At the start of this year I very suddenly recovered from the acquired
brain injury I’ve been rehabilitating since April 2024. I’ve definitely
got more to say about the experience but it will be spread out over a
long period of time for some really important reasons.
While injured I spent almost all my time focused on the injury,
analysing it, reflecting on my responses to things and accommodating my
limits. At the beginning especially I had to begin every conversation
with a disclaimer that I had an acquired brain injury in order to manage
people’s expectations of me and their behaviour towards me. So many
people have hostility towards things that they shame in themselves, so
if they would shame themselves for being slow or missing something, they
will equally take that hostility out on a person demonstrating those
traits. Advising that I had an acquired brain injury was a good way to
make people conscious of their responses to my injury.
Once I started to improve enough to get on ok, I would simply state it
when it became necessary, such as when it was obvious I couldn’t
remember a name or was fatigued from an environment. It was still a
prominent part of all conversations.
Something I didn’t expect at
the final moments of recovery was that psychologically, it is important
not to talk about the injury anymore. Let me explain.
Throughout the rehabilitation, I had not pictured that recovery would
required actively making space for me being well. The care for my injury
had been every minute of every day. I was always assessing my injury’s
response to my daily experiences. If there were warning signs or
symptoms I would have to enact all the strategies I knew to allow rest
and recovery. I’m a really active, driven person. It took a really long
time to learn to stop, wait, and rest; that was made easier by the
injury making me feel like I didn’t want to do a lot. But for the parts
where my habit was to keep going, I had to learn a different way of
being.
The end of the injury required me to become that person I had been
before. The day I had been waiting months and months for finally came
where my medical team told me that instead of stopping at symptoms, to
push through and see how far I could push. It was a nervous but fast
process of change. At the start of the injury I would ignorantly push
through and the physical penalty would be debilitating. I had never
experience anything like that in my life, so I stupidly kept doing the
same thing expecting a different result. By the end of the injury I had
properly learned my lesson, so feeling a symptom and pushing was
definitely a little scary. The antidote to that fear was how much trust I
had in my medical team. If they believed, I was going to try it.
It was incredible to do things that previously would have left me
bedridden and to have my brain and body let me keep going instead. Once I
had some results like that, I had to do it as many times as I could so
that I could trust the result, and have my whole life get used to this
being the new normal. Even any remnants of that ‘
what will this cost me’
needed to be gone from my brain in order to lock the recovery in. One
of the medical professionals I’ve been able to see for the injury is a
concussion psychologist. I’ve asked them so many questions about what
recovery normally looks like and there are common things that people
experience, worrying if they get bumped in the head after recovery or
getting odd regressions in symptoms. The more confidently I return to
seeing myself as
well, the more smoothly I’ll navigate wobbles like that.
One of the ways I invest in that confidence is to celebrate new
normals that are big victories. Highlighting them feels like it gives
them priority and gravity in my brain. For example I had a small head
cold last week. It feels very different to carry a sickness in a body
with a well brain. Yeah, I could feel the parts of my body that were
fighting, but my brain wasn’t one of them. It felt resilient and
engaged. I saw someone at a theatre show recently, remember their name
and where I knew them from. I savoured how natural it felt for my brain
to get that information because two months ago it couldn’t.
Another way I invest in that confidence is to disengage from questions
about my injury in most circumstances. It comes up a lot. People begin
conversations with me, asking if I’m well, with lots of concern. Even
for a person confident they are well, if enough people ask you that it
can set you up to wonder ‘
wait, am I well? A lot of people seem to think I’m not.’
I also need to be very conscious of the percentage of time I spend with
my thoughts connected to the injury for the same reason. I do my best
efforts to minimise thinking about it to only necessary medical
appointments, and to friends going through the same injury who need
information. A good friend who had a significant childhood illness had
some great advice about this. They didn’t want to have that illness,
from which they had recovered, be seen as their identity when they had
fought so hard to have a life without it. They said they previously
practiced responses for questions about it that would immediately
confirm that they are well, so well that the illness wasn’t even on
their mind, and then drop a topic change to steer the conversation in
another direction. I’ve definitely been using that.
So if you are one of the few people who do get to see me in person, this
blog post one of the avenues I’m using to make sure people know I’m
recovered so I don’t have to repeat conversations correcting people who
assume I’m still injured and having my mind spend unnecessary time
dwelling on an injury it is trying to separate itself from.
These photos were taken over a year ago, but you obviously all know
why they were never posted. As you know I have been doing my best to
avoid buying clothes new. This dress was one of my only exceptions
because I adored it. I feel so happy and summery every time I wear it.
Absolutely no regrets. It is from Forever New but it is well past current season.
A reminder as previously stated in another blog post. I'm currently renovating my blog and had planned to get it all returned
to Blogger from Wordpress before launching into blog posts but I have a life so I'm kicking off blog posts before it's all complete. This means some things are old, or links are broken, blah blah blah. It will be done when I have time or I feel like prioritising it over the other amazing things I'm up to. I've been blogging for well over a decade so that task is enormous.
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