Concussion: Take Two

Yep. A little over three weeks after my last concussion, I got another one. I’m kind of mad at myself. I probably could have prevented this from happening, but I instead let my stubbornness and sense of duty get in the way. Though I was still under doctor’s orders to refrain from mental work, I couldn’t bring myself to set and enforce firm limits. As you know if you’ve been following my blog, I have a tendency to assume that people will be angry with me for what I can’t or shouldn’t do, no matter how valid my reasons may be—according to my CBT book, this is a phenomenon called “projecting” (the manual’s a bestseller, so it must be an authoritative source). Armed with a healthy dose of guilt, I went ahead and spent three hours on Monday afternoon supervising an exam.

For most people, this would be a perfectly reasonable, routine, relatively undemanding task, but I guess I’m not most people, at least not right now. When I got home, I was absolutely exhausted. My husband insisted that I wear my headgear, and while I normally resist such demands, I decided to comply. Then the stupidly inevitable happened: I took off the helmet while on the couch, forgot to put it back on, went to the bathroom, and had a seizure, falling to the ground and hitting my head on the side of the bathtub. (The bathroom is a particularly dangerous place for me; an impressive percentage of my seizures occur there. Maybe they’re induced by the stress of surveying the piles of dirty laundry on top of the washer.)

We went to the hospital to make sure that I hadn’t done horrible damage. We eventually came home. I ate a donut then immediately regretted it, since concussions = nausea. I went to sleep. I woke up more coherent but feeling just as awful as I had the night before.

I’ve probably written about this before, but one of the most unsettling things about concussions, and seizures, to a lesser extent, are the memory gaps. In the hours following the accident, I couldn’t remember the year let alone what had happened. I can recite the date now, but my version of the period surrounding the concussion is based entirely on what Andrew’s recounted to me.

So yeah. Back to square one, as far as my recovery is concern. No work; limited reading; limited watching of TV; maximum eating of ice cream and fried cake. (Luckily I’m no longer nauseated and can consume as much junk food as I want. My pants are already a bit tighter.)