05
A Day to Remember
Categories: Pre-Post
A Day to Remember…I wish I could. My loss of memory and the associated brain injury issues really freaked me out for more than a year. I desperately wanted to remember what happened that night of the accident.
I hung on every printed report, listened to every story, even re-read my own emails trying to piece together or recall what happened. The facts as I knew them simply didn’t add up. The fact that others were also telling me that stories “were all over the board” with inaccuracies, made for even more confusion. Every time someone would say something I think I recalled (boat ride, conference calls, etc) I would jump in excitement that it was coming back to me…only to realize it was really just a different memory. Losing a month of life and its memory is really freaky even years later. I don’t understand how weeks of memory even unrelated to an accident are erased, but it started a revelation of even more to worry about.
Aside from the confusion, embarrassment and disappointment of losing my memory of what happened that night (along with a few weeks surrounding the day of the accident), the realization that my brain wasn’t working normally sent panic through my veins for months.
The volume, variety and strength of the prescription drugs in my system certainly contributed, but my noticeably slower processing speed and short term memory were clearly amiss. I couldn’t tell anyone (I reasoned with myself) because if they didn’t let me return to work and stay I wouldn’t be able to survive financially. Fortunately, I can look back on this stage of my recovery knowing that my mental capacity and functioning were restored, but at the time it was almost more than I could handle. I took to the only thing I could measure and track:
- Sudoku puzzles. I have long been a crossword puzzle fan and do the sudoku puzzles daily. Since they have been online for months I knew I could regularly finish most of them in less than 3-5 minutes. I would never make a world champion or anything, but I took pride in my ability to quickly solve them. Since my family knew I loved them, they had stocked up my bedside with 4 or 5 books filled with puzzles of all difficulty levels. At first, I thought I was just too tired to think and would fall asleep while working on one. After a while, I came to the realization that I was simply not able to finish them in less than 20 or 30 minutes! It was frightening. Even the simplest of puzzles seemed too much.
- Document everything. In almost every case, I could see that it was my short term memory that was shot. I began writing everything down (and putting time and dates with the notes). Every evening I would read what I wrote that day…and unfortunately it added to my confusion. I would forget details from the same day! I would swear the note was from a different day. If I failed to record a name of an individual who visited (for instance), I would forget their name. It was simply horrible.
In the end, the injury to my brain was the most critical and frightening of all. It contributed to what I now know is depression, anger and borderline irrational behavior. I am freely documenting this admission of injuries so that others who may find similarities, can know it’s treatable and one can also fully recover. Time heals.
