Brain Injury Death Game

Immediately after my injury the paramedics were unsure if I would survive. My few memories of being in the ICU I believed I shared the room with many wounded soldiers. Months later when we moved into a different home I sensed ghosts and dealt with them for a month. We worked out an agreement.

Yeah, a brain injury is a weird place to wake up to. As we try to explain how much things have changed it's truly beyond explanation. The rules change. Our entire being has moved into a new dimension.

I have entered into periods of suicidal thought. I have entered into a desire to fight and swear. I have jabbered my nights through dreams like great novels or frightening tales were being laid out before me.

It weirdly seems as though the Spirit of Death's attention was drawn by any almost there experience. As though it believes that it drew a good card from the deck of our life. They say that a cat has nine lives. How many do we have? The lack of skipping and singing my life through hints that my nine lives have shortened. But my mind does not want to work like that. I spread my awareness across today and away from yesterday and tomorrow. This type of awareness of thought is due to my days of meditation. Do I still meditate?

Huh?

It seems like a "pick something" game. For cognitive injury you reach in and choose. How many?

For physical. For psychological. Not sure how each bag fills up but once a survivor you do find others who picked similar to you. Some? Oh, shit. Depressing and sad and glad where I am. Only through comparison I guess. Not that I'm complacent with my picks. In my struggle for the surface for much breathable air, what if I were locked inside myself in a long term care facility?

No. This is not a good time. If I met the Spirit of Death  face to face,I have maintained my desire to never bow.

I challenge.

Life Suffering Regret

Going Hemingway....

What do I suggest?

Living among all that is present in this world is never easy. Adding to our measure of awareness our own personal suffering , adding learning and experience and involvement in the world's suffering, creates different things for different people.

I am often reminded through the versatile life experience of Ernest Hemingway that a well lived life does not always lead to fulfillment and a restful slip into death. Death. Which is where we are all headed. My parent's interesting lives were perhaps not known by them that it was such. Yet we are born and will one day die. Doesn't this hint that life is for learning? It cannot be a period of time where we hang on as if it will accomplish or not accomplish something. Hemingway did not hang on. I enjoy and learn and relish where he had gone and what he had accomplished as well as his great works of literature. How did his life end in suicide?

Entering my sixth decade of life (Ernest died at age 61) with a lengthy trail of injury and family crisis and divorce, I experienced a Traumatic Brain Injury. I joke by stating that the Irish in me pushed me down. I brought a friend a bottle of her favorite to wish her well in job hunting. A bottle of good Gin on sale. The Irish in me never drinks it. That night in October 2014, I did drink it and left a house absent of an outside light or hand railings. I left the top and landed on my head. The right side cracked open as the brain traveled at an enormous speed to the left side of my head. My brain injury arose from a left hemisphere and some left frontal damage. Add to that the crumbling of the inner ear bones leaving me with 2% hearing on the left side. Your cognitive life shifts. Your physical strength and ability shifts. Your psychological sphere is out of balance. The norm is no more.

Common to others in the plight of TBI and the often additional PTSD suicide beckons. I understand that Hemingway and others in his family suffered from Hemochromatosis. He also suffered from many injuries through life. It is also noted that he drank heavily. There have been five suicides within the Hemingway family over four generations. As we TBI survivors have worked to push on I have heard words similar to that of Ernest's brother. "Like a Samurai who felt dishonored by the word, or deed of another, Ernest felt his own body had betrayed him."

I've been invited to join Facebook support groups for TBI & PTSD and have also looked into community support groups. As I recently told a TBI friend, we all feel as though we're in a hard race. If I begin to tire and kneel and perhaps vomit it is encouraging to feel the support of another who stops and consoles and places a hand on my back. But as my head raises and I look at the race pushing on around me I see where everyone is just better or worse than me. It's a rough crowd seeing the disabled all trying to push forward. What are we doing? Where are we going? For me, it is better to go the park and watch the world go by. Watch the dogs run, the kids play.

Going Hemingway? I know through having the cognitive, physical and psychological thought of feeling dishonored by the word or deed of another. I have lived it. And I also have felt that my body has more than once betrayed me. I have thought of suicide.

I am hoping and planning to explore the way of going on. Of learning from life. Of sharing my pathway.

Share with me!