April 24th

The 15th anniversary of the car wreck I had in 1998 was April 23rd.

I cannot help but think that someone somewhere has a sense of humor – bad, evil, ironic, whatever, because on April 24th, I got two letters from Social Security denying my claims for Disability and Supplemental Income. I forget where I had gone that day, but I came home and checked my mailbox downstairs and found both denials. I didn’t KNOW they were denials then, and I didn’t open the letters in the elevator, telling myself that they were denials to be ready for it when I got home.

This is the third time I have applied for these supposed benefits since the brain injury in the car wreck. For years, I have been "in denial" about any possibility of brain injury, despite weeks of coma and being kept comatose to keep my brain from swelling because of bruising, to keep it from swelling into the confines of my skull and further damaging the brain. There’s no where for it to go, to swell, in the closed skull; it "mushes" against the bone and destroys tissue. The brain is surrounded by bone to protect it; it is very delicate and very easily damaged, unprotected. Like all organs, it swells with bruising, but, having nowhere to go, causes itself further damage.

The brain is the consistency of stiff pudding. Throughout it, nerves connect to each other with delicate tendrils that are easily sheared if the brain is caused to move in the skull and to bounce off the hard bone of the skull. The majority of people who experience this and endure weeks long coma are unable to function "normally" afterwards, requiring care for the rest of their lives.

I am VERY fortunate. I live by myself and can mostly function "normally", and given how I felt when I woke up in the hospital five weeks after the car wreck, I was in almost complete denial of any lasting damage. I had to learn all over again how to walk, how to dress myself, what my name was, who I was and am. My personality had changed (for the better, btw) and I was a happy person, happy to survive the car wreck, happy to "be here", happy that I was "on the road to recovery". My face’s default expression changed. My "natural" expression now is a smile, where before, life had gotten worse and worse and my face reflected how I felt in a scowl, a deeply unhappy and angry expression that put people off and held them at a long distance.

I spent 59 days in three hospitals, lost 45 days of memories, and it took more than 4 years to recover enough to try to get back to work. A year and a half after the car wreck, I went back to College, to finish the degree I had been working on, in one way or another, since 1980, when I graduated from High School. I couldn’t take more than one class at a time because I would get tired and lose focus and be unable to comprehend what I was hearing or reading, a vast shock to me, who had found college classes to be "too easy" before the wreck. Fortunately, I had done most of "the hard stuff" before the wreck, and was mostly filling holes in the requirements to graduate with a degree.

I lived and worked in Japan for six years, so I went to Japanese language classes, thinking that it would be easy for me, having lived there and used the language to work and reside in that very foreign country. I found though, that my "visual memory" had been damaged and that I could no longer remember the written language, a big part of foreign language study, and I had to drop Japanese classes. To get a Bachelor of Arts degree, you must study a foreign language, and, since I couldn’t handle the written part of Japanese, I had to "settle" for a Bachelor of Science degree, a lesser but still important class of college degree.

I did it though. I graduated in the summer of 2000, with a Degree in Social Sciences, finishing the classes needed that December one class at a time. My 3.86 GPA had been reduced, by failing a few classes, to 3.08, still high, but not as high as it might have been, without the brain damage.

I was still in denial about brain damage – after all, I had just gotten a college degree! see! Damage? Piss on your brain damage, I DID IT.

Things fell apart after that. Recovery and trying to graduate had given me focus, and I lost it after graduation. The Oregon economy tumbled into recession, driven by the fact that the state had given up timber, which had driven the economy, and it had developed "the Silicon Forest" to replace timber, and the Dot Com recession had decimated Oregon companies and all associated jobs. I fell into depression and gave real thought to killing myself, very unhappy that I had survived only to be lost again. I gave real thought to just jumping off my 8th floor balcony, unhappy that I had survived what should have killed me, the car wreck in 1998.

(to be continued after lunch)

 

 

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