The neuropsychological exam +

It makes for interesting reading.

Right after the wreck, when they got me out of the mangled remains of the car I had owned just ten days, I was admitted to OHSU, the local trauma hospital, with a Glasgow Coma Score of 7/15. I guess I was very fucked up – and yeah, I was fucked up too, drunk on cheap whiskey. The report says I had no movement on my left side – no reaction to pain in arm or leg (omfg). Deep tissue lacerations in my left thigh caused a loss of 30% of my thigh’s mass and the left femur was fractured. (I did not know that) I was in a coma – not just comatose – for ten days in ICU (I cannot remember some 45 days) I was apparently discharged on 5/14, to a nursing facility, but ripped out everything stuck into me and had to be put in restraints and readmitted to OHSU the next day. I was moved to another hospital’s Brain Injury Treatment program, where I was admitted with a GCS of 13-14 and a Rancho V and did not get out of the hospitals until 7/31 – over two months in the hospital. Neuroimaging showed "multiple punctate haemorrhage’s throughout the brain, diffuse axonial shearing, and bilateral frontal haematomas."

In translation, that means my brain bled all over, with heavy bruising to my frontal lobes and that parts of it were pulled apart and nerves disconnected from each other. My bruised brain swelled and with no where to go, "trapped" by my skull, some parts of my brain were mushed (a non-medical term) against the hard bones of my skull. They kept me comatose, on a morphine drip, and put me in what you would call a driving chamber to reduce the swelling and limit, as much as possible, the damage as the brain squeezed against the skull.

My thought, reading this is "how fucking lucky am I???" And I said so at the time, to my Neurophysician, the doc who took care of me. She responded vehemently that "luck had nothing to do with it. Experts worked on you and saved your life"

Umm, ok, but I still feel lucky. Lucky it was 1998 – I’d have died not even a couple of years previously – and lucky that OHSU was so close and had the doctors I needed right away.

Whether or not "luck" had anything to do it with it, I feel very fortunate – it could soo be worse!

The report doubts heavily that I can do a full time job. I lose mental focus within a few hours – no wonder I hit that parked car with my bus, ten hours into my work day on my last job as a charter bus driver.

I have been in denial all along. "Brain damage? Me? No fucking way!"

I was wrong and have been for 14 years.

No wonder I am "severely depressed" and un-adjusted to my new reality. No fucking wonder things have not worked out very well for me. No great surprise my balcony talks to me – "just get it over with and jump". "8 floors is enough to kill you. Jump. Fuck everything and everyone and jump the fuck off, Kurt".

I have been more or less successfully ignoring that voice, which sort of sounds like mine but doesn’t, but how much longer can I?

For a while longer.  Onwards.

Fucking onwards or die, Kurt.  

My choice.

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ohh notes I can’t respond to.  bogus dude.  cowardly.

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+

In 2001 – 2002, that voice got very loud, but I was able to see that jumping could/would be a mistake, that it was totally possible that I would live to regret it.  I have successfully ignored that voice for a dozen years.

As above, read it please, it says onwards or die.  I do not choose to die, but it is the one real choice I have, to live or die.  Hamlet was saying what is the real truth, that once we are here (having been given NO choice in the matter) that we have the choice to stay or to go.

Anyone who says otherwise is full of shit.

 

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