHA!!! We figured it out! You have 'Stomachache'. That will be $5,000." The rest of the piece of paper went on to say, basically, "You should probably see a Dr. about this." I thought the hospital was where the doctors were, and so I went there. My mistake.

Back to the head injury. My Dr.expressed concern that I was going to be back at school and work in 2 weeks, and would be shifting dramatically from a life of leisure to a full academic schedule plus 25-hour work week. He said it was very important to do a little homework every day and not procrastinate and expect to do all my studying at once, because I would likely find myself unable to do it. Also, that I should expect my headaches to get worse, that studying would be more difficult than I remembered, and that I should contact my school's office for student disability services to let them know I might need accommodations.

Me: You mean like, a special chair to sit in? Cause of my back?
Dr.: Well yes, but also cognitive accommodations.
Me: .....you're talking about a learning disability??
Dr.: Yes. A temporary learning disability. But yes. You see, you have a brain injury.
Me: riiiight.....

The student disability services office, by the way, was extremely helpful. Their response to my long and detailed email, verbatim: "We don't deal with temporary disabilities in this office." If you were wondering, there is no such thing as a separate temporary disability services office at my school. I decided this was not a bureaucratic battle I wanted to fight, and let it go.

I had a hard time believing that my brain would behave any differently than it always has. Aside from the headaches, I had experienced no cognitive problems in the 9 weeks since my injury. I now realize that that's a bit like assuming your leg must be fine after an injury without actually trying to walk on it. It's not like netflix and scarf-knitting were really testing my mental limits.

Fast forward to my 13-week check-up. I had now been back in school for a few weeks, and by now I was supposed to be brace-free and contemplating the climbing gym. Instead, I was doing the absolute bare minimum to get through my days. I did no homework, just made it through class and went home. Most of my classes - some I had to skip. Luckily I have really understanding bosses who looked the other way as I put in about 6 hours a week at my 20 hour a week job. Other than that, I was back to sleeping about 14 hours a night. All of my signs of progress had begun to move backwards. My doctor recommended that I take the semester off and focus on rehab. I told him that unless someone was willing to marry me and put me on their health insurance, that was not an option. This resulted in a rather romantic proposal from Markette, but sadly it would take 6 months for us to prove domestic partnership, unlike marriage, which requires 15 minutes with a Justice of the Peace.

So instead my physical therapist told me I had to stop physical therapy. So I could quit school, and therefore my job, and be without health insurance and therefore unable to go to physical therapy, and also probably starve a little bit. OR, I could quit PT, keep powering through school stuff, have a huge rehab setback, and hopefully not fail all my classes making it all pointless anyway. It was not a fun choice, but ultimately an easy one because I like to eat.

A few interesting things happened in the next few weeks. I had my first Field Bio test of the year. I completely bombed it. This was the first time in my life that a teacher handed me a test and I stared at the page and literally NOTHING came out of my brain in response to it. I studied for it. I even started studying 4 days earlier than I usually would have, in an attempt to ammend my procrastinating ways. I just couldn't retrieve any of the information afterward. I chalked this up to my constant exhaustion and the fact that I haven't taken a science class since high school. Later that evening, I had a quiz in my other class. Eight of the questions were conceptual - "Explain how Romanticism influenced the views of American pioneers..." - they could be answered with story-like information. I had studied well and I breezed through all these questions, no problem. The other two questions were factual - "Name two European Romantics who..." - nothing. I stared at these questions blankly for the rest of the test time. I could remember stories about these people, but I absolutely could not think of any names. The stark contrast between the way my brain responded to these two types of information made me start to think something fishy might be going on.

The next incident was far more conclusive. I came home to an empty apartment after work and laid in the living room for hours eating and resting and reading. Later in the evening I walked down the hall and jumped a mile when I saw my roommate in her bedroom.

Me: "Wow, you scared me! I didn't know you were home, when did you get here?"
Roomy: "Uh, I came home about an hour ago."
Me: "How did I not see you?"
Roomy: "Um.....I came in, we had a conversation, I handed you your mail...."

Turns out my mail was on the table next to me, but I would have sworn she was not in the house. It's kinda hilarious, if you don't think too hard about what it means.

I think this was when I started to really understand that I had a really bad accident, and I was kinda seriously injured. I think it's probably a great defense mechanism that I grasped this very gradually, one new piece of information at a time. "6 weeks in a back brace" was hard enough to hear back in June. If they had told me then that my life would continue to be seriously impacted well into the next winter I'm not sure I would have handled it well. I knew it would take a long time to heal, I wasn't remotely prepared for how long. I figured I'd have to start at square one physically after my bones healed, now I'm looking forward to the far-off day when I'll be able to see square one from here. I knew I had a traumatic brain injury, but I somehow never imagined that it would affect my actual brain.

Yep, I'm the smartest.

I can't relate to Nelson Mandela.

One of the movies I watched earlier this summer was "Invictus", which is about how anyone can win the World Cup if Nelson Mandela wants them to hard enough. I enjoyed the fact that, even though it was based on real life, the super scary impossible team to beat was the one with all-black uniforms, just like in the Mighty Ducks or any other underdog-wins-it-all kid's sports movie.

 At least 50% of what I know about Nelson Mandela came directly from this movie. (social studies was never my strong suit). At one point, the football team takes a tour of the prison and the cell where Mandela spent about 30 years of his life. It's half the size of my bedroom and not lavishly furnished. A lot of the movie is about how some people expect him to be all pissed off and revenge-y now that he's in charge, but instead he's all like "No, everyone, the country is the most important and we need to be peaceful and get along, ok? Hey, wait, just watch this football match and get distracted and excited about that." Someone remarks that he spent 30 years in a box and came out ready to love the people who put him there.

This makes my brain explode.

At the time I was watching this, I had been in a back brace and pretty immobile for 2 or 3 weeks. Nobody put me there unless you count that jerk gravity. I would have throttled babies if it would get me out of it any sooner.

After telling this to my brother, who has a bigger soft spot for very young humans and animals than I ever will, he got a little upset and said "No, you wouldn't! Don't say that." I considered, and realized that if I think about it hard enough, babies are people too and I probably wouldn't hurt them. Puppies, though. I would absolutely throttle puppies if it would help. Not dogs, but only because most of them could probably take me in a fight. Baby bunnies? Definitely. With my bare hands. He wasn't really a lot less shocked about that, but I stand by it.

This is the cutest baby bunny I could find, because imagining me throttling him is still probably less offensive than me trying to draw stick-figure Nelson Mandela.

I declare that my life is more important than an animal's. In fact, my quality of life is more important than an animal's life. I imagine I would take some heat for that, if more than 4 people read this blog. Here's the thing though - with the exception of any super strict lifelong leather-avoiding animal-tested-product-eschewing vegans out there, you all have made the same choice. If you eat a turkey sandwich, you are declaring that the quality of your lunch is more important than an animal's life. So if it would magically heal my spine faster, I would absolutely end the lives of any number of small creatures. If there is a difference between this and eating the turkey sandwich, it's that at least I would be doing my own dirty work. Which probably makes it more, not less, moral. (and yes, my brother eats turkey and other meats).

So how Nelson Mandela managed to be chill about being forced to spend three decades in a box is beyond my comprehension. A lesser, slightly pettier man might inspire admiration, but Nelson laps himself and just inspires confusion and a suspicion that he might not actually be a real person.