Life can be frustrating for a person who has a brain injury. Living with someone who does isn’t easy, either. I can’t eliminate those situations, I can only try to manage them consistently.
If you’ve ever cared about everything and nothing at the same time, you already know what anxiety and depression feel like. Here’s what nobody tells you.
Anoxic brain injury is like an F5 tornado. Imagine yourself standing in a pile of rubble.
Imagine someone picking up a piece of wood from the rubble, and asking if you know where it belongs. It’s nearly impossible.
The friendly young man behind the counter asked if I wanted my tuna to be on a wheat, tomato, or a spinach wrap. That’s when things turned south for me.
Who doesn’t understand a wheat wrap? At that moment, I didn’t.
“I apologize. I had a brain injury, and I don’t understand any of this.”
I can have a conversation about something complicated one minute, and the next minute, not understand basic instructions. When he asked if I wanted my tuna on a wheat, tomato, or spinach wrap, it’s difficult to explain what I thought.
I explained to my neurologist how a previous doctor told me I reached my cognitive limit. There could be no more improvement.
My neurologist looked at me and said, “That’s a terrible diagnosis. You’re going to get better.”
He said words that have stuck with me since: “I believe it. I need you to believe it. When you believe it, your brain will put itself in a position to heal, and it will begin to heal.”
There are so many people with serious health conditions that suffer from what doctors call invisible illness. Invisible does not mean a patient is fabricating a health issue. It means that the condition is not observable by others. This makes sense. It’s logical. Yet, most people falsely believe if they can’t see a clear indication of illness, then whoever they are looking at must be healthy. This is very common with neurological disorders.
Conflicting emotions aren’t rare or odd. They are part of life. What’s rare is to ever have a single emotion without another one nearby pushing its way into your mind.
I’ve learned that I can be grateful to be alive, and frustrated that I’ve fallen up the steps… again.
Whatever growth you’ve had, it’s never enough. The rest of life works that way, too. Healing from sickness, recovery, and growth in anything are so slow. It’s so slow, it can be discouraging, frustrating, even infuriating. It’s human nature: we want the progress to be fast, and fast enough to notice it.
Two years later, I finally had an answer, but that answer meant I had another medical condition. There is both relief and grief when you get a medical diagnosis. I felt relief because there was an explanation for my symptoms, and I could learn to manage them—and maybe feel better. I felt grief because that meant having yet another medical condition to manage that will likely never go away.
After surviving cardiac arrest, my life was turned upside down, but I didn’t even realize it. I was in a medically induced coma for days afterward. When they brought me out of the coma, it was Saturday afternoon. I was told what happened. I didn’t understand at all the impact of it, but I thought I did.
I had no idea getting back to normal was not in the cards. Between medical appointments, therapies and crushing fatigue, returning to my old life was more of a fantasy. Yet, I’d wake up every day and tell myself, “Today is the day I’m going to crush it.” Except I couldn’t. I didn’t.
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