Month Two

The second month after the accident was riddled with emotional instability for lack of a better term. I would be fine one minute and then in a complete panic the next. The panic attacks would sometimes go on for hours, crying hysterically. I remember one day in particular... I was working as usual, trying very hard to continue with daily life like everything was fine. After lunch I became extremely upset. I was able to maintain control until 5 o'clock, time to leave. When I got to my car the sobbing began. I did not want to go home, I just wanted to be far, far away from everyone. I didn't want my husband to see me so upset because he had been through so much already. I called him at work and told him I wasn't coming home. I was going to spend the night with a friend and she would come over and pick up my bags if he would just have them ready for her. I drove around until I found a hotel. I called my friend to let her know where I was. She brought my bags to me, we talked for a while and she left me for the evening. I cried all night long until all the tears were gone. I took the next day off from work and went home and went to bed. My husband came home at noon. When he walked into the bedroom he lay down and scooped me up in his arms. I can't imagine how helpless and lost he must have felt.... Certainly he felt as helpless and lost as I did. The fact that I felt no affection or emotion except during the overload periods, put a tremendous strain on our marriage. I can absolutely see how a couple who was not in a strong, committed marriage, before a TBI, might not be able to hold up under the strain. I still drifted through my days as if watching myself from afar. My only release seemed to be writing a blog sweetlife4me-jp.blogspot.com 
I love to write poetry and during this time some of my writing seemed very dark. During February of 2010 I had two different friends comment to me that my blogs were scaring them a little. I assured them that writing was just my outlet for survival, they seemed unconvinced. Their concern was the first clue that some of my relationships may not survive my recovery. I found recovery from my TBI a very deep, lonely and very personal journey back. Every day was a new adventure physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. With the exception of my husband who was there 24/7, others did not understand the deeply complicated process going on. It wasn't just my brain that was recovering. I was a different person and as the months would prove I was just beginning to realize the difference, but had not yet embraced the new me. This second month was also a month of unbelievable fatigue. The thing that kept me going was knowing my daughter who was on deployment with the U.S. Navy would be returning to the U.S. in March and we were scheduled to go greet her ship when it returned. I made it to work every day, but when 5 o'clock came, it took every once of energy I had to spare to make it up the steps to my room and to fall into bed with all of my clothes still on. My husband would come in minutes later, help me undress and tuck me in. He would bring me dinner in bed and then I was out for the night, only to get up to the same routine the next day. It took every breath I had to make it through the day. All of my energies were solely devoted to getting from one minute to the next. Even as I write this a year later, tears run down my face as I think back to the slow motion of every day. It was like swimming in glue.... It was exactly like swimming in glue. When I wasn't at home all of my concentration was geared toward acting natural. The fatigue and the isolation I feel when I think back on this time is very difficult to swallow. Every thing I knew seemed up for grabs. My personality, my marriage, my faith, were all tittering on a very fine edge and much to my surprise the worse was yet to come.

A Post From Sweetp Feb. 2010

http://sweetlife4me-jp.blogspot.com/2010/02/someone-elses-shoes.html

Poetry From January

http://sweetlife4me-jp.blogspot.com/2010/02/flaws-in-me.html

The First Month

I was released from the hospital on Saturday. I felt like I was floating on clouds or was having an out of body experience. Little did I know that this feeling would last for months. It was exactly like watching myself from far away and knowing it was me, but not feeling it as me. Oddly enough everything was so foggy that I didn't realize I felt weird until later. I was so busy and so focused on trying to act normal that I paid little attention to anything else. My family was in total shock. My husband was a nervous wreck and my two sons were scared to death. Six years before my accident, my stepson was in a minor traffic accident. He never lost consciousness and didn't even go to the ER. The night of the accident he acted totally normal, wasn't in any pain and anticipated being sore the next day. They found him dead the next day from a severed carotid artery. Having this previous knowledge only heightened their anxiety. My husband would follow me room to room. He would beg me to lay down and to rest. He kept telling me I was not okay as I proclaimed, but that I had a terrible accident. I was in complete denial. I'm not one to get sick often, and I certainly wasn't used to being hovered over. I'm the mom, I'm the wife... I was the one who was suppose to hover over people and even then I wasn't good at hovering. I had several visitors the first couple of days home, although I only actually remember some of the visitors. I do remember thinking how odd it was that when people saw me they were just amazed at how good I looked. I had gotten up, washed my hair and put my make-up on as I normally did. I think people expected big bruises, gashes on my face, something to indicate I had a bad accident. I did have scrapes and lots of bruises, but they weren't on my face. For lack of a better way to explain how I fell, the information people got was I had fallen down the stairs.I'm not sure how well I pulled off the "I'm fine" routine, but my family knew better and the weeks following the accident it became more clear to me that all was not right with my head. I took that Monday off work and I slept all day long. The next day I had a hair appointment at 5 o'clock so I didn't want to miss work because I didn't want to miss my hair appointment. I remember sitting at my desk and everything seemed to be in slow motion. My boss, who is also a friend and was with me at the hospital, came into my office to see how I was. I told him I was fine, a little sore and my head hurt but I was fine. In reality my head felt like a ginormous water bottle and my neck felt like a toothpick trying to hold the water bottle up. I hurt from my skull all the way down my back where stair marks were perfectly outlined in black on my back. I floated through the day and went to my hair appointment which is in the next little town. The girl who does my hair had heard about the accident and was really concerned about me being there by myself. I hadn't told anyone about the appointment because I knew a big fuss would be made about me keeping it. While I was getting my hair done my son called and wanted to know how I was feeling and where I was at. When I told him where I was, he was not happy at all. He told me that I shouldn't be driving and that I could have a seizure. My hair dresser offered to drive me home, but I wouldn't accept the offer. It never dawned on me that my stubbornness was causing my family a lot of unnecessary anxiety. The next day I stayed home from work and again I slept all day long. Overwhelming fatigue would become my most severe symptom in the beginning. It was that first full week that my husband noticed that something was different about my body temperature. I had always been very cold natured and also suffered from Reynauld's syndrome. My hands quiet often would turn blue from lack of circulation or go totally white and be numb. I was always too cold. That weekend we went to see a movie. After the movie was over he asked me if I had been cold. I told him no, which caused him to look at me like I had just stepped off the moon. He said it was so cold in the theater to him that he couldn't believe I had stayed for the entire movie. The next week I went to get my nails done.The girl who did my nails was the same one whose house the accident took place. She would often warm my hands before beginning on the manicure, but she mentioned that they were unusually warm. So there were positive changes that occurred. Everything moved in slow motion the first month. When people would speak to me it was as if the audio was off balance to a video. The time lapse between the words they spoke and the time it took my mind to comprehend what was being said threw everything off kelter. When I talked, I would stop mid-sentence to search for words. Sometimes I would forget what I was talking about in mid-sentence. When I went to the store I could be standing right in front of the item I came to get and forget why I was there. My emotional state was very out of balance. I didn't feel any emotion, but when I did it was like a dam had broken and the tears would be overwhelming. Nothing in particular would cause these episodes they just seemed to happen at unexpected and often inconvenient times. Sometimes the crying would last for hours. I floated through the first month without much conciousness of what I was experiencing. My husband, on the other hand, was on hyper alert never knowing which mental state I would be in from one moment to the next. I was hoping everything would get better once the 6 week mark had past. In some ways it was only beginning.

How It All Began

New Year's day 2010, began like any other New Year's day. Each year we spend the day with friends. We eat, play board games, play spoons, sometimes take a walk, it's just an enjoyable day. There are 4 couples along with their children who are mostly grown with a couple of exceptions. Each year we celebrate the day at someone else's house. I had made enchiladas along with a few other things and we arrived right around noon. Everyone was there except for a couple of people. The hostess had the food arranged around the kitchen and had put the desserts and drinks (non-alcoholic) in the sitting room. The sitting room was a room they had added onto the house. They used the existing cellar and built a small room right on top of it that adjoined the kitchen. The cellar door was still intact in case of a tornado and her teenage son had claimed it as his "Man Cave". He and my son were in the Man Cave playing video games. The door to the cellar was flush with the tile floor in the sitting room. The drink table was directly beside the opening to the man cave. Now the story turns and I am not going on memory, but by what I was told happened. We girls were sitting around the kitchen table talking when I decided I wanted something to drink. I got up and headed toward the drink table. While I was getting my cup I turned to add something to the conversation. When I turned, I rotated my body and repositioned my feet, however the place where I went to plant my left foot was the open hole to the cellar. I immediately fell straight back and down 10 feet. The stairs to the cellar were very steep and were at the front of the cellar. At some point during the fall I met the stairs as I tumbled and ricoheted off the walls and stairs. I landed with my head on the video game player (which was dented badly), my body was twisted around the bottom stairs. I landed at the feet of my youngest son. When they got to me my eyes were opened and fixed, I was unconsious, my neck was hyper extended to right so that my head lay limply on my right shoulder. The hostess was the first one down the stairs. When she got to me she said she knew I was dead and she began to cry, scream and pray. She moved my head thinking I would wake up or make a movement, but she said my head just flopped like it wasn't attached to my body. When the others got to me, my breathing kicked back in with a ragged "death moan" as they called it. I would not respond to them as they waited for the EMT to arrive. Due to the size of the cellar (very small) they had a hard time getting the EMT people down to me along with the equipment needed to get me up. They secured my neck and after much work managed to get me on the board. The had to lift me up vertically as careful as possible not to jiggle me any more than necessary. When we arrived at the hospital, the greatest fear was I had broken my neck. They also believed it was possible that my shoulder and hip was broken. X-Rays did not show any fractures which we contribute to prayer. The CAT scan showed bleeding in the front left part of the brain. The doctor was concerned about the bleeding and the fact that the left eye was protruding out.It was determined to be in my best interest to be taken by helicopter to Oklahoma City which was 90 miles away. They contacted a neurologist in the City who advised them not to fly me if there was cerebral bleeding. I was sent via ambulance instead. I don't remember much about being in the ER. I remember coming too when I heard my oldest son begin to sob when they told him I was being transferred to Oklahoma City, because there was nothing they could do for me here. The sound of that sob is what got my motors running. I realized in my semi-conscious state that I needed to get myself together and act as normal as I could possibly act. My entire body felt stiff and ridged. I felt like every muscle in my body was experiencing a major charlie horse. I was tense and couldn't move anything that didn't hurt. I dreaded the trip to the City, knowing it would be a bumpy ride. I asked for something to settle my muscles and calm me down so maybe I wouldn't hurt so bad. Luckily my husband had known the head nurse for years. He was terrified and she was extremely concerned. She talked to the ambulance driver who agreed to allow him to ride with me to the City. This is something they absolutely never do. My husband said when they got in the ambulance the EMT in the back told him that I was in God's hands because most people who have cerebral bleeding don't make it. My husband knew something that the EMT did not know. While we were in the ER, all of my friends began texting all of their friends, who sent texts to their friends and a prayer chain began. I truly believe the findings in Oklahoma City were a direct result of those praying people. I do not remember arriving at the Oklahoma City emergency room. I do know that they were going to release me as the bleeding appeared to have stopped. My family and friends did not want me released due to the type of injury and the distance. The ER doctor agreed to keep me over night for observation.I was released the next morning after the doctor got a consult on the CAT Scan from the previous night. The bleeding hand not only stopped but much of the blood had dissipated. I vaguely remember one of my friends taking pictures because I love to scrapbook. I remember my friends calling the next morning wanting to know what I wanted from Starbucks.I don't remember the ride home nor much else about that day. My husband told me that I had a very serious injury and that I needed to be very careful. In my mind, there was nothing wrong. Since I didn't remember much of what happened, and since they saw no need to keep me in the hospital, I was completely detached from what happened. I thought that if it had been serious I wouldn't be able to act so normal (which I was trying to do so my family wouldn't worry). 12 months after the accident, my husband still goes pale when we talk about the accident. He truly thought I was dead and had there not been many, many prayers, I believe I would have been.