nine hours from now

I went to bed and got back up again; I’ll finally get a review tomorrow of that neuro-psyche test I took with VocRehab last month.

I have always scored really highly on verbal scales; using just the verbal score my IQ was 124.

That looks high, and it is, but it’s only part of the aggregated scoring for IQ; I lost 10 -15% of my IQ in the car wreck – it’s very bad to bruise your brain.  It’s even worse to shake it apart and you hope they put it back together a well as they could.

The verbal skills are still high; duh, nearly 4000 posts here, but other sections of the tests I took in 98 and 99, right after the car wreck, showed worse scores than I used to have – one of two or them were "border-line" in the lowest percentiles. Really fucking bad.

This is what I mean when I say I’m not so smart; I’m really not, I just talk a good game.

I write more than I speak many days and stay at home most of the time.

Losing my bus driving job was hard; I used to think I was a good driver. I am in my car, I hope, I think, but not in big vehicles any more. That visual memory damage turns out to be  more real than I want it to be. Part of driving a big bus or a truck is remembering what angles you’ll see in a turn – I hit things because, well, for one reason, I was always driving a different bus, but mainly because I couldn’t remember the right angles.

That used to be what I thought I do best, drive. I dunno what I do best now; it’s a self-confidence thing, yeah, but it will be nice to talk to professionals who might have a better idea what’s right for me.

Less than 8 hours.

It takes me longer to type than it used to, and this constant mis-spelling and the red wavy lines under mis-spelled words drives me nuts. This short entry took more than an hour to get right.

There have been times I wished I was more visibly damaged. Inside things are a mess, but outside, well, you’ll see the scar on my throat from the tubes they put in me, and you might or might not notice the scar under my lower lip and on my chin – they say I bit through the skin there.

The left leg got chewed up in the wreck; it took me over a year to walk right again, and, if you saw the scars in my thigh, maybe you’d feel them too – they are less than a hands width from my balls and when I was seated in the car – well, it was a very near thing; I could have woken up castrated. There’s a long scar down my belly, from my ribs to below my belt line, where they cut me open for internal damage – bruised adrenal glands and kidneys and organ bruising. That’s an impressive scar. The ones on my head don’t show, even with this 1/2 inch haircut I have now.

I do kind of, but not really, wish some of these things were more noticeable. That’s why they call Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) the "unseen injury".

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Just got an email from K*, wishing me the best for tomorrow.  She knows I’m different than I used to be.

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