#back brace

Posture correcting back brace, 1900-20 by unknown designer

I'm not sure what this back brace is made of, the webpage doesn't say

Sonntag chill outfit🙈 frisch aus dem bett erstmal kaffee machen😂😍

Good morning

Sunday chill outfit🙈 fresh out of bed, make coffee first😂😍

In October, I had a bad accident. I fell off a ladder, broke three vertebrae, my breastbone, had five large lacerations on my head, cracked my skull and had a traumatic brain injury. I was unconscious for a couple of days. Spent a month and a half inpatient, between hospital and rehab facility.

I’m presently weaning off my back brace, walking around like me, but more slowly, and have no real cognitive damage, aside from no longer having a sense of smell, or a physical sense of hunger. I miss smell a lot; it returns to about 50% of patients within a year, and it’s a common loss from TBI. It makes it much harder to cook (I’m a good cook, or I was anyhow) and my sense of taste is obviously affected; most food tastes bland and grainy, and with sweet foods, the only part I taste is the sugary part. I can’t tell one soda flavor from another. Occasionally I’ll think I can detect a smell, but it’s just the memory of a smell that’s strongly associated with a thing, or an activity. It’s been quite merciful when cleaning chicken poop off my art studio floor, but otherwise, it’s a little grating.

I was very worried about writing, and visual art: I do both, and if I couldn’t, I’d feel useless. Both are a huge part of my identity, but I’m very fortunate in that neither were affected. (I’m tempted to type some absolute gibberish in here to indicate otherwise, but that’s just me, easily and darkly amused.) In general I am INSANELY fortunate in regard to how well and how quickly I’m healing. Truly, every day, I am just awash in gratitude and awe at how well I’m functioning. Also, the chickens love me just as much as ever. Or they love mixed field greens, but I’m happy being delusional in that one regard.

I spent about four minutes today, trying exasperatedly to open this tiny plastic container of saffron I’ve had for a long time, because I wanted to make some mulligatawny, and I wanted to see if it was still pungent. I finally got the thing open without spilling any (that shit’s expensive) and sniffed, then remembered I have no sense of smell. I laughed pretty hard. I can sniff a bottle of bleach and smell nothing at all; I’m gonna go ahead and say my saffron is JUST FIIIIINE.

Today I did the math. Treatment for my accident, from ambulance (a neighbor found me and called 911; I was unconscious and barely breathing) up until last week’s CT scan (I still have a blood clot near my brain) has come to a little over $270,000.00 My obligation personally is about $8,000 from last year and another new $2,000 so far this year (bad accident timing, insurance maximum-wise.)

If you had told 25 year old me that I was going to have an accident at 64, and that it would cost more than $300,000.00 to recover, I’d have to have given it some serious consideration. I mean, it’s not like 25 year old me gets to keep the $300,000.00, but still: it’s a lot of money. I’d probably have asked if I look 64 at the time of the accident (I was vain and pretty, and no, I don’t) and factored that in. Ironically, I was unconscious and then really loopy and demented for the first four or five days, so I didn’t really get a choice as far as spending the budget. Isn’t that kind of weird, that by virtue of having a pulse, you authorize expenditure? I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just weird.

So. Mulligatawny, with triple the saffron, because I have it and probably won’t taste it otherwise. And now I have to make my studio into a Confused Hen Dormitory, because it’s going to be double digits below zero for a few nights. It’s all good, and if Miss Spoons would just stop scolding me, it’d be great.

~Tara

Sneak peak of a new character..? 👀

Here for commissions ⬇️